The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  1.8. The prize plate celebrated the recipient’s “diligence and proficiency,” which mirrored the didactic goals of books like Clare Linton’s Friend for its schoolgirl readers. Elizabeth Anna Hart, Clare Linton’s Friend (London, 1900) (In author’s possession).

  The final stanza enunciates the ethical action that reading the poem is meant to inspire.

  I think my feelings towards you should

  be soft and tender,

  And even I might plan, and try some

  tiny aid to render;

  I’ll often give you all I can out of my

  little treasure,

  And I will pray—yes, every day—that

  you may have some pleasure!124

  In yet another reminder of the profound difference separating them, the child informs the little beggars that “my life is very pleasant, the past is dear, the future clear, and, best of all, the present; I am a happy child.” “A Child’s Thought” suggests that poor children get neither happiness nor childhood. Their hardships do, however, enable well-to-do girls like the child narrator to feel good about herself by doing good to them.

  Such writings enjoined girls to broaden their moral remit beyond their families to their needy neighbors. Framed as duty, the care of “helpless little creatures” was a privilege crucial to the self-definition of all middle-class females. Clare’s relationship with Polly is part of Clare’s moral education.125 She demonstrates genuine affection and trust in Polly—so much so that she herself is briefly “stolen” (actually kidnapped) trying to rescue Polly from the demonic mother “Sal the Sloper.” At the same time, Clare Linton’s Friend repeatedly reduces Polly to Clare’s doll-like companion whose fate the Lintons completely control. Hart emphasizes this point when Clare’s cocksure cousin Harry ventures gamely into the slums to find Polly. He returns with a half dozen hungry, ragged girls, each professing to be called Polly and more than willing to be Clare’s “friend.”

  “Have you found Polly?” she [Clare] cried, almost whispering from excitement.

  “Polly!” shouted he [Harry], “phoo!- that wouldn’t be much—I’ve found Pollies! Take your choice. Here’s half a dozen of them!”

  And flinging open the hall door, he displayed on the steps half a dozen ragged children huddled together….

  “They all say they’re Polly,” he cried, with a little wave of the hand toward them. “Pick and choose … I couldn’t be too particular about measuring,” explained Harry; “but they’ll about do…. I might have had a dozen more, but I couldn’t take any except with dark eyes.”126

  Inconveniently, Clare wants only her special Polly—not just any of the Pollies whom Harry has selected from the apparently illimitable supply of them available to any genteel youth willing to shop for them in the slums. Polly—and all slum Pollies—are more animate dolls than persons. Inequality is essential to the love that defines the reciprocities of “friendship” in Clare Linton’s Friend.

  Few girls in late-Victorian Britain actually got a waif of their very own. But their tender, bossy relationships with their dolls taught them powerful lessons about the muddled lines dividing the intimacies of sisterhood from the hierarchies of servanthood.127 Books like Clare Linton’s Friend and poems like “A Child’s Thought” were part of the Lesters’ curriculum in cross-class sisterhood. Muriel and Doris’s loving friendship with Nellie Dowell can and ought to be viewed as one legacy of this education, even as both sisters later critiqued its class-based assumptions about power and privilege.

  New Girls?

  In the late 1880s and ’90s, the New Woman burst upon the scene, at once a literary invention and a term describing unmarried, educated middle-class women who boldly claimed for themselves new social rights and duties.128 Abetted by novelists, journalists discovered that the New Woman made good copy and compelling plots. They eagerly chronicled her dangerous defiance of social conventions as she bicycled along country paths and lanes; went to Girton or Newnham or Somerville to study Greek, maths, and history; smoked cigarettes; ventured into the slums to nurse the poor or live with like-minded women in settlement houses; and dared to earn her own living beyond the authority of husbands, fathers, and brothers. Invariably, fictional New Women and their real-life counterparts paid a high price for their freedoms. Marriage and motherhood were hard to square with their adventurous independence. So too, opposite-sex love often seemed elusive and incompatible with female ambition and personal autonomy.129

  Writers of juvenile fiction decided that New Women must have emerged from somewhere and invented New Girls who populated a steady stream of novels with titles like Polly: A New Fashioned Girl (1889). New Girls tended to be less threatening than their older New Woman counterparts. They were more often high-spirited rather than defiant; enthusiastic rather than zealously dogmatic; unconventional rather than morbid; Christian in their outlook rather than secular or religiously heterodox.130

  Not many middle-class girls actually lived “New Girl” lives.131 Muriel and Doris did. What made this possible? Their parents’ views about girls, their schooling, and even the posh suburb of Loughton (where the family moved in 1901) contributed to their deeply religious but distinctly “advanced” views about gender and society and their keen sense that they could and should contribute to its betterment. Unlike girls growing up only a generation before them, the Lester sisters never seemed to have doubted that what they thought and did mattered, and that they could and should have their own ideas.

  Too godly to be counted among the altruistic aesthetes and cranks of the fin de siècle, Henry Lester embraced some of their distinctly modern ideas. Muriel recalled that her father regularly wore that avant-garde article of hygienic clothing, the Jaeger dressing gown, whose “live wool,” unlike “dead vegetable fibres,” threw off the body’s “malodorous emanations.” Lester sartorially identified himself with faddists and Utopian socialists like George Bernard Shaw, Jaeger’s most eccentric and famous British champion.132 Rachel Lester aligned herself with one of late-nineteenth-century London’s most politically advanced schemes to improve the lot of the poor. In 1892, she was a founding vice president of the Congregationalist Canning Town Women’s Settlement. Canning Town was the all-female branch of Mansfield House begun in 1889 by Balliol graduate Percy Alden—later knighted for his work as Chairman of Save the Children. At both settlements, advanced Liberalism shaded imperceptibly into municipal socialism. Early residents at Canning Town Women’s Settlement included West Ham’s first alderwoman, the socialist Labour leader Edith Kerrison. The sisters Fanny and Anna Tillyard established a hospital run by women for women. Alden’s future wife, Dr. Margaret Pearse, served as its chief consulting physician.133 Clearly, Rachel supported and appreciated powerful women whose religious convictions propelled them to undertake innovative political and social action in their community. Rachel and Henry allowed their daughters to ride bicycles unchaperoned across the countryside like George Gissing’s pretty but unfortunate Monica Madden—a freedom angrily decried by critics as unsexing girls. Doris had no such qualms about the emancipatory consequences of bicycling. She extolled the bicycle for fostering a spirit of independence that “paved the way for the Suffrage Movement!”134

  Henry and Rachel sent their daughters to a progressive coeducational preparatory school, Wanstead College.135 Coeducational private schools were unusual in the 1890s and often disdained and dismissed as distinctly “American” and un-English.136 A 1903 volume of essays seeking to spread the gospel of coeducational secondary schools listed only thirty such establishments in England and Wales.137 Some of these, including Wanstead College, were mixed sex up to the age of fourteen and single sex for the final two or three years.138

  The headmaster of Wanstead College, Thomas Beecham Martin, and his wife Emilia were “original, modern and delightful.”139 A former head of an elementary school in Macclesfield before opening his own school in Wanstead, Thomas Martin was the son of a Cornish Wesleyan Methodist minister.140 In such a small and intim
ate school environment, Muriel, Doris, and the other students must have been very aware of Mrs. Martin’s advanced social, political, and economic commitments as an active member of the Metropolitan Association of Women in Council, which sometimes met at the college. The Council’s objects were far-reaching: women’s mutual education; support “by every means in our power, measures which will secure to women, the same Parliamentary and other rights as men;” discouraging “class prejudice” while encouraging the “economic independence of women”; and finally, to advance the cause of coeducation as a model of “combined action of men and women in all public work.”141

  Mrs. Martin was also a vegetarian. Muriel “caught the habit from her” and kept to it her entire life.142 Muriel says nothing about how her parents and family responded to and accommodated her radical diet; nor did she elaborate the intellectual and ethical basis for her decision. In the context of the 1890s, vegetarianism nested within a politically and socially heterodox subculture whose boundaries encompassed middle-class socialists, pacifists, Esperantists, anti-vivisectionists, Simple Lifers, and gender-sex bohemians like Henry Salt and his lesbian wife, Kate. London’s vegetarian community of restaurants and associations welcomed a young Indian barrister, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who promptly joined the committee of the London Vegetarian Society in 1890.143

  Turn-of-the-century Loughton proved to be a congenial locale for rearing “new girl” daughters. Despite (or perhaps because of) its social exclusivity, its proximity to Epping Forest’s wooded parkland, its direct access via the Great Eastern Railway to East London’s philanthropic institutions and the City, Loughton’s affluent residents included an unusually large number of progressive thinkers interested in social and political questions.144 (See fig. 1.9.) Arthur Morrison, the “realist” slum novelist and connoisseur of Japanese prints, lived in sprawling Salcombe House, a short stroll down Upper Park Road from the Grange, the Lester’s family manse.145 Aesthetic-minded slum reformers like the chemist Arthur Pillans Laurie, the social statistician and child-welfare champion Hubert Llewellyn Smith, and the radical journalist and economist Vaughan Nash occupied Arts and Crafts homes in Loughton where they established a “colour” (paint) manufactory along Ruskinian lines.146 Josiah Oldfield, the controversial leader of the vegetarian movement, established Oriolet Hospital, a sanatorium and retreat founded on vegetarian principles located near the Lesters. With more amusement than shock, Loughton’s turn-of-the-century chronicler and inveterate recorder of local gossip, William Chapman Waller, commented that Oldfield had abandoned Oriolet and his wife when he ran off with an especially comely nurse employed there.147 Loughton, much like Hampstead and Bloomsbury, attracted more than its share of “the moneyed and the aesthetic” as well as a radicals, socialists, and advanced Nonconformists.148 The new ideas percolating in fin-de-siècle Britain found hospitable soil in Loughton among its bohemian intellectuals, civil servants, and reform-minded capitalists like Henry Lester himself. More than railroad tracks connected Loughton to the slums of East London.

  1.9. Early twentieth-century Loughton bordered the vast leafy expanse of Epping Forest and was mostly populated by families like the Lesters whose wealth was based in commerce and manufacture. Postcard of Earl’s Path, Loughton, c.1908. (Courtesy of Chris Pond, Loughton and District Historical Society.)

  Rachel and Henry Lester consistently and intentionally exposed their daughters to some of the most progressive thinking about religion, female education, social problems, and women’s roles in society. They were, Doris averred, well ahead of their times when it came to principles and practices of child rearing. Rachel Lester set her heart on sending Muriel to one of Britain’s leading girls’ “public schools,” St. Leonard’s in Scotland. England’s great public schools for boys—Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and Rugby—enjoyed pride of place for centuries as training grounds for future leaders of church and state. Essential sites for reproducing Britain’s ruling elite, they fostered deep institutional loyalty and dense social networks for their privileged male pupils drawn from the aristocracy, landed gentry, clergy, and wealthy professionals. Founded from the 1860s onwards, girls’ public schools and “high schools” like St. Leonard’s, North London Collegiate, and the Cheltenham Ladies College lacked the pedigreed social cachet of their ancient, richly endowed, all-male counterparts. They drew students largely from the clerical, professional, and business classes. Academic and social hothouses premised on faith in girls’ capacity to master heretofore masculine domains of knowledge, these new schools expected girls to think critically, creatively and independently.

  St. Leonard’s vaulted to the forefront of girls’ secondary education when one of its distinguished former students, Agnata Ramsay, placed first in the Classical Tripos at Cambridge in 1887—besting all the men in her mastery of Greek and Latin history and literature. Even Benjamin Jowett, the revered Master of Balliol College, Oxford, lent his enormous prestige by praising St. Leonard’s for treating girls as “honourable, responsible beings.”149 The school was a by-product of the movement for women’s higher education in Scotland and England that led to granting the Ladies Licentiate in Arts (instituted in 1876) by its illustrious near neighbor, St. Andrews as well as the founding of Girton (as the College for Women in Hitchen in 1869) and Newnham (1871) in Cambridge.150 For its first three decades, Girton graduates dominated the staff and leadership of St. Leonard’s and brought with them their high intellectual standards as well as their intensely homosocial culture of female love and friendship. The first head of St. Leonard’s, the Scotswoman Louisa Lumsden, arrived with Constance Maynard, her lover and partner. They served on the staff until their tumultuous relationship deteriorated and both women sought separate venues in which to continue their work of building new institutions for women’s intellectual advancement.151 Schools like St. Leonard’s cultivated powerful emotional attachments among students as well as between teachers and students articulated through ritualized, erotically charged relationships called “raves” and “crushes.”152 No evidence suggests that Muriel formed such a relationship, but St. Leonard’s offered her ample opportunities to observe them. In her diary, she noted that during a gossipy stroll, her friend Frieda told her all about a fellow student called Joy and “a fuss about a certain girl who liked her.”153

  The St. Leonard’s Gazette of the 1880s and ’90s provides a vivid portrait of a rapidly expanding institution committed to building girls’ bodies and characters through strenuous team sports such as lacrosse and hockey, and developing their intellectual faculties through a rigorous curriculum that included Greek and Latin.154 (See fig. 1.10.) By the time Muriel arrived in 1898, St. Leonard’s occupied impressive grounds with ancient buildings and spacious playing fields close by the cathedral and St. Andrews.155

  In many respects, St. Leonard’s was an institutional ideal for the education of female boarding students. It was everything that Forest Gate School was not. Just as Jane Nassau Senior and Henrietta Barnett had demanded the dissolution of Poor Law barrack schools in favor of small cottage households presided over by loving matrons, so too St. Leonard’s was divided into Houses, each with its own mistress, dining room, and study, and its own highly cultivated sense of corporate domesticity and identity. No doubt responding to widespread fears that female scholars’ devotion to studies jeopardized their health, the girls were not allowed to do work before breakfast or after 8:30 p.m. Academic subjects dominated the morning curriculum from 9:00 to 12:30 p.m. with a range of less strenuous special subjects in the afternoons. The hour and a half after dinner were given over to games and sports each day.156

  1.10. Muriel entered St. Leonard’s in 1898 and lived in Bishopshall West, pictured in the background behind the playing fields. She enjoyed success there as scholar, athlete (she played cricket, lacrosse, and field hockey), musician, and leader. She gained the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate before returning home to the Grange. St. Leonard’s School, Bishopshall East and West, 1895. (Courtesy of St. Leonard’s Sch
ool, St. Andrews. Fife.)

  Muriel and Nellie occupied precisely those social and economic locations—the daughter of a progressive, upper-middle-class capitalist and a Poor Law half-orphan—that sanctioned their removal from their families in favor of boarding in an educational institution. If St. Leonard’s was a quintessential Victorian heterotopia—a “somewhere” outside the social norms that existed in reality—Forest Gate was its dystopic counterpart. In the eyes of some contemporaries, the independent “new girls” of St. Leonard’s and the Poor Law orphans of Forest Gate exemplified disordered family life. They were not harbingers of welcome social change but social problems in themselves.

  The expansion of academically and physically rigorous schools for daughters of the well-to-do struck a sensitive nerve in late-Victorian Britain. Medical doctors and social commentators alike alarmed the public with claims that girls were overtaxing their minds with study and their bodies’ with bicycling, hockey, and lacrosse at the expense of their emotional and physical well-being. Institutions like St. Leonard’s, far from preparing their “old girls” to serve the best interests of the nation, appeared to produce hysterics and mannish spinsters incapable—or worse yet—uninterested in settling into the joys of conjugality and motherhood. They seemed intent on making their “New Girls” into “New Women.” The impoverished and orphaned female charges at Forest Gate likewise seemed far removed from Victorian ideals of femininity. Reared without the benefit of mother love and family life, such girls lacked even the rudimentary skills to undertake their domestic obligations as future wives and mothers of the nation’s soldiers and workers. Muriel and Nellie’s “girlhoods” could not have been more different. But what they shared in common was the expectation that girls like Muriel would befriend girls like Nellie who had been well schooled in deferring to her betters.