by Seth Koven
As an extension of her religious commitment to truth telling and transparency, Muriel strove to efface the boundary separating her public from her private self. Reflecting on her own shortcomings was part of her daily routine, which in turn provided fodder for her writings and speeches. Pulling back the mask of her public persona—revealing her flaws—was essential to the way she presented herself to the public and to herself. Muriel used candor to acknowledge and disarm her critics. A disgusted agent sent by the United States government to report on one of her Chicago antiwar speeches in December 1939 commented that Muriel had so completely internalized the performance of her own saintliness that even when she thought that she was unobserved, she maintained the same maddening, serene, beatific smile.27 She could be insensitively self-denying to the point of making others feel uncomfortable about their failure to match her virtue. Nellie’s letters and those of other poor Bow friends hint at this by accentuating their sense of unworthiness in comparison to her. Ruth Harris (Comfort), the ill-used wife of the sex guru and a Loughton friend of the Lesters, remembered the day that Muriel came to Folkestone, where she attended boarding school, to take her out to lunch. It was “a great honour and event” marred slightly by the fact that only after she ordered a three-course lunch did Muriel inform her young guest that it was her fast day: “my pleasure will be to see you enjoy [your meal].”28
Such stories echo Virginia Woolf’s scathing portrait of Miss Kilman in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), who starved herself for blockaded Austria’s starving millions; lived in a slum and wore the same ugly green mackintosh each day; and reminded everyone about “how poor she was; how rich you were.” “She was never in the room five minutes,” Clarissa Dalloway mused, “without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority.” At the same time, Woolf’s belittling, angry dependence on her own Nellie, the housemaid Nellie Boxall, offers a stunning rebuke to Woolf’s claims to sisterhood across the class divide. Woolf viciously confided to her diary that Nellie Boxall exists “in a state of nature; untrained; uneducated, to me almost incredibly without the power of analysis or logic; so that one sees a human mind wriggling undressed.”29 I linger over Woolf’s relationship with Nellie Boxall because it is an almost too-perfect foil to Muriel and Nellie’s partnership. The comparison throws into relief what made Nellie and Muriel’s tender reciprocal relationship so extraordinary then and so important now. We know a very great deal about Bloomsbury’s loquacious rebellion against Victorianism and far too little about the political, religious, cultural, and gender work of the radical Christian Left.30
Because sources by and about Muriel are so superabundant, it is possible to reconstruct where she was and what she thought and did for most of her adult life. The challenge in writing about Muriel is to avoid becoming her authorized biographer, to resist ventriloquizing her self-critical autobiographical prose. By contrast, there are very few sources by and directly about Nellie. Proletarian spinsters don’t have literary executors; their family members rarely enjoy material circumstances that would enable them to save letters and papers. If Nellie’s papers do exist, I have not found them. The most important sources about her survived because Muriel preserved them. Nellie and her letters mattered to Muriel. She made no secret of how much she loved, admired, and depended on Nellie, with her “broad commonsense outlook on life,” “staggering generosity” and “genius” for solving problems.31 In a collection full of missives from major and minor figures in modern history—heads of state, activists and reformers, Nobel laureates—Muriel herself put Nellie’s eleven letters in a manila envelope. In the distinctive unsteady hand of her old age, she wrote “Nell” on it. No other documents in her papers bore such indisputable marks of Muriel’s self-archiving, at least when I first touched and read her papers. Above and below Muriel’s hand is that of another person, possibly Muriel’s first biographer, Jill Wallis. She organized the Lester papers into what we call an “archive” by sorting them into folders and numbered boxes. To her, I remain profoundly indebted although she barely mentions Nellie.
After Nellie’s death, Muriel coped with the great grief of losing her by writing several biographical essays about her. They provide a basic outline of Nellie’s life, without any dates and with almost no names of places, institutions, or people. I have often needed to remind myself to thank Muriel for the clues that she gave me rather than grumble about her many omissions and factual errors. She must have gotten most of her information and misinformation about Nellie from Nellie and her mother Harriet. They function almost as coauthors of these life narratives, which sometimes purport to quote them directly. Muriel celebrated Nellie’s life in a two-and-one-half-page printed obituary, “The Salt of the Earth.”32 She drafted but never published a much longer and more detailed biographical narrative about Nellie, “From Birth to Death,” which survives in two typescripts of twenty-six and twenty double-spaced typed pages—the first of which Muriel edited extensively. Muriel systematically crossed out the name Dowell each place it appeared in the first draft and wrote the name Short above it—the only name that she used in the second draft.33 (See fig. I.4.) Presumably, Muriel had considered publishing the story as a socio-fiction (she drafted dozens of such stories drawn from life) while using the name Short to prevent most readers from identifying the Dowells. Contrary to its title, these typescripts are fragments. Both end in midsentence, long before Nellie’s death. Neither includes anything about Muriel’s life with Nellie or Kingsley Hall. Not a single word. On the basis of Nellie’s London Hospital records, I now know that these drafts take Nellie’s story up to 1910, the very year of Nellie’s earliest surviving letter. Muriel is an emotionally generous narrator of “The Salt of the Earth” and figures in her story about Nellie. By contrast, “From Birth to Death” is mostly narrated through Harriet Dowell’s loving maternal eyes. Muriel as author and friend strove to make herself invisible.
I.4. Probably written soon after Nellie’s death in January 1923, this oldest surviving draft of “From Birth to Death” shows Muriel’s editorial decision to change the name Dowell to Short to preserve’s Nellie’s semi-anonymity. Muriel never published this story. First typescript page of “From Birth to Death.” (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)
There is a vast amount that I will never know about Nellie and much that must remain speculative. I have often thought of the challenges faced by Thomas Carlyle’s fictional narrator of the life of Prof. Diogenes Teufelsdröckh as he followed his world-wandering subject. The “river of his History,” traced from “its tiniest fountains” dashes itself over “Lover’s Leap” and “flies wholly into tumultuous clouds of spray” before it once again, distantly, collects into a stream. Nellie’s history likewise simply disappears for years at a time; she, like the learned protagonist of Sartor Resartus (a book that Muriel read at the turn of the century), moved between “the highest and lowest levels,” and, in surprising ways, came into “contact with public History itself.”34 We can be certain that Carlyle, consummate chronicler of epoch defining men, would not have viewed her or Muriel as fit subjects of history. The loss, I hope to demonstrate, would have been entirely his.
The Match Girl and the Heiress both draws upon and reorients understanding of several key categories and grand narratives in the making of modern Britain. Scholars have long sought to explain the emergence of collectivist politics and state-directed social welfare in the land of laissez-faire liberal individualism. They have fruitfully debated whether the welfare state arose as an ad hoc response to the pressing demands of circumstances or as an enactment of ideological-philosophical principles. They have “brought the state back in” by emphasizing its internal mechanisms and the workings of civil servants; they have charted the emergence of new forms of expertise about the management and welfare of society like publicly funded school meals. Still others look to society and the impact of social movements, feminist arguments, and working-class political mobilization in demanding an expansion of welfare rights within the framework of shi
fting conceptions of citizenship.35 Some, including me, have emphasized the porous boundaries between middle-class women’s private voluntary initiatives and the rise of municipal and state maternal and child welfare policies and programs.36
This book, like Nellie’s life, unfolds within, around, and in the shadow of the New Poor Law (1834), the landmark legislation that shaped public provision of welfare to the poor until 1929.37 Muriel joined the pre–World War I crusade to abolish the Poor Law altogether and narrated Nellie’s life through the prism of her disgust at its inhumanity. Nellie grew up in the Poor Law school and orphanage at Forest Gate that became the flashpoint for acrimonious national debates about the state’s obligations to its most vulnerable subjects. She and Muriel lived in the district of East London, Bow and Poplar, that incited metropolitan, national, and international debates in 1921 when its borough councillors defied the state and were jailed for bringing concepts of redistributive justice and economics to bear on welfare and citizenship. As a Poplar Council member heading the borough’s Maternity and Child Welfare Committee from 1922 to 1926, Muriel herself played a part in these celebrated controversies. The social, cultural, and political ecology of their slum neighborhood was, I show, an important incubator for their work and social politics. This study looks at the mixed economy of public and private welfare provision for the poor through Nellie’s eyes and Muriel’s.38 It analyzes how Poor Law institutions including schools, orphanages, and medical infirmaries shaped not only Nellie’s life but constructions of family, childhood, motherhood, work, illness, and the body. Stories like Muriel and Nellie’s remind us about the affective, intellectual, political, and cultural work involved in dismantling the apparatus of Victorian benevolence and creating new understandings of rights-based welfare in the twentieth century.
Nellie’s participation in the match industry in England, New Zealand, and Sweden elucidates a critical moment in the history of British global capitalism from the vantage point of one of its most essential, easily replaced, and least powerful participants: an unmarried proletarian female worker. Her transnational laboring life played out against a backdrop of massive challenges to British capitalists’ economic hegemony from within—by struggles between Labour and capital—and without—by competition with other nations like the United States as well as anticolonial nationalist movements from Ireland to India.
Histories of capitalism from below invariably emphasize resistance to it and the mobilization of workers through trade unions, socialist, and labor parties. Nellie’s history does not. She put job security before worker solidarity. In this respect, she resembled the vast majority of women workers in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain, who were neither trade unionists nor members of labor and socialist political parties. About such women, we know far too little.39 They are often lumped together into a vast inert body of metropolitan toilers whose supposed passivity Frederick Engels lamented; in Gareth Stedman Jones’s influential formulation, such apolitical men and women bartered away class-conscious politics for cultural autonomy from bourgeois meddling.40 Nor do they have a place in feminist socialist historiography other than as recalcitrant obstacles in the path of gender and economic justice. By not resisting capitalist factory disciplines, workers like Nellie are presumed to be the ones who got it wrong; they short-circuit the implicit ethical imperative to root for those who fight against structures of domination. Nellie’s history makes it possible to begin to sketch the economic, emotional, and familial logic of such choices and her own. Her laboring life also invites an approach to business history—in this case, the match industry—attentive to family dynamics, class, gender, and cultural analysis.
This book joins efforts by historians to reclaim pre–World War II Britain for Christianity, a salutary historiographical Reconquista. Building on an earlier generation that demonstrated the blurred lines between secular and religious associational activities of local churches in the decades before World War I, scholars have demonstrated that statistical measures such as declining attendance at church and chapel did not herald the “death of Christian Britain.” In early-twentieth-century Britain, religion was no mere vestige awaiting respectable burial in history’s dustbin.41 Muriel and Nellie’s history underscores the enduring power of religious faith as a resource for those seeking an inclusive vision of social and economic justice in Britain and the world. It has led me to uncover a powerful stream of “practical” or “lived” theology within modern British Protestantism that I call “God is Love” theology. Muriel eclectically drew upon emerging conceptions of “spirituality” and “world religions” as she sought to live as an ethical subject. The Sermon on the Mount provided the scriptural foundations for Muriel and Nellie’s vision and practice of Christian revolution. The history of their grassroots labors in East London pushes against the amnesia that clouds just how much Christianity once animated and inspired Left politics in Britain.
I first began to research this book at the peak of President George W. Bush’s lavish funding of “faith-based” initiatives at the heart of his “compassionate conservatism” in the opening years of the twenty-first century. For readers in the United States, I hope that this history of Muriel and Nellie’s “faith-based” initiatives a century ago suggests the potential for deep religious faith to animate a radical critique and redistribution of power and authority between rich and poor, men and women, white and black, colonizer and colonized.
Influential interpretations of post–World War I Britain emphasize its “conservative modernity,” a prevailing mood of escapist despair and decline, and escalating violence against a host of “others,” real and imagined.42 The Match Girl and the Heiress, by contrast, highlights an optimistic ethical and religious strand of British political culture in the first half of the twentieth century marked by hospitality to all forms of difference, democratic but authoritarian anti-consumerism, and a commitment to living locally as “world citizens.” An immense cottage industry has dissected Bloomsbury’s every noisy rebellious gesture in the first decades of the twentieth century. This book tells a much quieter but more politically exigent story about the relationship between High Victorian Christian moral paternalism and twentieth-century rights-based social justice ethics and politics. Like the lifespans of the book’s two central figures, Nellie and Muriel, this study bridges the putative divide between Victorians and moderns in showing both surprising continuities and shifts in sensibilities and attitudes from the 1870s to 1920s. “Truth,” “reconciliation,” and “restitution” were essential to the language and practice of Christian revolution. Nellie’s and Muriel’s work as peacemakers in wartime Bow prefigured many of the technologies of conflict resolution championed by contemporary human rights activists and global humanitarians. As such, my analysis contributes to an understanding of the early-twentieth-century roots of these developments.
Finally, this study explores the power of love to transform individuals and the world in early-twentieth-century Britain. Love figures centrally in every chapter of this book. Nellie and Muriel’s lives, apart and together, demonstrate the capaciousness, variety, and historical specificity of love. Muriel and Nellie’s love for one another changed and enriched each of them. Love was the motor of their relationship and their unfinished Christian revolution. I show that it also paradoxically limited and constrained them and their community-based work. Christian revolution was predicated upon effacing the many ways in which differences between people—class, gender, religious, racial—produced oppressive hierarchies. But in all sorts of ways, Muriel and Nellie’s love confounded the erasure of difference by insistently demanding and reproducing difference between them. In some chapters love is an indispensable ideological and religious category informing their theology and thinking. Learning to “love thy enemy,” Muriel and Nellie believed, was the way to enact Christian revolution in everyday life. In other chapters, I tease out the implications of love for historical understandings of female friendship, same-sex desire, and cr
oss-class eroticism in the early twentieth century. This book, I hope, demonstrates the analytical gains of keeping together the history of affect and politics, feeling and thinking, loving and doing.
Muriel and Nellie’s partnership and the institution they nurtured, Kingsley Hall, must be counted among the innumerable early-twentieth-century “small utopias” spawned by European-wide dissatisfaction with the excesses and failures of fin-de-siècle liberalism and the cataclysm of global war.43 Theirs was a utopian enterprise deeply rooted in the gritty materiality of slum life, not some Arcadian flight into an ideal world of their own making. Utopias, the Austrian-born German sociologist Karl Mannheim famously argued in 1929, are always in dialectical tension with the existing order; for all that they are “incongruous” with and “burst the bounds” of the status quo, they necessarily remain deeply embedded within a “historically specific social life.” At least part of why Muriel and Nellie’s story matters, I suggest, resides not just in their accomplishments but in their expansion of how people could and did imagine alternative “not yet” futures for themselves, Britain, and the world.44