The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  12. See Kate Flint’s analysis of women’s reading in relationship to their construction of an autobiographical self, The Woman Reader, 1837 to 1914 (Oxford, 1993), 15.

  13. Arthur James Balfour, Foundations of Belief (London, 1895), 17.

  14. Theodore Roosevelt was so enamored by Wagner that he delivered a major speech about his anti-materialist doctrine and invited him to the United States. For a copy of Roosevelt’s speech, see the digitized typescript held at Houghton Library, Harvard University.

  15. Charles Wagner, The Simple Life, trans. Mary Louise Hendee (New York, 1901), 8, 23–24, 35.

  16. According to Gilbert Murray, the great classicist and liberal public intellectual, “Tolstoi’s doctrines were so extreme that actual Tolstoians were rare [before World War I]; but almost every young man and woman in Europe who possessed any free religious life at all had been to some extent influenced by Tolstoi. And his influence was probably at its greatest in Russia and England.” Gilbert Murray, “Introduction,” to Mrs. Henry Hobhouse, “I Appeal unto Caesar”: The Case of the Conscientious Objector, 2nd ed. (London, 1917), v–vi. For a copy of Tolstoy’s open letter and the historical context of its writing and reception, see Kenneth Wenzer, ed., An Anthology of Tolstoi’s Spiritual Economics (Rochester, NY, 1997).

  17. For a viciously witty account of free love and chaotic disputes over property rights in the Tolstoyan colony in Purleigh, see Gracchus, “Collapse of a Communist Colony,” Reynolds’s Newspaper, October 15, 1899, 2.

  18. For a wonderful evocation of Tolstoyan and Simple Life communities and the mingling of aesthetics and ethical concerns, see Diana Maltz, “Living by Design: C.R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft and Two English Tolstoyan Communities, 1897–1907,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39:2 (September 2011): 409–26. See also Charlotte Alston, Tolstoy and His Disciples: The History of an International Movement (London, 2014), esp. chapters 3 and 4; James Hunt, “Gandhi, Tolstoy, and the Tolstoyans,” in Harvey Dyck, ed., The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective (Toronto, 1996).

  19. G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (London, 1905), chap. 10.

  20. His disciple-in-exile in Britain, V. G. Chertkov, churned out tens of thousands of copies of his books from the Free Age Press. On Chertkov and his Free Age Press, see Michael Holman, “Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press: Vladimir Chertkov and his English Manager Arthur Fifield,” Slavonic and Eastern Europe Review 66:2 (April 1988): 125–38. On the dissemination of Tolstoy at the turn of the twentieth century, see Stephen Hobhouse, “Our Debt to Leo Tolstoi,” Reconciliation (June 1949): 596.

  21. On Stephen Hobhouse’s response to Tolstoy, see Stephen Hobhouse to Kate Courtney, August 7, 1902, Courtney 15/19, Leonard and Kate Courtney Papers, BLPES; see also, Stephen Hobhouse, The Autobiography of Stephen Hobhouse: Reformer, Pacifist, Christian (Boston, 1951), 67.

  22. Stephen Hobhouse to Henry Hobhouse, August 8, n.d. from Stepney Craft Camp in Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, ed., “Towards Harmony. A Century of Letters by Stephen Hobhouse,” typescript, pp. 88–89, Library of the Society of Friends, London.

  23. Stephen Hobhouse to Kate Courtney, August 7, 1902, Courtney 15/19, Leonard and Kate Courtney Papers, BLPES.

  24. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 12–13. Her response to Tolstoy precipitated an “epiphanic moment” of modernity, to use Thomas Linehan’s framework. See Thomas Linehan, Modernism and British Socialism (Basingstoke, 2012)

  25. See Leo Tolstoy, “How I Came to Believe,” in Christ’s Christianity (1885), 51.

  26. See Leo Tolstoy, On the Personal Christian Life, Letters to Friends, threepence edition (London, n.d.). This short set of letters reflected on how a Christian ought rightly to respond to a robber threatening to murder an innocent child; Tolstoy concluded that to kill the would-be murderer was ethically unacceptable, even if it meant not rescuing the child.

  27. Shaw published his review of Maude’s biography in the Fabian News, but my quotations of Shaw come from a lengthy essay, “Bernard Shaw’s Criticism of Tolstoy,” Current Literature LI (July 1911): 71–72. No doubt Shaw’s irritation with Tolstoy was exacerbated by their private correspondence in which Tolstoy upbraided Shaw for daring to use humor in tackling fundamental questions of good and evil. See “Tolstoy Rebuked Shaw for Levity,” New York Times, April 7, 1912.

  28. On Kenworthy and Tolstoy, see John Kenworthy, “A Visit to Tolstoy,” Humane Review (October, 1900): 262–326; John Coleman Kenworthy, Tolstoy: His Life and Works (London, 1902); see also Stephen Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Antisemitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton, 2003), 121–22.

  29. On the economic and social program of the Church, see J. Bruce Wallace, Preparing for the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (London, 1897), 4, 5, 16.

  30. See John Coleman Kenworthy, From Bondage to Brotherhood (London, 1894).

  31. See Warren Sylvester Smith, The London Heretics, 1870–1914 (London, 1967), 139. See also Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton, 2011), chap. 12. On the Fellowship from the perspective of Edith Lees Ellis, see Jo Ann Wallace, “The Case of Edith Ellis,” in Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett, eds., Modernist Sexualities (Manchester, 2000), 13–40.

  32. William Jupp, The Forgiveness of Sins and the Law of Reconciliation (London, 1903).

  33. Lily Dougall, The Practice of Christianity (London, 1913), 123. For a detailed examination of Dougall’s “experiential faith” (rather than her “spirituality”), see Joanne Dean, Religious Experience and the New Woman (Bloomington, IN, 2007).

  34. See chapter 2 for a short discussion of its founding and aims. It is possible, though I think unlikely, that Nellie had once been a member of this club. The only other scholarly study of Lester argues, I think incorrectly, that this was the club that Muriel visited when she went slumming.

  35. See “Theosophical Activities,” Lucifer (October 15, 1893): 165.

  36. For a report on the Brotherhood Club in Bow, see Universal Brotherhood Path (July 1902): 299.

  37. My account of Theosophy is heavily indebted to Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore, 2001).

  38. On Theosophy in relation to Tolstoy, see “Leo Tolstoi and His Unecclesiastical Christianity,” Lucifer 7, (September 1890): 9–14.

  39. Doris’s most influential teacher, the Sunday School pedagogue Emily Huntley, spoke for many Protestants committed to building international networks when she declared “Hinduism has no message of salvation for the child. It poisons his life at the spring through unholy rites, false ideals, corrupt stories.” Racism all too often was embedded in “progressive” social and religious politics like Huntley’s. See Emily Huntley, “India’s Needs through the Sunday-School,” in Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, ed., World Wide Sunday-School Work, The Official Report of the World’s Seventh Sunday-School Convention (London, 1913), 247. If Doris critiqued her mentor’s racism, I have found no record of it.

  40. See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (London, 1911). Underhill exerted a powerful influence over Muriel’s ideas about prayer and the body in the aftermath of World War I.

  41. See Muriel Lester, Entertaining Gandhi (London, 1932), 116–17.

  42. On Headlam, see F. G. Bettany, Stewart Headlam: A Biography (London, 1926); and John Orens, Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism: The Mass, the Masses, and the Music Hall (Urbana, IL, 2003). See also Peter D’Alroy Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival 1877–1914: Religion, Class and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England (Princeton, 1968).

  43. Charles Gore, “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration,” in Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (1889), 230, 264.

  44. Charles Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God (London, 1891), 162, 160, 111.

  45. Doris Lester, typescript autobiography, Lester/3/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  46. Spurred by the godless mischief of socialists, even the Holy Father Leo XIII awakened to the “utter poverty of the masses” and expounded the “rights and duties” of
the rich and poor in his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum. He enjoined “brotherly love and friendship” as an antidote to class conflict.

  47. This was how Alfred Garvie characterized the religious and theological mood of the turn of the century in his lectures delivered at Mansfield College, Oxford in 1901. See Alfred Garvie, Ritschlian Theology: Critical and Constructive (Edinburgh, 1902), 18.

  48. For a sympathetic account of the army’s many outreach activities and its religious services, see H. Rider Haggard, Regeneration (London, 1910). See Pamela Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (Berkeley, CA, 2001).

  49. See chapter 1.

  50. See Paul Dekar, “Muriel Lester, 1883–1968, Baptist Saint?” Baptist Quarterly 34 (1992): 337. East London and Essex newspapers regularly reported on Henry Lester’s church-related civic contributions. On his work with the Band of Hope, see “Stratford,” East London Observer, March 22, 1879, 7; on his opening a new mission hall, see “Leytonstone,” Essex County Chronicle, June 12, 1896, 7.

  51. Stanley B. James, The Adventures of a Spiritual Tramp, (London, 1925), 76–77. See also Doris Lester, typescript autobiography, chap.2, 3/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate; Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me, 41.

  52. For a respectful albeit sharply critical assessment of Campbell’s “theology,” see Frank Thilly, “Can Christianity Ally Itself With Monistic Ethics?” American Journal of Theology 12 (October 1908): 447–564.

  53. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 41; Doris Lester, “The Pattern Changes,” chap. 2, Typescript autobiography, Lester/3/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  54. “If Christ Came to London. Rev. R. J. Campbell preaches remarkable sermon in City Temple,” New York Times, December 16, 1907. There was a rich tradition of imagining how Christ would respond to the sordid conditions of modern urban life. See W. T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago (Chicago, 1894).

  55. W[illiam]. E. Orchard, From Faith to Faith: An Autobiography of Religious Development (New York, 1933), 85. The Lesters remained closely connected to Orchard well after the demise of New Theology.

  56. Many of Muriel’s diary entries are undated, including this one. In most cases, it is possible to offer a range of likely dates based on dated entries. This entry probably dates from 1902 to 1905. It is not possible to be certain that the scene Muriel narrates in her diary actually took place; it may have been an inner conversation she had with herself about her fellow congregants and her relationship to them.

  57. On women’s religious authority—its constraints and possibilities, see the stimulating essays in Sue Morgan and Jaqueline Devries, eds., Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800–1940 (London, 2010).

  58. Muriel Lester Diary, 1897–1906, Lester/1/1/2, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  59. The great Congregationalist preacher, Dr. G. Campbell Morgan, outlined what it meant to crucify oneself with Christ at the time Muriel penned these words. His meaning probably comes close to her thinking. “If I am crucified with Christ, then I am abandoned for evermore to the will of God. If I am crucified with Christ, I accept Christ’s attitude toward my fellow-men. If I am crucified with Christ, I choose Christ’s way of reaching the ultimate victory.” For Morgan, being crucified with Christ was indivisible from rebirth in and with Christ. See Dr. G. Campbell Morgan, “Crucified with Christ,” in Westminster Bible Conference, Mundesley, 1910, Verbatim Reports of Sermons and Lectures (London, 1910), 360.

  60. Muriel Lester Diary, 1897–1906, Lester/1/1/2 Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Each of these agencies had many smaller mission organizations and clubs. Thompson’s Paddy Goose missionary centre sponsored “Girls’ Guilds and Nursing Corps, Boys’ Brigade and Boy Scouts, Mothers’ Meetings and Dockers’ Unions” which “jostle[d] one another in their effort to get the space they require.” See Rosalie Budgett Thompson, Peter Thompson, Foreword by Rev. Canon Barnett (London, 1910), 63. For an overview of British Nonconformity’s contribution to slum work and social welfare, see Lesley Husselbee and Paul Ballard, eds., Free Churches and Society: The Nonconformist Contribution to Social Welfare 1800–2010 (London, 2012), especially contributions by David Bebbington, “Conscience and Politics,” and Peter Catterall, “Slums and Salvation.”

  63. Peter Thompson, “Obligations of the Church in Relation to the Social Condition of the People,” in Rev. William Archer, introduction to Proceedings of the Second Ecumenical Methodist Conference (New York, 1892), 459, 461, 463. On Thompson, see also H [enry] M[urray, ’Twixt Aldgate Pump and Poplar, The Story of Fifty Years Adventure in East London (London, 1935), 30, 50. Thompson along with fellow evangelical Frederick Charrington served as Treasurers for the Dockers’ Union during the Great Dock Strike of 1889—an indication of evangelical Nonconformity’s alliance with East London trade unionism. See Rosalie Thompson, Peter Thompson, 71–82.

  64. Muriel Lester Diary, 1897–1906, Lester/1/1/2 Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  65. My thanks to Yvette Lane for conversations that have helped clarify this argument.

  66. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 20.

  67. Ibid., 5.

  68. For a lively account of domestic service from servants’ own perspectives, see Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain (London, 2013). See also Lucy Delap, Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2011).

  69. See, for example, the depiction of the ladies’ maid Dixon in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and the effeminate nurse-turned-manservant Job in Rider Haggard’s She.

  70. Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (written 1911, posthumously published 1914) laments such divisions among the working class that hinder the growth of a socialist class consciousness.

  71. My thanks to Katie Trumpenauer for sharing her work in progress on modernist women writers and the children’s nursery.

  72. Arthur Morrison, “A Street,” Macmillan’s Magazine 64 (October 1891): 460–61.

  73. See excerpts from Arthur Morrison’s Daily Chronicle appeal as reported in “Free-Trade England. Winter and Want.” The Age, February 18, 1903. The Lesters would certainly have read and discussed Morrison’s appeal, given its prominence and their proximity to the famous writer.

  74. “An East End Parish,” All the Year Round, July 10, 1880, 206, 209.

  75. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 20.

  76. See Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman (London, 1894), 38–40, in which the “handsome clever” aristocratic Alison Ives runs a club and home for “my East End girls.”

  77. Muriel Lester, “Autobiographical Notes,” “Beginnings in Bow,” 2/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate. In one draft typescript, Muriel noted that she and her mother had gone to South London to speak with this woman about volunteer opportunities for Muriel. She had encouraged Muriel to give an afternoon each week to playing games with slum girls.

  78. Most public schools, male and female, sponsored their own philanthropic projects, many in the slums of London. St. Leonard’s funded and managed a seaside convalescent home for poor sick children.

  79. Hon. S. Lyttleton, “Girl’s Clubs,” in Emily Janes, ed., Englishwoman’s Year Book, (London, 1900), 228.

  80. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 20–23.

  81. Muriel’s homage to Mrs. Pryke’s domestic genius had several precedents in the writings of Edwardian female social investigators such as the Bermondsey settlement worker Anna Martin. See Anna Martin, “The Mother and Social Reform,” The Nineteenth Century and After (May 1913); and “The Mother and Social Reform, Part II,” The Nineteenth Century and After (June 1913). See also Ross McKibbon, Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), chap. 6; Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1970–1918 (Oxford, 1993).

  82. On female gift economies and aggression in Victorian culture, see Jill Rappoport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (Oxford, 2012), esp. intro. />
  83. Terry Carter, “Down the Lane-with thanks to Will Francies,” Loughton and District Historical Society Newsletter 184 (January/February 2010): 10. The description is drawn from an article written by a resident of Smarts Lane at the turn of the century.

  84. See November 13, 1911, Minutes of Loughton Chapel Sunday School, D/NB 3/87, Essex Record Office.

  85. Doris and Muriel reorganized the Loughton Union Chapel Sunday School along graded school lines in 1908; Doris taught the primary division, Muriel the junior. See Rev. Vivian Lewis, Come with Us, The Story of the Loughton Union Church 1817–1973 (Loughton, 1974), 22–23. See George Bowtle to Muriel Lester, July 29, 1914, Lester/2/5, Bishopsgate.

  86. See “Interview with Reverend W. Knight, Baptist chaplain of the Poplar and Bromley Tabernacle, Brunswick Road, 16 New Fillebrook Road, Leytonstone,” May 31, 1897, B176, pp. 48–61, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES.

  87. He must have found his calling to enter the ministry between 1901 and 1907. I have reconstructed Morrell’s trajectory using the 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, and 1911 census data; digitized registers of voters in London document his move to Marylebone; along with his probate record after his death. He retired from active ministry at Bruce Road in 1929. See The Congregational Quarterly, vol. 7 (1929): 280, published by the Congregational Union of England and Wales.

  88. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 28. Muriel mentioned neither Morrell’s name nor the name of the Church, but Doris did in a correction to her typescript autobiography.

  89. Charles Booth, “Walk among the Following Churches,” January 22, 1899, B385, pp. 85–91, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES.

  90. “Interview with Mr. French” in Geoff Richman, Fly A Flag for Poplar (London, 1974), 105.

  91. See Boys’ Brigade Gazette, June 1, 1897, 159.

  92. William Walsham How, “Introduction,” in Mrs. Donaldson, Home Duties for Wives and Mothers, Illustrated by Women of Scripture (London, 1882), v.

  93. W. E. Clapham, The Good Fight At Bow (London, 1938), 96.

  94. Richard Mudie-Smith, ed., Religious Life in London (London, 1904), 27, 9.