The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  The educational system was its most flexible, creative and gender neutral in the instruction it provided its youngest pupils in the infant rooms, where Nellie and Rose were received. Children at Marner Street School benefited from the pioneering work of the Scottish-born, German-trained Maria J. Lyschinska, who observed Froebel-inspired kindergartens in Berlin and incorporated their methods into the curriculum at Marner Street School in 1883–84.35 Advanced intellectual exiles and political refugees from Germany’s failed “liberal” revolution of 1848 like Johannes and Bertha Von Ronge brought kindergartens with them to Britain in 1851.36 Marx and Engels may have found their democratic politics “banal, hackneyed, as insipid as water, luke-warm dish water,” but there was nothing in the least bit “insipid” about the Ronges’ views on the education of young children.37 Kindergartens cultivated the intellectual and moral self-activity of each individual child and emphasized the educative value of play and self-expression, and the use of “natural phenomenon” as tools of early education. The School Board of London’s introduction of kindergarten principles in some schools from the late 1870s onwards marked a considerable opportunity for the movement. The inspector’s reports stress the integration of knowledge across disciplines and modes of instruction in Marner Street’s infants’ room and gave it a coveted ranking of “excellent” based on examination results and personal visits. The surviving records of the school suggest that while it no doubt performed its task of inculcating strict gender and class-specific values, it also provided valuable cultural and vocational resources for poor families and their children.38 Nellie attended Marner Street at a pedagogically optimistic and experimental moment in its history. It was an increasingly insecure time in her own life.

  A Death and Its Consequences

  William Dowell’s death at sea in 1881 irreparably shattered his family’s world.39 It triggered his family’s two-year descent from working-class comfort to abject poverty. Muriel stages the revelation of his death with a simple pathos that highlights Mrs. Dowell’s stoic determination to preserve her family and soften the blow to Nellie. Nellie is fundamentally different from her siblings. A “shrewd little girl,” she needed special protection because she possessed a finely wrought disposition. The narrator briefly shifts perspective from Nellie’s mother to her older brother Will and thus affirms her intimacy with the entire Dowell family.

  even when the letter came which the others always remembered as having made the whole difference to their lives, the letter which Will took from the postman with such pride because the envelope looked abnormally thick and good and had so much grand printing all over one corner of it, the letter whose opening had the astounding dreadful effect of making their mother tremble whose reading had made her cry, even on that never to be forgotten occasion, Nellie was protected.40

  Will’s innocent misreading highlights the grotesque contrast between the letter’s outward promise of good things and its devastating contents, between its status as mere words on a page and the inescapable consequences of those words. The narrator piles clause upon clause only to shift the focus of our attention to what really matters for her story, the short declaration that ends it: “Nellie was protected.”

  What options did Mrs. Dowell have in coping with the financial debacle of widowhood and lone motherhood?41 First and foremost, she could and did seek full-time paid work while using the infant room at Marner Street School as a form of free childcare for her youngest child Rose. Mrs. Dowell listed no occupation in the 1881 census, completed on April 3, 1881—several weeks before she received news of her husband’s distant death. By 1891, she listed her occupation as a match hand taper cutter—a factory job in the manufacture of wooden lucifer matches and wax vestas. Mrs. Dowell may well have migrated east to Bromley-by-Bow in the early 1880s because jobs for women in the match industry were plentiful there. Large firms such as Bryant and May and R. Bell and Co. welcomed widows, who often moved between waged labor in the factory and piecework undertaken at home.

  Mrs. Dowell, like her own mother before her, turned to private charity to supplement her earnings. Such women constructed a mixed economy of welfare that strategically combined resources from private charities and local Poor Law authorities with their own waged labor. Harriet Sloan and her daughter, Harriet Dowell secured pensions of 6 shillings per week (Muriel calls them a “pittance”) from Trinity House, one of London’s most venerable charities founded to support the “decayed masters and commanders of ships” and their widows. Established in the sixteenth century, Trinity House was the official “fraternal” guild entrusted with maintaining lighthouses, granting licenses to watermen plying the Thames, and most crucially and lucratively, regulating the pilotage and navigation of the Thames.42 Trinity House diverted a portion of its vast funds to its various charitable foundations and trusts. A set of Trinity House’s late-seventeenth-century almshouses remains a landmark on Mile End Road today, just across from a statue of the founder of the Salvation Army, General William Booth.43

  The death of a parent is always a traumatic event in the life of a child. The death of the male breadwinner in a working-class family, even one as seemingly secure as the Dowells, compounded emotional loss with devastating social and economic consequences. In late-Victorian Britain, neither private employers nor the state provided any sort of safety net to preserve the integrity of the family unit. Substantial wage differentials between men and women meant that few lone mothers could keep their households intact without financial contributions from their own children and kin. This was not an option for Harriet Dowell. Left to care for rather than receive earnings from five children, Mrs. Dowell, a thirty-five-year-old-widow with little workplace experience, had no good choices.

  Slum Motherhood and the “Hard Face” of the Poor Law

  In depicting Mrs. Dowell as a heroic, self-sacrificing and ingenious slum mother, Muriel entered a highly contentious and overtly politicized field of representations. By the turn of the century, motherhood increasingly gave way to the science of mothercraft, whose practitioners claimed expertise and authority in managing family, hygiene, housekeeping, and child nurture. Mothering ceased to be merely a matter of love and good intentions. It demanded discipline, science, education, and training. Confronted by a pan-European crisis of dénatalité as well as fears about empire, race degeneration, and the emergence of cigarette-smoking New Women, many demanded working-class mothers rear fit soldiers and workers for the nation.44 Some, like Henry Drummond, the best-selling popularizer of Christian altruism, exalted “the kingdom of the mothers” as the apotheosis of the evolutionary process. By virtue of their essentially loving and selfless natures, they were “perfect” biological, social, and ethical creatures.45 All this attention to mothers exposed poor women to considerable criticism by watchful critics intent on measuring—quite literally—the imperiled health of the nation through the “defective” bodies of working-class children and youth.

  Poor mothers putative greed and indifference to their children’s well-being were viciously satirized by Punch’s contribution in June 1890 to the contentious public debate about amending the Infant Life Protection Act. In December 1889, Parliament debated a “great and growing evil”: parents’ purchase of life insurance for their ailing and feeble children.46 Punch viciously recast the story of the classical world’s most ostentatious exemplar of maternal love and incubator of republican virtue, Cornelia Agrippina, into a parable about the moral turpitude of “modern motherhood.” (See fig. 1.2.) A drunken, corpulent harridan starves her listless children to collect burial insurance money for them. Her children, like jewels, have cash value. Her oversized, gloved, outstretched hands mark her violation not just of motherliness but femininity itself. That watchword of scientific charity and conventional moralists—“thrift”—falls on deaf ears in the mother’s pursuit of the “devilish gains of Death.”47 Such views corresponded only too well with the unapologetic disdain of Helen Dendy, an influential Charity Organisation Society worker in S
horeditch in the 1890s. Dendy traced the origins and afflictions of the “troops of ragged, dirty stunted little urchins, neglected and crippled in mind and body” to the “ruined lives of their parents….” Without any hint of sympathy for the dire economic circumstances of poor mothers, Dendy acidly asserted that “the mothers are either worn out drudges before they have reached middle-age, or have developed into the careless slatterns who live on the doorstep gossiping with like-minded neighbors.”48

  1.2. Punch joined the public debate within and outside Parliament about whether poor mothers sacrificed their children’s health to collect burial insurance money. “The Modern Cornelia,” Punch, June 21, 1890, 299.

  Poor mothers did have their share of outspoken defenders. A former workhouse boy and journeyman cooper-turned-labor organizer, Will Crooks, blasted the House of Lords committee investigating Infant Life Insurance for daring to suggest that poor mothers put burial insurance money before love for their children. London papers reported that Crooks instructed the Committee that he knew “thousands of families of working people, and was perfectly certain that there was not among them one mother lacking maternal affection.”49 The district nurse, M. Loane, fiercely denounced such cruel calumnies upon the honor of working-class mothers. “It is impossible to show too much respect to a poor woman,” Loane insisted, “who has managed to rear her children, fed and clothed them, inspired them with the laments of morality and self-respect, and taught them to love one another and spare a thought for their neighbours. To see such women treated with brusque discourtesy, or condescending patronage, is simply intolerable.”50 The vast majority of nineteenth-and twentieth-century working-class autobiographers, all too aware that so many of their mothers had been beleaguered and belittled by “charity ladies” and “welfare visitors,” enveloped them in a protective nostalgic haze.51

  Muriel infuses her narrative with sympathy and attention to inner psychological states of mind as she describes Mrs. Dowell’s household economies and her attempts to cover up the “disappearance” of once-beloved objects, secretly carried to the pawnshop to pay for rent and food. Even Mrs. Dowell’s resourcefulness cannot fend off the inevitable dissolution of her family. Strangers arrive with boxes, furniture, and their own “little girls” who quite literally replace Nellie and her siblings. On their final night living together as a family, Mrs. Dowell melodramatically tries to stifle her sobs as she steals into Nellie’s room for a candlelit glimpse of her sleeping daughter. Visceral details—sounds and sights—position us as witnesses to the unfolding scene of trauma and loss. We suffer with Mrs. Dowell as she tries to convince herself and her children that good food, nice beds, caring nurses, and gardens await them at the Poor Law school and orphanage to which she must send them.

  In fact, many poor women did use such Poor Law institutions as temporary stop-gap measures in times of dire need.52 Some parents—usually mothers—admitted and reclaimed their children dozens of times in a single year. The constant discontinuities of physical care and schooling for such children, so-called “ins and outs,” created headaches for Poor Law administrators, doctors, and teaching staff who viewed them as sources of physical and moral contagion.53 Policy makers interpreted “ins and outs” not as proof of parents’ laudable desire to retain custodial control over their children but as evidence of their selfish refusal to do what was best for them.54 Poor Law officials placed parents in an impossible bind. They condemned them for their supposed indifference to their offspring and their determination to remain connected to them. Harriet Dowell was too poor to pursue this strategy. Nellie was admitted and discharged only once from Forest Gate.

  No trace of sisterly solidarity softens the female face of the municipal state in the guise of the woman poor law officer sent to collect Nellie and her siblings and squeeze them into the waiting van.

  The street door knocker resounded twice with a smart rap. “Name of Dowell, upstairs,” … then the footsteps of the Poor Law officer were heard ascending. She tapped at the kitchen door and stood on the threshold, evidently in a hurry. “Name Dowell, four children,” announced the hard faced woman … “Is this one of them,” inquired the woman, pointing to Nellie … It was now the mother’s turn to cling to the children, but Nellie stumbled to her feet, stood erect, caught hold of her sister’s hand and made her way down the stair … and started their journey to the unknown.55

  There is no mistaking Lester’s radical—though far from original—critique of the Poor Law: the extreme economic vulnerability of respectable and responsible members of the working class like Mrs. Dowell left them helpless in the face of the cruelly impersonal mechanisms of the marketplace and state poor relief. Mrs. Dowell becomes passively childlike while Nellie literally ceases to be a person: she is merely “one of them.” Even Lester’s prose quickens (“Name Dowell, four children”) as if mimicking officials’ indifference to inner psychological torment at the pain of impending separation. Lester’s narrative recycled clichéd sentimental idioms of nineteenth-century women’s Christian writing about family and home. Abolitionist poems such as Hannah More’s “The Sorrows of Yamba” (1797) and industrial problem novels like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) showed how systemic violence and injustice—African slavery and the exploitation of white industrial workers in Britain—dismembered families and violated the sacred bonds of parents and children. Such works, like Lester’s, compel readers to combine thinking and feeling.

  Where did school and Poor Law officials send Nellie and her siblings? Why did they remove them from Mrs. Dowell’s loving care? In 1883, the Dowell children, except for the youngest, Rose, transferred out of Marner Street School. She remained with Harriet Dowell for another three years. Nellie’s brother William followed in his father’s footsteps and apprenticed on the training ship Exmouth, a decommissioned flagship from the Baltic fleet.56 An ambitious scheme developed by East London Poor Law officials, the ship was home, school, and workplace for six hundred boys who received training in basic seamanship as well as room and board. Much like the Marine Society founded by John Fielding and Jonas Hanway in 1756, it tried to solve several problems at once. It removed poor boys from the streets with their criminal temptations; it inexpensively provided for their care while guaranteeing a steady supply of trained labor for the Royal Navy and Mercantile Marine.57 Seafaring must have agreed with William because by 1898 he had become a petty officer on HMS Mars. He was commended at a special meeting of the Royal Humane Society on August 28, 1898 for his bravery in rescuing victims from the waters in a disaster near Blackwall.58

  Nellie was one of a handful of children that the Poplar guardians sent forty miles out of London to Leighton Buzzard on the northwestern border of Bedfordshire. A parish union town and head of a county court district, Leighton Buzzard had a single wide street with several smaller streets branching off it at the Market Place, then as now dominated by a forty-foot-high fourteenth-century cross; an ancient Church of All Saints; a town hall and corn exchange; and a population—including five nearby villages—of just under 6,000 spread over nearly 9,000 acres.59 (See fig. 1.3.) By contrast, Nellie’s home district, Poplar, had a population of 156,525 in 1881 jammed into 2,334 acres. Reeling from the death of her father and the steady erosion of the material conditions of the Dowell household, she confronted an utterly alien way of life far removed from the tight network of relatives and the familiar landmarks, sounds, sights, and smells of Bow and Bromley’s densely congested streets and alleyways. We cannot know how Nellie made sense of her new world. Muriel never mentioned Nellie’s time at Leighton Buzzard, perhaps because Nellie herself did not—or chose not to—remember it.

  1.3. A medieval cross still dominates the central market square of the provincial town of Leighton Buzzard, where Poor Law officials briefly boarded out Nellie to a foster family. South aspect of the Cross at Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, London. Published 1 November 1803 by W. Byrne, Titchfield Street and T. Cadell & W. Davies Strand. (Courtesy of
Bedford and Luton Archive Office.)

  Leighton Buzzard was far beyond the reach of her mother, grandmother, aunts and uncles. The terms of the General Order of the Poor Law Board of November 25, 1870 authorized Boards of Guardians to board out “orphaned” and “deserted” children to certified Boarding Out Committees who coordinated their management with local government and Poor Law officials. Of course, Nellie was neither an “orphan” nor a “deserted child,” at least in the eyes of her mother so eager to love and protect her. To borrow Lydia Murdoch’s evocative phrase, she had become one of tens of thousands of “imagined orphans” in Victorian Britain removed from their birth families. An Anglican cleric headed Leighton Buzzard’s two “Boarding Out” committees charged with placing each Poor Law child in a local family in exchange for a weekly cash payment. Boarding out allowed overburdened Poor Law unions like Stepney and Poplar to subcontract care of particularly vulnerable classes of poor children like Nellie in private families.60

  This system had several notable advantages in the eyes of its champions. It removed children from two undesirable—and sensationalized—sites within the Victorian imagination: the slum tenement and the pauper family. Like many other late-nineteenth-century schemes designed to reclaim the urban underclass such as Children’s Country Holidays and Farm Labour Colonies for out-of-work men, it replaced the diseased environment of the slum with the health-restoring atmosphere of the country. It was cheap and diminished pressure on Poor Law unions and local ratepayers to construct, manage, maintain, and regulate large facilities. It kept children within that most hallowed institution of Victorian life, the family, while removing them from their own. Boarding Out Committees visited, inspected, and supervised “orphans” within their new homes to ensure their well-being, but newspapers regularly reported abuse and exploitation.61 Some women undoubtedly took in pauper children out of a genuine commitment to their welfare. All needed the income they received. This was a business proposition whose success depended heavily not only on the competence and conscientiousness of the local committees’ oversight but the vagaries of placements within specific households.