The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  Campbell staked out a theological middle ground between divine immanence and transcendence. God was immanent—present throughout the entire universe; He revealed himself everywhere in and through His finite creation. However, the finite universe could not and did not exhaust God’s transcendent infinitude.52 Campbell’s dialectical formulation of God’s simultaneous immanence and transcendence appealed to those committed to changing their world while seeking spiritual solace through faith in a transcendent God. The demands of modern life and the teachings of Jesus were wholly compatible, he insisted.

  The New Theology provided a path into pacifism, internationalism, socialism, and religious modernism for the Lesters and many other spiritual seekers.53 Its humanism, faith in reason, and commitment to social reform captured perfectly the aspirations of progressive Liberalism at the high tide of its moral and political authority. Campbell’s alliance with one of East London’s beloved politicians and leader of the Independent Labour Party, Keir Hardie, only deepened its appeal to radical Christians, intent to bring justice to the outcast at home and abroad. Campbell imagined that if Christ came to East London, he would “strike straight” at the root causes of poverty, degradation, and class division.54 His best-known follower, Reverend William Orchard, remained closely allied with the Lesters and their work for the next several decades. He aptly summarized the message of the New Theology: “following Jesus consisted in practicing the truths He taught, copying the character He displayed, and living the life He lived, which was much more urgent than holding theories of the Atonement….”55 Here was a Christianity unfettered from dogma, miracles, and doctrines, a theology of everyday life that invited believers to enact their faith through the most banal tasks.

  Muriel’s desire to follow Christ impelled her to chastise her elders in the family’s Union Church in Loughton for their unchristian behavior.56 How could they hope to convert the “masses,” she wondered, when they failed to heed God’s call to brotherhood. In the name of brotherly love, she claimed religious and spiritual authority as a young woman.57 In an undated diary entry probably from around 1904 she recorded a scene that she either imagined or reconstructed from actual events.

  I know I hardly ought to be standing up now. It is unusual for such as I to speak because I am not a man, and I am young…. I have been listening to my elders and betters speaking for some time, and it seems they have forgotten some things that seem very fresh in my memory and I cannot forget…. “Let Brotherly love continue converting the Soul.” I’ve heard you talk of conversion of the masses but I’ve never heard any of you exhort each other by repeating Christ’s plans for converting souls –, It is “Let Brotherly love continue.”58

  The present tense lends urgency and immediacy to the unfolding scene. She speaks and writes; the reader of her diary, like her “elders and betters,” hears and witnesses. Muriel provides no context to explain what events may have triggered her dramatic public rebuke of male “betters.”

  Muriel then turns from accusation to a non-conflictual way to reckon with differences in this extended diary entry. She criticizes her elders while refusing to separate herself from them. She shifts from “I” and “you” to an inclusive “we.” I quote this diary passage in its entirety because it articulates the core precepts that guided Muriel’s love-based theological thinking and her social work for the rest of her life, one that she came to call “reconciliation.”

  I think some of us are very eager to pick wholes in each other, we do not hear & forbear, give & take, nor bear each other’s burdens. It seems when a question is raised, we go out of our way to disagree, whereas if we could take our stands on the broad basis, which we all acknowledge, we could forget the differences, rub off the corners, & agreeing to differ in accidentals, we could agree on essentials, & cultivate the habit of seeking what we all agree on & ignoring particular dangerous ground

  The cultivation of common ground makes it possible to avoid “dangerous” disagreements over “accidentals” and “particulars.” She acknowledges difference (“agreeing to differ”) while overcoming its tendency to divide. In the years ahead, reconciliation offered Muriel—as it had Brotherhood Church leaders Jupp and Kenworthy before her—a way to do God’s work and challenge social hierarchies. It promised to produce mutual understanding across social, ethnic, geopolitical, religious, gender, and economic divides. God’s love guided her, but friendship was how she chose to enact these border crossings.

  Espousing brotherliness proved easier than living it. Muriel struggled to banish egoism, pettiness, and her craving for popularity. Echoing Charles Gore’s call for “self-effacement,” she tried to “forget myself a bit” rather than thinking about “who likes me.” On New Year’s Day 1905 Muriel resolved to leave behind “malice, envy, & horrible sensations.” She yearned to master the “habit of thinking of other’s good” and get “nearer to Jesus,” so near that she would “crucify” herself with Christ.59 She outlined a clear plan to achieve her goal of self-loss: be “pure” from “foolish thoughts,” “egoism,” and “insincerity;” abandon the desire for admiration; refuse to think “much of things of this world.” By Easter, she ecstatically recorded the “marvelous finding” of her “newly discovered” Faith, her rebirth in Christ.

  In Services of joy at Chapel this morning the little worrying doubt came—unbidden. I longed for it never to recur to sting me, yet have always shrunk from probing deep down in my soul. I have been lazy too & the lazy desire not to be worried began to paralyse me I feared. Then someone prayed.

  ‘Let nothing come between us and a Vision of Thee.’ Significant. I realized the difficulty of & the need to realize God is—& Christ is here & nothing else matters.

  Proofs of her new “Faith” crowded in. She found them everywhere. In the quiet of her room as she prayed, her Bible fell open to John 3: “marvelous miracle. How good that God heard my Prayer.” The Gospel of Mark was no less comforting. Each verse spoke to her with newly profound meanings. Mark 8:34 (“Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, take up His Cross and follow Me”) fortified her devotion to “think[ing] of others.” “This precious Faith that has come is beautiful and comforting” and she prayed to “keep it forever.” If God’s immanence (“Christ is here”) made possible an utter loss of self, it also heightened her powers. “It enables me to do all things & may enable me to turn others to goodness. Christ is my God & no one can rob me of Him.”60 This was a momentous spiritual experience, which she explored only in the safe precincts of her diary. She expunged it entirely from her public utterances and published autobiographical writings. Perhaps she found it too painful to recall the rapture of Easter 1905 in light of the subsequent spiritual disquiet that troubled her later that year.

  Despite Muriel’s quest to construct her own “God is Love” theology around the loving doctrine of reconciliation, she could not always banish the sin-centered theology of Atonement. On Sunday, July 30, 1905, she confessed a “horrid thought—messenger from Satan?” “People are so wicked and ignore things so largely” that she “cd not trust myself to keep up heart and stake all on the certainty that I must conquer.” Her diary entries for this period burst with the rhetoric of sin and salvation that she had tried to reject as incompatible with God’s love. Doubts now confronted Muriel, she confessed to her diary, like “snares” and “tricks,” a vocabulary more redolent of John Bunyan than Leo Tolstoy. She longed for the wildfire spirit of Renewal, which had quickly gathered 100,000 Methodist converts in Wales that year, to light up England. (The Welsh Revival received substantial attention in the newspaper of the family’s Loughton Union Church and from its leaders.) Muriel’s public silence about this spiritual struggle may have reflected her inability to square her optimistic, love-saturated theology with dark anxieties about Satanic messages. There is no reason to ask or expect Muriel’s lived theology—or anyone else’s—to achieve logical consistency. Her “lived theology” was bound up in the unruliness of feelings and her struggle to beco
me a young woman and an ethical subject.

  By New Year’s Day 1906, Muriel found herself exhausted and dispirited. Doris remained maddeningly dependent on her. When Muriel dared to suggest that she wanted to sleep apart from her younger sister, Doris brooded all week and Muriel vowed to “cherish her” even more. Daily reminders to “adore Him first of all” had not stifled her need to please herself. She welcomed the New Year with a painful headache.61 It would take her the better part of the next decade, punctuated by several complete breakdowns, to regain the serenity of mind, body, and spirit that she had so briefly enjoyed during Easter 1905.

  FOUNDATIONAL FABLES, ETHICAL AWAKENING

  It was not only the strains of securing her “precious faith” that gave Muriel a headache. By late autumn 1905, her social and religious work in Bow had also run into difficulties. She had spoken against a fellow worker, Louie (Louisa Emily) Harris, a family friend through Loughton Union Church and the daughter of soap manufacturer Booth Harris. Muriel feared that she had “spoilt a friendship” along with her “enjoyment” of the “Bow Mission.” I’m not certain which of the many Nonconformist strongholds Muriel’s “Bow Mission” was. Was it a satellite of Peter Thompson’s Wesleyan East End Mission or William Lax’s Poplar and Bow Mission; or Reverend John Parry’s on Albert Terrace; or one of the many Night schools and girls’ clubs in Bow attached to the Factory Girls’ Helpers Union set up by the evangelical Lucy Guinness?62 Muriel never said. Some, like Peter Thompson’s “ministry of love” based upon “real fellowship with the people,” certainly harmonized with many of Muriel’s views.63 What’s remarkable is just how many there were, all cheek by jowl within a few blocks of one another. Reflecting on unspecified troubles at the Mission, Muriel upbraided herself for insufficient sympathy for weakness (presumably an unnamed friend’s) and prescribed more prayer for herself. Imlac’s wisdom in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas consoled her: “a new day succeeded to the night and sorrow is never long without a dawn of ease.” On top of all this, there was the daily challenge of balancing the claims of Bow with home duties at the Grange.64

  If Muriel kept absolutely quiet about her spiritual travails (except in her diaries), she never tired of talking about how she first fell in love with Bow and its people in 1902. On something of a lark, she accepted an invitation to a party at a factory girls’ club near Bow Church. (See fig. 3.4.) Her description verges on parody as she invokes one journalistic cliché after another about slums and slumming. She offers herself as the idle rich girl in search of “new sensations,” who finds fundamental truths about her life’s work and her world in the least likely of places. It is a fairy tale in reverse, a foundational fable of moral transformation whose heroine happily goes from riches to rags.65

  Muriel’s story chronologically bridges her pampered late-Victorian youth and her young womanhood as an Edwardian Christian radical. A story of social awakening, it is meant to explain her ethical transformation. In the version that she published in It Occurred to Me (1937), she “threads” her way down “narrow turnings” and through “murky streets” “ill lit by occasional gas lamps.” Muriel reminds her readers that everything she initially sees, thinks, smells, and feels in Bow is filtered through dense layers of images of the slums—remembered conversations, newspaper stories, pictures, and novels. With more than a slight hint of ironic disavowal, she introduces “the famous East End, in the public eye the disreputable haunt of thieves, drunks, and hooligans.”66 Read my story, she seems to say, if you want to get behind these superficial commonplaces to find deeper human truths.

  3.4. Bow Church sits on an island in the middle of Bow Road along with the controversial statue of William Gladstone erected by the owners of Bryant and May Match Factory. It was a major hub of Muriel’s political and philanthropic work. Bow Church, “Sunday in East London,” The Sunday at Home (1895), 388.

  It Occurred to Me attributes her earliest impressions of East London to disparaging comments made by Lester family household servants when she was a child entrusted to their care. As Muriel’s train passes on the tracks above Bow, her nostrils are assaulted by the dense acrid smell of the factory where bone manure was transformed into “sweet scented soap.” (This factory, Cook’s, would be Nellie’s last employers for whom she engaged in waged factory labor in 1909.) From the safety of her carriage, she “stared down at the rabbit-warren of unsavoury dwelling-houses, gardenless, sordid…. I could not believe they were human habitations.” She turns to the nurse accompanying her and inquires, “Do people live down there?” The nurse’s reply is “clear-sounding in my ears still: ‘Oh yes. Plenty of people live down there but you needn’t worry about them. They don’t mind it. They’re not like you. They enjoy it.’”67 Well into the twentieth century, some domestics did derive their sense of status and prestige from those they served, which allowed them to sharply differentiate themselves from the laboring poor.68

  Muriel’s version of this moment in her childhood echoed Victorian novelists’ depiction of servants as vigilant defenders of their masters’ and mistresses’ superior status and proxy for their own.69 Her story conscripts servants to do the dirty work of perpetuating racialized class prejudices. The nurse, not her parents, imagines the poor as an undifferentiated dehumanized collectivity inhabiting their own separate affective and sensory world. “They don’t mind it” means “they” are not “us.” They don’t even smell and feel the same things that we, who travel in first-class train carriages, smell and feel. Such claims short-circuit the power of empathy and identification, which propelled men and women of wealth to see the poor as their brothers and sisters. “They” flattens the social micro-geographies and status hierarchies within East London’s myriad neighborhoods and streets. The urban poor were acutely aware of the differences between the side of the street whose houses had bay windows and lace curtains and those less respectable households across the street that did not.70 They were never simply “they.”

  Lester’s vignette contrasts sharply with Virginia Woolf’s “utopian longing” for the servant-filled world of the nursery as a site of aboriginal freedom and creativity.71 The nursery may have functioned as a lost Eden in Woolf’s imagination—“in the beginning, there was the nursery” (The Waves)—but Muriel casts it as a site of the original sin of capitalism. Servants’ presence in the nursery insinuated wage relations and social inequality into the home. For all that Muriel came to reject domestic service as a socioeconomic institution, she did retain deep affection for the Lester family’s household servants. It Occurred to Me opens with an extended homage to Fanny Lilley, her nurse “of the old school” who lovingly sang and told stories to her. On some nights when Muriel was too tired to make the journey all the way back to Loughton, she stayed with Fanny, who in retirement apparently took her own flat in Stratford. If other upper-middle-class young “ladies” did this in Edwardian Britain, I have not found them.

  Of course, servants were never Muriel’s only source of knowledge about slums and slum dwellers. Serious and popular literature offered her a vast cultural repository of anxious prejudices. In “A Street” (first published in Macmillan’s, 1891), the Lesters’ near neighbor in Loughton, Arthur Morrison, satirized the many different “notions” of the East End circulating at the fin de siècle. For some, it was an “evil growth” hiding “human creeping things … where every citizen wears a black eye.” For others it was populated by a race of clay pipe-smoking, soap-despising unemployed; for still others, it was simply the place from which begging letters and unending appeals for charity emanated. For Morrison, it was an unlaughing place of daily struggles with croupy infants, grimy flowerpots, and bloaters. Cut off from the “outer world,” Morrison’s East Enders remained oblivious to the “rise and fall of nations.”72 They were all too aware of the material forces of hunger and deprivation. During the freezing cold winter of 1903 when Muriel first began to visit Bow regularly and unemployment spiked in East London, Morrison appealed to readers of the Daily Chronicle on behalf of h
onest poor women like Harriet and Nellie Dowell. “Looking 50 before they are 30,” they refused to clamor for relief or make a sensational spectacle of their suffering. “It is their pride to keep their trouble a secret.” Their bitter ironic reward for such self-reliant stoicism, Morrison declared, is to “go unrecognized” by those eager to help them.73

  A writer for All the Year Round distilled the late-Victorian dialectic of knowing and not knowing East London that Muriel strategically recycled in her autobiography. It was terra incognita for “multitudes who know nothing of that uttermost east which lies beyond the east of the City proper” and yet “we all have an idea of it, and, directly or indirectly, we all have business relations with it.” “Those of a better class who have lingered last and longest in the east,” the writer temptingly advised readers, enjoy “great compensations of a somewhat peculiar kind” in its “moral Sahara.” In this concatenation of orientalist tropes, East London is an empty desert whose occupants are implicitly likened to anti-domestic nomadic peoples. For this very reason, it promises unnamable “peculiar” pleasures for the well-to-do hardy enough to venture beyond the “City proper.” The writer coyly suggests that there is something “improper” about this city outside the City while gesturing at the entwined economies—“business relations”—that link East London with the rest of the metropolis. He concludes by contrasting two different ways to narrate East London. While the “abnormal and exaggerated yields the readiest and most picturesque material for the writer, yet perhaps deeper and more intense interest belongs to the simple annals of the poor, their constant struggle for existence….”74 Surface spectacle jostles with the anthropology of the ordinary as competing approaches to narrating the slum. If Muriel first came to East London in pursuit of “picturesque material” she soon threw herself into the distinctly mundane struggles of getting by in Bow.