by Seth Koven
Neither Harriett Dowell’s personal fitness nor the depth of her solicitude for her offspring had anything to do with Nellie’s removal to Leighton Buzzard. The mere fact of her destitution constituted prima facie proof of her unsuitability to retain custody of them. This was the judgment that poor families—mothers in particular—desperately sought to avoid even as they devised ways to extract resources from Poor Law institutions to their family’s best advantage.62 Mothers’ bitter encounters with the Poor Law provide an essential context for appreciating the politics of Muriel’s portrayal of Mrs. Dowell’s devotion to her children and her unjust maternal suffering.63
Nellie Dowell Becomes a Poor Law Orphan
The guardians did not keep Nellie in Leighton Buzzard long. On July 19, 1883, she was admitted to the Forest Gate Industrial School where her older sister Alice joined her two weeks later. Forest Gate was rate-funded philanthropy on a grand scale—all that was best and worst in mid-Victorian approaches to poverty and children’s education. While the residential school was built, funded, and overseen by the Whitechapel Guardians in 1854 at the cost of forty thousand pounds, Poplar Poor Law Union entered into a partnership with the Whitechapel guardians. This guaranteed Poplar’s poor children access to over three hundred beds at the school.64 Nellie occupied one of these beds. Throughout the 1880s, Forest Gate housed, fed, educated, disciplined, and entertained between six and eight hundred children in any given week in its three departments: infants, girls, and boys.
Forest Gate’s neoclassical “bare Italianate” style and massive proportions betokened its builders’ strong commitment to their own concept of child welfare and pauper childhood.65 Its construction and management were governed by the logic of aggregation (massing together of paupers) and segregation (separating paupers from their families and dividing them into distinct classes based on age and gender) at the heart of the New Poor Law; and by a vision of efficiency dictated by economies of scale rather than the emotional and psychological needs of children. There was nothing homelike about Forest Gate. To the passerby, it offered an imposing symmetrical civic façade. Its immense sex-segregated dormitories provided its child wards no opportunities to domesticate or personalize the space allotted to them. Metal frame beds must have frustrated most children’s attempts to inscribe initials or mark their surfaces with graffiti. There was literally no privacy in these dormitories: the beds were lined up in rows to maximize bodies per cubic foot while making it easy to monitor the children’s activities at a panoptic glance. Such schools may have been impersonal, but they undeniably offered their pupils better instruction than the ramshackle educational arrangements of individual poorhouses. Viewing the working-class home as a source of moral pollution, guardians congratulated themselves on placing poor children in “total” institutions that inculcated orderliness, discipline, and compliance with routines.66
Not everyone shared this sanguine assessment. In 1873 the President of the Local Government Board, James Stansfield, appointed Jane Nassau Senior Britain’s first female civil servant in 1873. She quickly embarked on a public crusade to investigate schools like Forest Gate.67 Senior’s stunning 1874 Report indicted barrack schools, including Forest Gate, for failing to provide pauper girls with love, mothering, a sense of joy and individual worth, life skills and intellectual stimulation. For Senior, such qualities were the essential stuff of childhood. These schools, she contended, left their female wards stunted in mind, body, and spirit, and hence incapable of leading moral, self-supporting lives. Many of these girls quickly disappeared into London’s underclass of degraded and fallen women.68 By denying pauper girls a proper childhood, the state invested in the manufacture of prostitutes. Senior’s male colleagues dismissed each of her proposals as sentimental follies: a curriculum that included games and excursions to teach girls how to shop and manage their future households; foster care in families or the creation of a system of small “cottages” each superintended by a matron. They would prove less easy to dismiss twenty years later when one of Senior’s most forceful female disciples, Henrietta Barnett, brought them before Parliament and the nation.
Thwarted in her attempt to bring feminine influence to bear on state policy, Senior turned to the private voluntary sector and founded the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants (MABYS). The talented Senior, a noted opera singer and founder of the British precursor of the Red Cross, died of cancer in 1877 before she could reap the fruits of her benevolent labors. Her niece, Mary (May) Hughes followed in her footsteps in caring for the outcast. She founded rescue homes for Whitechapel prostitutes in the village of Longcot; as the first resident of Kingsley Hall in 1915, she became part of Nellie and Muriel’s circle of close friends. MABYS paired each pauper girl with a “lady” volunteer who befriended and advised her.69 It captured the imagination of middle-class women in the 1870s awakened to their social duties and intellectual powers by the establishment of the first women’s colleges and social reform schemes such as Octavia Hill’s “lady” rent collectors and Louisa Twining’s “lady” workhouse visitors.70
For children like Nellie Dowell, accustomed to the cramped dereliction of two-or three-story slum tenements and the freedom of the street and courtyard, Forest Gate must have seemed vast, intimidating, and restrictive, more like the workhouse than a home.71 Only Nellie herself could have provided Muriel with the detailed description of her reception at Forest Gate. Muriel highlights Nellie’s futile resistance to the micro-workings of the school’s disciplinary regime as the staff seeks to eradicate her individuality. Nellie uses all the tools of the weak to resist the powerful: tears, inactivity and aggression.72 This is not a battle that she can win.
Nellie caused some trouble among the attendants and had even to be taken to the matron during the first month of her stay. She had fallen asleep towards the end of her journey, worn out with her sobbing, and when the train stopped at their destination and the nurse stood her on her feet to awake her, she was glad enough in her dazed state to hold tight to her hand. She sat throughout the tea, pale and dry eyes, but she could eat nothing…. It was even found necessary to take her to the matron—an awful and terrifying thing for the inmate of almost any institution. This was because she had passionately resisted the hair cutter when it came to her turn to be cropped on the first Saturday after her arrival. She had been terrified by the big scissors wielded over her head by a strange person. A strange sense of outrage filled her as she saw herself shorn of her curls.73
The inescapable encounter with Forest Gate’s barber marked one particularly charged moment in the life of each child sent there. Lice flourished in locks of hair: to control the former required shearing the latter. Nellie’s “strange … outrage” over her lost curls allows Muriel to convey her own horror at the institutionalized violations of children at Forest Gate. An ardent, independent spirit like Nellie—the sort of person essential to Muriel’s vision of a society ordered on radically egalitarian principles of Christian love—was anathema at Forest Gate.
The plainspoken Labour leader George Lansbury knew only too well that decisions about the management of pauper children’s bodies could and did erode the fragile boundaries of the child’s individuality. In Lansbury’s politico-moral calculus, the good intentions of Forest Gate’s staff mattered much less than the consequences of their actions. He, like Muriel and Mrs. Dowell, registered his dismay at the sight of the children, “dressed in the old, hideous, Poor Law garb, corduroy and hard blue serge, and the girls with their hair almost shaved off, with nothing at all to make them look attractive in any sort of way.” The dehumanization of Forest Gate’s children was the logical outgrowth of officials who “looked on the poor as a nuisance” despite getting “their living out of the poor, or because of the poor.”74 It was a “crime,” Lansbury contended, for the community to allow the Poor Law to “rob” children of the “pleasures of childhood.”75
It is hard not to feel grief at just how much we know about what Nellie was supposed to
be doing each hour of each day during her years at Forest Gate. Every aspect of life at the school was officially regulated, each thirty-minute block of the day charted with precision. Nellie awakened at 5:45 each morning, washed and bathed, and arrived at morning drill by 6:30, followed by breakfast and prayers between 7:00 and 7:30. (See fig. 1.4.) The Board of Guardians specified what and how much food would be offered to each child each day of the week. Not even the amount and proportions of sugar, flour and water used in the institutional suet pudding were left to chance: 10 oz. flour, 3 oz. suet, 1 oz. sugar per pound of pudding.76
1.4. Like most large residential institutions in nineteenth-century Britain for both rich and poor children, Forest Gate School accounted for every minute of the day and filled it with closely monitored group activities. Forest Gate children enjoyed neither time nor space for privacy. “Timetable for Girls,” Annual Report, Forest Gate School, 1888, FGSD/19/A. (Courtesy of London Metropolitan Archives.)
And what of Nellie’s religious life and spiritual development during these early years? Poor Law infirmary creed registers listed Nellie’s religion as Church of England. Nellie apparently likened the horror of entering Forest Gate to a frightening illustration from a popular edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the epic seventeenth-century narrative retracing the Christian everyman’s perilous journey to God’s grace. She and all the children at Forest Gate attended Divine Services at 10:15 a.m. and 6 p.m. each Sunday and 6 p.m. every other Thursday. Few poor children in Bow living with their families would have attended services so frequently and regularly. What impact did all this “Poor Law” Christian instruction have on Nellie? According to Mrs. Dowell, not much. Forest Gate taught Nellie a “rude form of religion by people who did not even pretend to believe it themselves.”77 While rivalries between Anglicans and Nonconformists had long dominated parliamentary debates about education, Nellie attended only nondenominational schools controlled by the School Board of London and Poor Law officials. Nellie’s schools retained their Christian character, but the content of religious teaching had been hammered out through political wrangling and compromise, not conviction; it aimed to avoid controversy more than inspire faith.
Some officials closest to the provision of religious instruction in the metropolis were not hopeful about its spiritual efficacy. It was no more possible to teach children what truly mattered about God by preparing them for an examination about Scripture facts than it was to quiz them on “brotherly love” and “unselfishness,” quipped Edmond Holmes, erstwhile chief inspector of schools. Information about God was altogether different from knowledge of Him, which required “reverence,” “devotion,” and a capacity to imagine and feel that which could not be seen or touched.78
It would be easy to condemn Forest Gate and all those associated with its conception and management as inhumane, intent on stifling a child’s creativity and producing a docile class of laborers for the army, navy, servant-keeping households and the capitalist economy. All of these things were at least partly true. Nellie was, in Muriel’s telling of her life, an uncooperative victim of—and rebel against—this system, so we have reason to suspect that she found ways to undermine the lockstep severity of the school’s regimen. However, this is not the whole story, or rather, there are other stories to tell about Forest Gate. The Superintendent’s logbook suggests that the staff worked hard to provide recreation for the children—such as outings to enjoy entertainment at the People’s Palace on Mile End Road and swimming lessons. And they likewise struggled to preserve their charges’ health by installing the latest sanitary devices in the infants’ lavatory on the recommendation of the medical officer Dr. Parker. The head matron and superintendent lobbied the managers to provide holidays for the children and reported the manifest improvement in the children’s “general health and appearance.”79 Theirs was an uphill battle against a system predicated on the conviction that pauper children were best served by separating them from their indigent kin. Because Forest Gate was several miles east of Whitechapel and Bow, few parents could even afford the time or the fare to visit their children, except on special occasions.
The institution to which the Dowell children are consigned seeks to mold them into a deferential, patriotic source of labor for the well-to-do. “They were taught,” the narrator of “From Birth to Death” bitterly remarks, “to respect the rich and wave Union Jacks … that one of the really important things in life is that door handles, finger plates, hinges, nozzles to fire hoses, taps and other small brass fittings must be kept in a perennial state of shine.”80 London’s chief Inspector of Schools anticipated Muriel’s assessment. He acknowledged that “self-expression on the part of the child may be said to have been formally prohibited by all who were responsible for the elementary education of the children of England” in the 1870s, ’80s and ’90s. School rooms were designed for surveillance and discipline with the children seated in rows … on long fixed forms.”81 The Inspector of Poor Law Schools for the Metropolitan District, Wyndham Holgate, refused to gloss over the deep structural failings of schools like Forest Gate, which proved competent to teach materials by “fixed rules” “whilst anything that taxes originality of thought is, very often, a lamentable failure.”82 The curriculum reinforced the implicit message conveyed by the organization of space. “Obedience was a recurrent theme in the readers approved for use in the schools, along with diligence, punctuality, patience, tidiness, gratitude and thrift.”83
The educator Clara Grant headed a London Board school a short distance up Devons Road from Nellie’s own school and later assisted Muriel and Doris at Kingsley Hall during World War I. She too recalled with indignation the philosophy undergirding Board school education in the 1880s. “We ought … to have said, ‘What does the child need? What is the best we can give him? He must have it,’ but we said none of these things.” Board school instruction refused to acknowledge the “common justice” that true education entailed the “fullest development” of each person and instead exacted obedience and cultivated passivity.84 Grant and Doris Lester championed “self-teaching” along Montessorian lines undertaken by each child at his own pace to develop initiative, “independent judgment” and pleasure in learning.85 Doris’s immersion in the life of Bow and her own friendships with local women, including Nellie, helped to shape her radical vision of early childhood education as the foundation of citizenship. Her nursery school on Bruce Road (begun around 1912 or 1913) and later Children’s House (founded in 1923 as the children-centered part of Kingsley Hall) were antidotes to everything Forest Gate School had come to mean about working-class childhood.
“Robbed” of Her Childhood
Grant’s and Lester’s values are conspicuously absent from Clara Lucas Balfour’s novel about Patience “Patty” Grant, an orphaned and abused “workhouse girl.” Toil and Trust: The Life Story of Patty the Workhouse Girl was exactly the kind of book children at Forest Gate like Nellie were encouraged to read. It sheds light on the kinds of messages drilled into Nellie as a Poor Law half-orphan. First published as part of a series of shilling morality tales for “Kitchen,” Sunday, and Day School libraries in 1860, it remained in print for decades. Toil and Trust offered readers heavy-handed moralizing about the rewards of “industry” and “piety,” wooden one-dimensional characters, unlikely twists of plot, and a happy ending. Now long forgotten, Balfour was a prolific and popular Christian temperance lecturer and author of exemplary histories and fictions, often about women’s achievements and misfortunes.86 The Lady’s Paper extolled the “persuasive and attractive eloquence” of this “talented lady” and “friend of humanity;” it likened Mrs. Balfour to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who graciously wrote an introduction for one of her temperance tracts.87 Balfour insisted that she had drawn Patty’s story from real life after making careful inquiries into the fate of workhouse girls who had sought but failed to support themselves as domestic servants. The novel’s opening line addressed two readers, one well-born like Muriel who would “thi
nk,” and the other humbly born like Nellie who would have “felt” what it meant “to be a friendless child … to have your bread thrown to you with a grudge, your feeble services repaid with a blow….” Balfour courted both audiences successfully in her lectures at Mechanics Institutes and temperance gatherings. Her tales were explicitly instructive: they provided middle-class and working-class readers with models of right and wrong behavior upon which to base their own actions.
Poor Law orphans in Victorian fiction like Oliver Twist were invariably innocent victims of either unavoidable misfortunes such as their parents’ accidental deaths or adults’ immoral and imprudent behavior. Patty was both. A workplace accident kills her biological father. Her virtuous mother unwisely remarries a dissolute man with an evil gin-drinking mother who turns Patty into a household “slave” to her own half-siblings. After Patty’s mother dies of “hard work” and “heartache,” a kindly doctor “rescues” her. Rather than taking her into his own home—the happy fate of Tony, the orphaned street “arab” adopted by an elderly newsagent in Hesba Stretton’s Alone in London—the doctor sends her to the workhouse as a safe refuge. Balfour is not exactly an apologist for the workhouse but unlike Lester, she does not condemn it. The female ward of the workhouse is a dreary place whose inmates constitute a “promiscuous company” of drunks, deserted wives, and “wretched widows.” Patty’s moral genius, meek patience and unrelenting toil prevail over all adversities. By the novel’s end, we leave her as the proprietress of a snug lodging house.