by Seth Koven
The ties of family trumped solidarity with fellow workers. Nellie’s story underscores a point that defies the statistical impulse at the heart of social welfare policy. The trauma of incarceration in Poor Law institutions cannot be reckoned exclusively in terms of numbers of individual men, women, and children within the walls of Poor Law schools, casual wards, asylums, and unions. Their experiences must be understood as something kept vivid through stories and memories like the ones Nellie and Harriet told Muriel, that were coextensive with the kinship networks at the heart of neighborhood and community in East London. Preserving her independence—defined as freedom from the clutches of the New Poor Law and supporting herself and her mother without resort to charity—remained Nellie’s highest priority. In Muriel’s story about her, Nellie and her mother refused to be victims of the Poor Law while acknowledging its horrors.
Nellie was an exemplary company girl, not a proletarian radical, for the better part of her working life in the match industry. As a nonunion worker in a unionized workplace in Wellington, she abetted R. Bell’s global capitalist business strategies as well as its ongoing attempts to weaken the union, discipline its female workforce, and squeeze profits out of its labor. Seen through the interpretive lens of historians of late-industrial capitalism and labor, Nellie was a proletarianized and exploited worker. This seems indisputable, except that this is not how she saw herself or how Muriel told her story. Muriel suggests that Nellie had an extraordinary ability to find pleasure and humor in even the most difficult circumstances. She may well have been grateful for steady work and the opportunity her employer extended her to explore the world. If her choices strike me as necessarily political—the refusal to become a trade union member—they probably did not for her.
Thanks to R. Bell and Company, Nellie enjoyed an extraordinary expansion in political and social freedoms as a fully enfranchised white woman. She saw for herself that leading politicians and state actors could be and were committed to a “sort of socialism” favorable to workers. While her antipodean travels enhanced her status at her factory girls’ club in Bow, she must also have realized just how much less she counted in British society and politics as a disenfranchised, propertyless wage laborer. Her time in Sweden, Muriel suggests, marked the beginning of deep shifts in her worldview. As she adapted to a new language and an altogether different culture and way of life in Sweden, Nellie reflected upon and began to recast her previous experiences in ways that challenged truths she heretofore had taken for granted. Her brother-in-law’s disablement and the breakup of the Dellar family touched chords deep within her about the traumas of her own youth and made only too clear the inadequacy of metropolitan poor relief and charity. While Muriel does not specify the character of Nellie’s growing dissatisfaction with her philanthropic “lady” friends, she hints that Nellie came to see more clearly how such “friendships” were predicated on the reproduction of class differences, not their erasure. Nellie may have been a company girl, but she became a Cockney cosmopolitan with an unusual breadth of outlook and experiences. Her literal border crossings as a “match girl” anticipated—without foreshadowing—the social, cultural, and class crossings at the heart of her love and friendship with Muriel.
Sometime between 1903 and 1909, Muriel and Nellie met each other. When Nellie first encountered Muriel she would have rightly recognized her as yet another well-intentioned slumming lady. Muriel, for her part, must have seen in Nellie that exemplary figure much beloved by journalists and coveted by philanthropists, the Cockney match girl. Because “From Birth to Death” simply ends midsentence on the bottom of the typed page, I had long assumed that Muriel must have narrated the circumstances of their meeting in the now lost pages. With the aid of Nellie’s hospital records and the dating of her earliest surviving letter, I know that “From Birth to Death” narrates events after Muriel and Nellie had already become “loving mates.” Muriel simply chose not to mention when, where, or how they met. She never becomes a character in “From Birth to Death” but remains its invisible narrator.
The lost pages of “From Birth to Death” have loomed large in my own imagination as the source that would answer my most pressing questions. Archival fragments invite such optimistic fantasies. They incite but also frustrate “an urge for plenitude” and “more and more linkages to work into the torn fabric of the past.”173 These lost pages also remind us that archives, like the life stories we make from them, are always fragments. The historian’s work of mending the torn fabric of the past is necessarily—and perhaps happily—unfinished business.
CHAPTER THREE
“Being a Christian” in Edwardian Britain
THE SECOND ANGLO-BOER WAR (1899–1902) in South Africa had not gone smoothly for the world’s paramount military power. Britain had suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of a ragtag force of Dutch-descended farmers determined to protect their Boer republics from annexation by the British imperial behemoth. When Lord Roberts’s relief forces lifted the Boers’ seven-month siege of the small border town of Mafeking on May 17th, 1900, Britons raucously took to the streets. Muriel Lester scribbled the joyous news into her schoolgirl diary.1 A vocal minority, including the future Great War prime minister Lloyd George, hazarded their good names by denouncing British military aggression in South Africa as immoral imperialism actuated by gold and diamonds, not God and civilization.2 Seventeen-year-old Muriel disdained such dissenting voices for their unseemly “pratings” after peace.3 Twinning militant Christianity with militarism, she joined the struggle for British supremacy in South Africa with the true Christian’s “spiritual fight.” Britain’s empire was God’s will. The war had made her “fearfully proud of anything English” and “glad and proud to be one of Christs’ [sic] followers.” She even filled a khaki-covered album with pictures displaying “British prowess and native infidelity—any sort of native.”4 At the dawn of the new century, Muriel Lester was smug about the superiority of all things British and no less pleased with herself.
A decade later, Muriel was a committed pacifist feminist enmeshed in the overlapping worlds of religious modernism and ethical socialism. Although she never renounced her deep attachment to Britishness, she embraced internationalist perspectives and criticized British global aggression. Christianity animated her devotion to brotherhood and sisterhood across divisions of class, race, religion, gender, and nation. She threw herself into various benevolent projects in the slums of Bow, a hotbed of labor and socialist politics in the metropolis. The British empire had retained little of its luster and even less of its romance. A supporter of the humanitarian Congo Reform Association, Muriel knew that unspeakable cruelty and violence lurked just beneath the thin veneer of civilizing missions like King Leopold’s in the Congo.
In the years before World War I, Muriel Lester, along with so many Edwardian seekers, forged a new sense of herself as an ethical subject and a Christian obliged to act justly to others, near and far. How she did this and its consequences are the subject of this chapter. This was an ongoing process for Muriel, a lifelong pilgrimage animated by God’s love. It meant balancing—and connecting—two different parts of her life, two competing geographies of self: the verdant upper-middle-class comfort of Loughton with its private demands to care for her aging parents; and the dull dirty streets of Bow with her growing public commitments to its people. As she traveled by first-class rail between these two locales, she reckoned with what it meant to be a dutiful Victorian spinster daughter and an Edwardian New Woman in the slums.
Even in her schoolgirl diary entries of 1899–1900, the stakes of openly “being a Christian” were high for Muriel: “to let everyone want to copy me.” It’s hard not to smile—or wince—at her immodest ambition. “Being a Christian” meant becoming a person whom others would emulate. It was self-and other-directed, inward and outward, solitary and social. Muriel’s commitment to being a Christian had its own internal history, a developmental logic rooted in the idiosyncrasies of her psychosoci
al and spiritual autobiography. But it was also shaped by shifting and expanding possibilities available to an educated single woman in the fin-de-siècle metropolis. Her journey from her parents’ Victorian progressive Nonconformity to Edwardian Christian radicalism was not a lonely one. She had plenty of inquisitive and self-critical fellow travelers.
Essential to Muriel’s ethical remaking was her engagement with a broad range of theological ideas and social reform initiatives from the 1880s to World War I that revolved around “God is Love” as the central fact of Christianity. Muriel’s writings offer many clues about the people, ideas, and movements that challenged and transformed her. Some, like Tolstoy’s radical Christian ethics and R. J. Campbell’s New Theology movement, she fully acknowledged. Others, like Theosophy and the Brotherhood Church, she never named but bear striking affinities with her emerging theological and social convictions.5 Fin-de-siècle commentators were undoubtedly preoccupied by fears of race degeneration and cultural decadence, but these years also spawned a bewilderingly lush array of countercultural critiques of imperialism, materialism, and economic inequality. The excesses of Britain’s liberal bourgeois culture of possessive individualism called forth a deep yearning for new forms of social sharing, community, and spirituality. These opposing tendencies were part of the heterogeneous cultural formation within which Muriel made choices about her own life.6
Muriel’s romance with the slums of Bow and her friendships with men, women, and children living there allowed her to test out theories and decide which to keep and which to discard. Her lived “theology of love” and her loving labors among her Bow friends were always—and necessarily—entwined endeavors. Somewhere along this path, she met Nellie Dowell and they embarked on their bold venture to remake themselves and their world on Christian revolutionary principles.
“GOD IS LOVE”
The years between the 1890s and World War I witnessed a robust, experimental, and transnational engagement with what I am loosely calling “God is Love” theology. J. R. Seeley, author of the best selling and controversial history of Jesus as merely a “young man of promise” (Ecce Homo, 1865), lamented the “ethical famine” of the 1890s while recognizing the “immense opportunity” this presented to those able to satisfy the collective hunger for moral guidance.7 It was during these years that Muriel Lester elaborated her understanding of God’s love as the galvanizing force of private and public life and the foundation of her socioreligious concept of reconciliation.
Muriel thought long and hard about God as she crossed the threshold from youth into young adulthood. Worship and church-related activities increasingly animated her daily life. However, like most women, she had no opportunity to study or develop a systematic theology. During these years, she delivered no sermons, wrote no theological tracts. Muriel’s ideas about religion—what scholars call “women’s theology”—must be found in sources far outside the usual purview of historians of theology in her private letters, autobiographical writings, and unpublished diaries. This means that I often simply don’t know where Muriel stood on particular questions of doctrine and scriptural interpretation.
Muriel knit together her theological thinking—her lived theology—out of an eclectic range of Christian traditions, some radical and others mainstream, emphasizing God’s inclusive love rather than His suffering on behalf of a fallen humanity.8 God’s love was central to nineteenth-century Christians across denominational divides, from love-feasting Methodists and sober Broad Church Anglicans to hellfire evangelicals. It’s hard to make sense of the profound significance of the Atonement for Victorians without God’s redemptive love for humanity.9 In the tradition that sustained Muriel and to which she contributed, God was more like an encouraging albeit divine friend than a stern father.10 Sin and suffering were no longer the Janus-face of God’s love.
Muriel’s father, Henry Lester, encouraged his daughters to think deeply and critically about God and religion. He rejected the notion that theology was an exalted intellectual endeavor reserved only for clerics and the learned. He opened his Presidential Address to the Essex Baptist Union in 1904 with the democratic assertion that all who loved God also loved to discourse about Him. In so doing, every person could and did produce something worthy of the name “theology.” His own theology celebrated God’s love and the joys of loving God. “My simple conception of theology,” he proclaimed, “is almost enough for me. ‘God in Christ—reconciling the world unto Himself.’ ”
Understanding the mystery of reconciliation and living by it was no simple matter. “Shall I ever master that?” he modestly asked.11 It took Muriel the better part of five decades to elaborate the implications of this passage from 2 Corinthians as the scriptural bedrock of her revolutionary Christianity and global ministry of peace for the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Muriel’s reading list at the turn of the new century, dutifully inscribed in her diary, provides one way to retrace her religious, spiritual, and intellectual itinerary. Who Muriel was cannot be conjured out of the sum of the books that she read. They do, however, provide insight into her evolving religious and ethical sensibility. While her diary includes responses to major historical events (“our Queen is dead”) and soul searching about faith and friendship, it also served as a commonplace book. She copied favorite passages from Browning, Tennyson, Pater, Milton, Browne’s Religio Medici, and the Gospel, which quite explicitly spoke to her own questions and hopes. Her reading was purposeful, pleasurable, and self-reflexive.12 She veered from her steady diet of novels (Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Gaskell, Kingsley, and Mrs. Ward) to social criticism and practical theology. After a double dose of Darwin and Drummond (The Descent of Man, The Ascent of Man), she turned to The Heart of the Empire, C.F.G. Masterman’s overheated essays by leading New Liberals demanding publicly funded social services to address the problems of modern city life. Arthur Balfour’s coolly reasonable disquisition, The Foundations of Belief, insisted that “Nature” was “indifferent” to both human happiness and morality. Humans cultivated disinterested virtue and “ethical sentiments,” Balfour argued, “merely because they were crucial to “our survival.”13
Muriel was keen to feel God’s love, not understand nature’s indifference as the foundation of her own belief. She found ample doses of it when she read Charles Wagner’s The Simple Life (English translation, 1901). A burly Alsatian Protestant pastor and minister to the poor in Faubourg St. Antoine in Paris, Wagner enjoyed growing celebrity in Anglo-America with his lyrical anodyne pleas to cast off the tyrannical “inner anarchy of desire” for material goods in exchange for spiritual goodness itself.14 He warned his followers to avoid the dangers of excess introspection, “this dissecting of oneself,” which led to self-centered inaction. Wagner distilled the essence of his practical theology in his explanation of why “the invisible God came to dwell among us, in the form of a man:” “Love.”15
It was Muriel’s encounter with Tolstoy’s “primly-bound” Kingdom of God Is Within You that most profoundly transformed her ideas about God and society. It stands between Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and Anna Karenina on her reading list. Tolstoy’s ethical and Christian writings had begun to attract an ardent following in Britain spurred by his well-publicized open letter to Czar Nicholas and the first Hague Convention of 1899, which sought to limit arms and encourage the creation of international bodies to arbitrate disputes between nations.16 (See fig. 3.1.) A handful of Tolstoyan communities dotted the Cotswolds and Essex countryside by 1900. Members wore homespun loose-fitting frocks, engaged in strenuous physical labor as craftsmen and farmers, and scrubbed their whitewashed dwellings—sparely furnished with hand-carved tables and chairs. Some followed Tolstoy in striving for a purified fellowship between men and women, which banished altogether the messiness of sexual desire and sex. Others experimented with “free love” and freedom from private property, to the amused horror of their many critics.17 High-minded ethics often mingled with affected aesthetics. There was nothing simple
about their commitment to the Simple Life. Tending to the communal good demanded constant self-regulation and a good deal of self-reflection.18 The pugnacious Anglo-Catholic G. K. Chesterton found Tolstoyan Simple Lifers irresistible targets and quipped that there was “more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle.”19 (See fig. 3.2.)
3.1. Photographed in simple peasant garb, Count Tolstoy enthralled a large British audience, including Muriel, in the first years of the twentieth century. The headline informed readers that Tolstoy was “THE REFORMER WHOSE BIRTHDAY IT WAS FORBIDDEN TO CELEBRATE.” Illustrated London News, September 19, 1908, 412.
Tolstoy’s renunciation of copyright made possible the widespread availability of his radical Christian writings in English translation and expanded the ranks of British Tolstoyans.20 At the turn of the century, booksellers flooded the market with three-pence editions of Tolstoy. When Muriel’s friend Stephen Hobhouse casually purchased and read a cheap edition of Tolstoy’s brooding Confession at the Oxford train station in January 1902, he experienced a conversion so powerful and sudden it left him physically sickened by the prospect of inheriting Hadspen, one of England’s loveliest gentry estates.21 Broken in mind and body, he fled Oxford for a German health resort, where he endured milk diets, fasting, and rest cures. For Stephen, embracing Tolstoy meant rejecting not just his patrimony but distancing himself from his civic-minded parents, the right honorable Henry Hobhouse and his able wife, Margaret Potter Hobhouse. “It is not the least of my troubles,” he wrote his father, “that I cannot shape my hopes after those of my parents,” which has “led me in spite of my better self into a want of affection and coldness….”22 Tolstoy not only opened up new spiritual vistas for him, but also brought him close to an emotional, psychological, and ethical abyss. “I cannot make up my mind just how far to compromise in accepting things as they are, and striving after them as they ought to be,” he confided to his sympathetic aunt, the pro-Boer Kate Courtney. His own class privilege blocked his path to the “unity and brotherhood of man” that he so earnestly sought, but he could not think or take action or feel his way out of his ethical conundrum.23