by Seth Koven
95. See Lena Orman Cooper, “My Mother’s Meeting,” The Quiver (January 1900): 767–68.
96. Violet Myers, “A ‘Mothers’ Meeting’ in the East End,” The Idler 17 (July 1900): 569–74
97. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 29.
98. Ibid., 44.
99. Doris Lester, typescript autobiography, Lester/3/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
100. Cox and Box refers to the 1866 comic operetta of that name by Arthur Sullivan and Francis Burnand, in which two men, one who works a day shift and the other a night shift, unknowingly rent a single room from a greedy landlord.
101. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, My Part in a Changing World (London, 1938), 72.
102. Doris Lester, typescript autobiography, Lester/3/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
103. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 34–35. In this vignette, Muriel described the club as well established and respected with the manager of the match factory as a major benefactor. Both are true of Clifden Institute’s Factory Girls’ Club for match girls. The managing partner of Bryant and May, Gilbert Bartholomew was one of the club’s most generous donors.
104. On its founding, see Mrs. H. Grattan Guinness, The Wide World and Our Work In It: The Story of the East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions (London, 1886), 118–21.
105. See Lester, It Occurred to Me, 44. Muriel was more generous in her assessment in an unpublished draft chapter. She thanked Doric Lodge for its hospitality to her and Doris. See Muriel Lester, Draft Autobiographical Accounts of It Occurred to Me, Lester/2/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
106. For an assessment of its place in global evangelicalism, see “A New Global Spiritual Unity” in Mark Hutchinson and John Wolffe, A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (Cambridge, 2012), chap.5. Hutchinson and Wolffe helpfully illuminate the widely varied responses of evangelicalism to modern life, from a corporate commitment to activist engagement with social problems to quietist withdrawal.
107. Militant suffragette Christabel Pankhurst was deeply influenced by Grattan Guinness’s “scientific” predictions and theology. See Timothy Larsen, Christabel Pankhurst: Fundamentalism and Feminism in Coalition (Woodbridge, 2002), 36–40.
108. Harry Grattan Guinness, The Approaching End of the Age (London, 1878) and Mr. and Mrs. Harry Grattan Guinness, Light for the Last Days (London, 1887).
109. See Harry Grattan Guinness, The Heresy Taught by the Rev. G. O. Barnes Exposed and Answered (London, 1884).
110. Leaders of Doric Lodge characterized it as a “cosmopolitan gathering” with a “great diversity of character and temperament.” In 1907–8, students at Harley College hailed from Norway and Armenia, Italy and Patagonia, Palestine and Australia; they were Baptists and Episcopalians, Wesleyans and Presbyterians. They mastered Greek, Hebrew, French, and Spanish. See Harry Guinness, These Thirty Years (London, 1903), 19. On Regions Beyond, see Joseph Conley, Drumbeats that Changed the World (Pasadena, CA, 2000).
111. Dr. Harry Guinness, Not Unto Us, A Record of 21 Years Missionary Service (London, 1908), 39–41. Muriel acknowledged the insufficiency of her education in geography and nonwestern cultures. “When I arrived in India … my mental equipment was very meagre.” See Muriel Lester, My Host the Hindu (London, 1931), 15.
112. For example, see Monday, October 8, 1900, Deacons’ Minute Books, Loughton Union Church, 1900–1904, D/NB/3/4, Essex Record Office.
113. See Chapter 4.
114. A large literature charts Leopold’s regime in Congo, none more riveting and moving than Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1998). Hochschild’s account brilliantly integrates American, British, African, and Belgian actors but surprisingly never mentions Grattan Guinness.
115. See Sharon Sliwinski, “The Childhood of Human Rights: the Kodak on the Congo,” Journal of Visual Culture 5: 3 (2006): 333–63.
116. This was the case put forward anonymously in Dr. Grattan Guinness Self-Refuted (Edinburgh, 1905).
117. Henry Jr. presented himself as a victim of Leopold’s duplicity. He attributed his personal observation of abuses during his time in Congo in 1890–91 as examples of corrupt local officials rather than systematic exploitation. See Dr. Henry Grattan Guinness, “The Story of a Disillusionment,” Regions Beyond (January–February1908): 12–14.
118. Kevin Grant argues “evangelical Christianity, rather than [secular] radicalism, remained the predominant force in the humanitarian politics of empire in Britain in the early twentieth century.” Kevin Grant, “Christian Critics of Empire: Missionaries, Lantern Lectures, and the Congo Reform Campaign in Britain,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29:1 (2001): 29. My account of the role of Regions Beyond in the Congo Reform Association draws heavily on Grant’s article.
119. In the aftermath of World War I, Morel fanned the flames of racism with his sensationalized account of African soldiers putative sexual violation of white women in Germany. Muriel accepted Morel’s judgments and likewise condemned the conduct of African troops.
120. On Du Bois’s proclamation, see C. G. Contee, “The Emergence of Du Bois as an African Nationalist,” The Journal of Negro History, 54: 1 (January 1969): 48–63. For the text of the proclamation, see W.E.B. Du Bois, “An Address to the Nations of the World,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York, 1995), 639.
121. See “Women’s Branch of the Congo Reform Association,” London Times, April 24, 1909, 8. Muriel was the only unmarried woman at the meeting. The women’s branch focused on the conditions of women and children in the Congo.
122. See Loughton Chapel Magazine (July 1908), D/NB 3/155, Essex Record Office.
123. Forbes Jackson, “Daniel Hayes, An Appreciation,” in Harry Guinness, Not Unto Us: A Record of Twenty-One Years’ Missionary Service (London, 1908), 64. The Lesters had many ties to Berger Hall. It was widely hailed as the Baptists’ most outstanding outpost of slum work and was supported by many of the Lesters’ close friends including the Marnham family. The Marnhams provided generous donations to Muriel and Doris throughout their careers and also volunteered their services to Kingsley Hall. See “Bromley’s Stronghold, A Notable Anniversary,” East End News, October 22, 1909, about Pastor Hayes’s ninth anniversary at Berger Hall. Tower Hamlets Local History Library Clippings Collection.
124. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 41. Hayes’s public lectures had not always emphasized the barbarism of Belgian rule. In a 1902 lecture at the Falkirk YMCA, he played upon the barbarism of natives, cannibals in the Horse Shoe Bend district, among whom he had toiled in Christ’s name. See “Missionary Lecture,” Falkirk Herald and Midland Counties Journal (February 19, 1902): 3.
125. In January 1909, Campbell suggested the value of strong British intervention in the Congo. See “The Congo Question. Rev. R. J. Campbell and Possible Intervention,” Western Times, January 29, 1909, 13.
126. George Haw, From Workhouse to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks, MP (London, 1907), chaps. 1–2.
127. Opposition to the New Poor Law politicized laboring men and women in the 1830s. On Anti-Poor Law Associations and political protest, see Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Los Angeles, 1995).
128. “Separate Report by H. Russell Wakefield, Francis Chandler, George Lansbury, and Mrs. Sidney Webb,” Royal Commission on the Poor Law, PP 1909. On Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s contributions to this report, see A. M. McBriar, An Edwardian Mixed Doubles, The Bosanquets versus the Webbs: A Study in British Social Policy, 1890–1929 (Oxford, 1987).
129. On membership numbers, see Michael Ward, Beatrice Webb: Her Quest for a Fairer Society; A Hundred Years of the Minority Report (The Smith Institute, 2011), 32.
130. George Lansbury, My Life (London, 1928), 2.
131. Ibid., 81.
132. George Lansbury, “A Socialist View of Government,” National Review (June 1895): 567.
133. On socialism, Labour, and re
ligion, see Stephen Yeo, “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896,” History Workshop 4 (Autumn 1977): 5–56.
134. See David M. Young, “People, Place and Party: The Social Democratic Federation 1884–1911,” PhD diss., University of Durham, 2003, 124.
135. Lansbury’s spiritual journey had been circuitous and tortured. Educated by Primitive Methodists, Welsh Nonconformists, and Anglicans, Lansbury had even joined a Salvation Army temperance organization in his youth.
136. For a passionate articulation of the links between Christianity and Labour, see Labour and Religion by Ten Labour Members of Parliament and of Other Bodies (St. Albans, 1910). Contributors included Keir Hardie, Will Crooks, Philip Snowden, Arthur Henderson, and George Lansbury.
137. Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home (New York, 1937). McKay encountered Lansbury right after World War I when he came to London in 1919.
138. On these pre–World War I campaigns, see George Haw, From Workhouse to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks, M.P. (London, 1907); George Lansbury, My Life (1928); on Crooks and Lansbury’s localist and “organic” political idiom as defenders of popular rights, see Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 2002), 237–39.
139. For a summary of the findings and debate over this particular charge, see Gordon Crosse, “The Poplar Workhouse Inquiry,” Economic Review 17:1 (January 1907): 46.
140. See testimony of George Lansbury and Will Crooks on 8 June 1906 in Poplar Union. Transcript of Shorthand Notes Taken at the Public Inquiry Held by J.S. Davy, C.B. into the General Conditions of the Poplar Union, Its Pauperism, and the Administration of the Guardians and Their Officers Cd.3274 (London, 1906), 24.
141. George Eliot, ed., Thomas Noble, “Janet’s Repentance,” Scenes of Clerical Life (Oxford, 2000), 260.
142. The phrase is John Trevor’s, founder of the Labour Church, which sought to “occupy the ground that Secularism has cleared and build a new Temple upon it.” See John Trevor, “Labour Church,” in Joseph Edwards, ed., Labour Annual (London, 1906), 41.
143. On the Baptist Zenana Mission, see Karen Smith, “Cultural Captivity: British Women and the Zenana Mission” Baptist History and Heritage 40:1 (Winter, 2006): 30–41. On British women’s discursive and political use of the zenana in shaping the professional fortunes of British women medical doctors, see Antoinette Burton, “Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make ‘Lady Doctors’ for India, 1874–1885,” Journal of British Studies (July 1996): 368–97.
144. For a typical account of the zenana as a site of oppression from which British missionaries would rescue Indian women, see “India’s Daughters and England’s Daughters,” Illustrated Missionary News (Feb. 1, 1877): 19. As late as 1917, the Baptist Zenana Mission insisted the Indian women were “unwelcomed at birth, untaught in childhood, enslaved in marriage, degraded in widowhood and unlamented at death.” See Jubilee, 1867–1917, Fifty Years’ Work Among Women in the Far East. Women’s Missionary Association of the Baptist Missionary Society (London, 1917), 3. Geraldine Forbes concludes that women missionaries to India in were “not only the helpmates of the imperialists, they were themselves cultural imperialists providing an education based entirely on English values.” See Geraldine Forbes, “ ‘Pure Heathen’: Missionary Women in Nineteenth Century India,” Economic and Political Weekly (April 26, 1986): 8.
145. On the internal tensions within Baptist ideas about the brotherhood of mankind and spiritual equality across racial divides, see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination (Chicago, 2002).
146. For a panoramic overview of evangelicalism, see David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to 1980s (London, 1989), especially chapter Six, “Walking Apart: Conservative and Liberal Evangelicals in the Early Twentieth Century.” My interpretation emphasizes how rank-and-file Christians like Muriel founds ways to combine competing understandings of Christianity.
Chapter Four. Body Biographies in War and Peace
1. Muriel Lester, “Salt of the Earth,” 17.
2. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock, “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1:1 (March 1987): 7–8. For an example of using the history of a body as a form of biographical-historical analysis, see Stephen Brooke, “The Body and Socialism: Dora Russell in the 1920s,” Past and Present (November 2005). Like Brooke, I am interested in my subjects’ bodies and in their thinking about the body in relation to a range of social, cultural and political debates. On working-class attitudes toward health and medical services in Preston, Lancaster, and Barrow, see Lucinda McCray Beier, For Their Own Good: the Transformation of English Working-class Health Culture, 1880–1970 (Columbus, 2008).
3. I borrow this formulation from Julie Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 27.
4. My thinking about “interiority” has been shaped in conversation with Carolyn Steedman’s beautiful analysis in Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (Cambridge, 1995).
5. See W.H.R. Rivers, “The Repression of War Experience,” a paper delivered before the Section of the Psychiatry, Royal Society of Medicine on December 4, 1917, Lancet (February 2, 1918). On non-white soldiers’ relationship to rehabilitative regimens and the trauma industry, see Hilary Buxton, “Disabled Empire: Race, Rehabilitation, and the Politics of Healing Nonwhite Colonial Soldiers, 1900–1945,” dissertation in progress, Rutgers University.
6. The literature on shell shock is vast. For a recent assessment of it in relation to pre–war and wartime developments, see Tracey Loughran, “Shell-Shock and Psychological Medicine in First World War Britain,” Social History of Medicine 22:1 (2009): 79–95. Loughran summarizes the debate about the relative permeability between physiological and psychological explanatory categories. On shell shock as the “body language of masculine complaint,” see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980 (London, 1987), 172. On World War I shell shock and modernity, see Martin Stone, “Shellshock and the Psychologists,” in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, eds., The Anatomy of Madness: Essays on the History of Psychiatry, vol. 2 (London, 1985).
7. See Poplar and Stepney Poor Law Asylum Hospital Discharge and Admission Register, admitted February 9, 1890, discharged March 12, 1890, SA/M/2/1, Records of St. Andrew’s Hospital, Royal London Hospital Archives. See also Religious Creed Register, July 1889-July 1891, SA/M/4/6, Royal London Hospital Archives. The case notes of her admitting physician at London Hospital, Dr. F. J. Smith, indicate that the first phase of her illness began in December, 1909. See RLHLH/M/14/65—Dr F. J. Smith, Medical female patients case notes, 1910.
8. Thomas Barlow, “Notes on Rheumatism and its Allies in Childhood,” British Medical Journal 2 (September 15, 1883): 509–19.
9. See B. N. Dalton, MD, “The Etiology of Rheumatic Fever, and an Explanation of its Relations to Other Diseases,” The British Medical Journal (March 1, 1890): 472–74. See also Peter English, History of Rheumatic Fever (New Brunswick, NJ, 1999).
10. See Case Notes for Eleanor Dowell, March 1910, Dr. F.J. Smith, Medical female patients case notes, RLHLH/M/14/65 London Hospital, Royal London Hospital Archives; see also Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1” Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
11. See Whitechapel Infirmary, Admission and Discharge Register, March 11, 1910: admitted at 5:40 pm, p. 97, STBG/WH/123/45, Stepney Board of Guardians, London Metropolitan Archives.
12. This was standard hospital procedure from the 1870s onwards following widespread acceptance of the finding of Carl Wunderlich’s Medical Thermometry and Human Temperature (first published in German in 1868; English trans. 1871).
13. Obituary, F. J. Smith, MD, FRCP, Consulting Physician, British Medical Journal 3045 (May 10, 1919): 593–94.
14. See Lauren Berlant, �
�On the Case,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007): 663–72.
15. The notes by various specialist doctors about Nellie are recorded in the Medical Index, 1910, LH/M/58, London Hospital, Royal London Hospital Archives. The nurses’ notes about Nellie are included in Dr. F. J. Smith’s case report on Nellie, which also incorporates observations from each of the specialist doctors. In the case file, doctors’ observations are marked, “DS,” and nurses’, “NS.” Nellie’s medical case file is contained in Dr. F. J. Smith, Medical Female Patients Case Notes, 1910, LH/M/14/65, London Hospital, Royal London Hospital Archives. I thank Kate Richardson for her invaluable assistance in locating these records and Dr. Fredric Mintz for interpreting them with me.
16. Participants in the Poplar rate strike of 1921 and historians have written voluminously about it. See John Scurr, The Rate Protest of Poplar (London 1922) and Noreen Branson, Poplarism, 1919–1925: George Lansbury and the Councillors’ Revolt (London, 1979); on Minnie Lansbury’s death, see Janine Booth, Guilty and Proud of it! Poplar’s Rebel Councillors and Guardians 1919–25 (2010), 89.
17. See Muriel Lester, typescript, 2/3, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
18. Muriel Lester, “An East End Problem. Ought One to Speak the Truth?” Christian World (August, 22 1918).
19. Muriel Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1,” Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
20. Ibid.
21. Eva C. E. Luckes, Hospital Sisters and Their Duties (London, 1886), 66.
22. Entry by Eva Luckes, Head Matron, March 12, 1910, Official Ward Book, No. 2 (mislabeled 1909), LH/N/6/13, London Hospital, Royal London Hospital Archives.
23. See Admission and Discharge Register, London Hospital, 1910, Reg. No. 624, Eleanor Dowell, March 4–11, 1910, LH/M/2/58, Royal London Hospital Archives.
24. Muriel Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1.” See also Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz, “Hospital and Asylum Visiting in Historical Perspective,” in Mooney and Reinarz, eds. Permeable Walls: Historical Perspectives on Hospital and Asylum Visiting (New York, 2009), 9. For an analysis of hospital attitudes toward patients’ family member in the US, see Charles Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers (Baltimore, 1987), esp. 286–87.
