by Seth Koven
It’s not possible to reconstruct precisely Muriel’s movements in 1910 when Nellie fell into a catatonic stupor. However, it’s hard not to ask: where was she when Nellie needed her the most? Muriel probably knew nothing about Nellie’s troubles that March because she spent so much of the year far from London. She and her parents made pilgrimage via Egypt to the Holy Land, where Muriel witnessed the “shameful” degradation of Christendom’s holiest sites under the “scornful” supervision of bayonet-wielding Ottoman guards and bickering Christians paralyzed by sectarian rivalry. In Nellie’s first surviving letter to Muriel, she looked forward to hearing tales about Muriel’s adventures in “Egypt.” The Lesters then enjoyed several months in Mentone, a favorite destination of sun-seeking English tourists perched high above the Mediterranean in the Alpes Maritimes.49 Doris, ever dutiful, stayed behind in a rented room in Bow to look after their many joint enterprises: the Mothers’ Meeting at Bruce Road Congregational Church, the nonsectarian Factory Girls’ Club, and their Graded Sunday school classes in Bow and Loughton.
En route home from the continent, Muriel met a Christian Scientist “lady” who extolled the restorative powers of ten quiet minutes of daily meditative prayer and urged her to read “Mrs. Eddy’s book,” presumably her best seller Science and Health with the Key to Scriptures first published in 1875. (In an unpublished draft, she specifies that the meeting took place in April—placing her on the continent during Nellie’s hospitalization.)50 The lady Christian Scientist deeply impressed upon Muriel that “Christians had no business to be weary, weak or miserable.” “As though to test me,” Muriel recalled years later, “a noxious germ settled in my throat on arrival in Paris. I wrestled with myself, refusing to give it even the hospitality of buying gargle or lozenges. It was hard work for a day and half, and then all was well…. Jesus relied with confidence upon God’s cooperation in overcoming disease. This is a law of nature that we haven’t yet learnt.”51 Here, Muriel offers a version of “hard work” dependent on inward discipline and stillness. It functions as an antidote to the ravages caused by the hard work of external doings even as it allows her, as a Christian, to engage the world more vigorously and efficaciously.
What “law of nature” had she learned from Christian Science? The flamboyantly prim, much-married Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy had cut a large path across Victorian America. In language soaked in Manichean imagery of light and dark, she promised to free men and women from the fetters of their physical bodies and the crude dominion of matter over spirit. There was a lot about Eddy’s theological idiom to attract Muriel. First of all, it was woman friendly. Eddy paraphrased and rewrote the Lord’s Prayer to acknowledge God’s male and female qualities: “Our Father which art in Heaven” in her hands became “Our Father-Mother, all-harmonious.”52 (Her critics cynically suggested that this revision encouraged her followers to worship her as the mother-god.)53 Second, Eddy promulgated her own version of “God is Love” theology. In her chapter on “Prayer,” she emphasized the fullness and perfection of God’s love: “Jesus aided in reconciling man to God by giving man a truer sense of Love, the divine Principle of Jesus’s teachings, and this truer sense of Love redeems man from the law of matter, sin, and death by the law of Spirit,—the law of divine Love.”54 She also challenged the entire apparatus of allopathic medicine, then consolidating its authority over a range of alternative practices, including homeopathy. Faith and prayer, not drugs, provided all that was necessary to heal the sick. Illness was merely a construct of human consciousness that had failed properly to welcome God’s love: “Everything is as real as you make it,” Eddy explained. “By knowing the unreality of disease, sin and death you demonstrate the allness of God.”55
The same year that Muriel met her lady Christian Scientist on board the Mentone-to-Paris train, Oxford’s Regius Professor of Medicine Sir William Osler offered an astute analysis of Mrs. Eddy’s claims and cures. Christian Science expressed the revolt against materialism and the drug-saturated bodies of modern life. Its protest was a welcome sign of youthful vitality. But it was also a “chaotic mass of rubbish.” Mrs. Eddy’s denial of the reality of disease and pain was “monstrously puerile” and more than a bit “comic.” As another acerbic critic remarked, Christian Science recommended that the best way to treat a “severed artery” was to “argu[e] with it like a congressman.”56 It posed real dangers to credulous seekers after its spiritual pabulum. Cynical detractors suggested that Christian Science owed its success in America and, to a lesser extent in Britain, to the surfeit of dyspeptics and neurasthenics for whom its spiritual healing was just the right sort of medicine. Its votaries were “idle women with money to spend” suffering from the overpressured, overstimulated “mental life” of the modern metropolis.57 Sir William Osler acknowledged that Christian Science did in fact sometimes work wonders for those afflicted by “functional disorders” such as shattered nerves rather than “organic ones” like cancer. It gave them generous doses of optimism and freedom from the unrest of their daily rounds. Psychology, not physiology, subsidized the success of this new and dangerous “cult” among bourgeois women negotiating the challenges of modern life.58
Christian Science had established a beachhead in Britain in 1896, when Mrs. Eddy sent her disciple, Pastor Julia King-Field, to lead its first London congregation. By the time its impressive Byzantine-styled Portland stone building on fashionable Sloan Terrace had opened its doors in 1909, the movement had already splintered. Spiritual questers often don’t make obedient followers. Many bridled against Mrs. Eddy’s demands for complete doctrinal conformity. One offshoot of Christian Science was the Higher Thought Centre near High Street, Kensington, under the “inspired espionage” and “selfless service” of Mrs. Alice Callow.59 Its guiding principles took self-help and positive thinking to one logical endpoint: “Man controls circumstances, instead of being controlled by them” because of the “absolute oneness” joining Creator and Creation.60 Its roster of speakers suggests its hospitality to religious, gender, and sexual heterodoxy: it included Brotherhood Church leader J. Bruce Wallace, founding member of the Fellowship of the New Life, Edith Lees Ellis, and the homosexual Simple Life socialist, Edward Carpenter. It was these same activists whose ideals informed Muriel’s “God is Love” theology and daily life at Kingsley Hall. By 1910, the Higher Thought Centre had formed its own suffrage organization that used “silence” as its main weapon. Here was one suffrage organization whose members could not easily be caricatured as shrieking hysterics.
Muriel seems to have extracted from Christian Science its axiomatic belief that allopathic medicine more often than not produced illness rather than cured it. She equated “lozenges and gargle” with the spiritually bankrupt and physically harmful world of commodified medicine.61 Soon after returning home, she used prayer to call upon what she called “the Creative Spirit” to “put to route” a disease afflicting a small boy whom she knew. God was a source of “confidence” and “positive ‘certain-sureness’” for Muriel; she would not see the boy’s illness as God’s “will.”62
It wasn’t just an isolated sore throat or an unnamed boy’s illness that made Muriel pay attention to Mrs. Eddy’s message. Muriel’s precarious health and that of the people around her whom she most loved opened her up to new ideas about the body, illness, and God. Muriel no longer inhabited her body with the self-confident ease of the robust hockey-playing graduate of St. Leonard’s. The balancing act between the two worlds of Loughton and Bow, of socialite and social worker, took a much heavier toll on Muriel than Doris. Doris, shy and uncomfortable with the limelight, never felt the tug and attractions of upper-middle-class sociability. Muriel did. Disgusted equally with herself and the glassy-eyed gamblers she met in Monte Carlo’s casinos in 1913, Muriel lectured fellow guests at her Riviera hotel about the lives of “her” Bow factory girls.63 (Nellie must have been the heroine of her story that evening; by that time, Nellie and her mother Harriet had moved next door to the Lesters on Bruce Road.) Muriel’s
tone is hard to gauge. Did she in hindsight recognize just how overwrought and absurd it was for her to scold the selfish rich and preach solidarity with London factory girls amid the cosseted luxury of their—and her own—Riviera hotel? Perhaps that was her point. In any case, the vignette hints at her growing instability of mind and body and her need to clarify her priorities.
The conspicuous failure of allopathic medicine to heal Nellie and her brother Kingsley must have further accentuated her growing doubts about its efficacy. When she returned from the Continent in the spring of 1910, she immediately faced the aftermath of Nellie’s devastating encounter with London Hospital’s pharmacopeia of pain-relieving, mind-altering drugs. The next year, Kingsley suffered a severe medical crisis. After graduating in 1909 with a First in Chemistry Part II from Caius College, Cambridge, he and Muriel briefly shared a flat in Hampstead.64 (See fig. 4.7.) While training for the Baptist ministry in 1910–11, he underwent surgery for appendicitis. It left him prone to debilitating illness. The Lesters organized their family life around finding resorts and sanitaria—in the English countryside and on the Continent—to prop him up. When he was well, Kingsley regularly joined Doris, Muriel, and Nellie in Bow. His easy humor and love of pranks charmed their friends on Bruce Road, including Nellie. She fretted about Kingsley’s health because she liked him and because his illnesses so often took her beloved Muriel away from her and Bow. “I can’t help sitting thinking of you going so far at away from me,” Nellie confessed as Muriel and Kingsley fled dreary London in late 1912. Adopting a stoic stance, she continued, “but never mind its all for a good purpose bring Mr. Kingsley home quite well & strong….” This proved an elusive goal.65
Muriel’s anxieties about Kingsley’s health exacerbated her own “nerves.” His death in September 1914 was one of the defining traumas of his sisters’ lives despite—and perhaps because of—the family’s decision to cast aside the outward conventions of black crepe and darkened windows. With steadfast good cheer, the Lesters were determined to celebrate his life rather than mourn his loss.66 Whether this gave Muriel or Doris sufficient scope to grieve is hard to say. His death triggered an exponential increase in his sisters’ activities and obligations in Bow, as if they could transform his loss into their good works. Muriel invested his short life with a youthful aura of sweetness, generosity, and promise.67 The family created an elaborate mythology about discovering a note among Kingsley’s papers, which left all of his money to Doris and Muriel in support of their philanthropic work. The magazine of his old public school, Mill Hill, suggests this was not entirely true. The December 1914 number of Mill Hill Magazine reported that a paper was found among Kingsley effects “expressing his wish that 100 guineas be left to the Mill Hill games committee.”68 Nellie, their neighborhood friends, along with “boys” from the Loughton Union Sunday school, Ben Platten and George Bowtle, helped the Lesters tear down the upper-story wall separating their small home at 60 Bruce Road from Nellie’s next door at 58. They christened the new space “Kingsley Rooms” to commemorate the memory of Kingsley’s “altruistic” life. It was also a constant reminder of his death.
By late December, Muriel and Doris accepted their father’s challenge to refurbish an abandoned hellfire Baptist Chapel around the corner from Bruce Road and turn it into the first Kingsley Hall—a triumph of a loving God over a punishing one. Muriel immediately threw herself into thorny negotiations with the London Society for Women’s Suffrage about who would cover the costs of launching a suffrage restaurant for wives of soldiers and sailors and women war workers from nearby Pearse’s Army Factory and Anderson’s Water-proof Factory. By January 9, 1915, Muriel had succumbed to the pressure. Her correspondence with the Society continued unabated, but she had checked herself into Huntley’s Health and Pleasure Resort.
Huntley’s was an elegant hydropathic retreat in Bishop’s Teignton, Devon long favored by progressive Nonconformists, including the Lesters.69 (See fig. 4.8.) Muriel had spent many months there with Kingsley between 1912 and 1914 during his frequent illnesses and had thrown herself into religiously based charitable work in the community.70 Muriel must have overcome her growing scruples about the booming commercial health economy of spas, mineral waters, and curative baths. Huntley’s menu of services included Turkish, hot and cold baths; massages; galvanic stimulation; and a simple “restorative” diet consumed in a stunning setting overlooking the Teign estuary.71 This pampering failed to reinvigorate Muriel. By January 23, with Kingsley Hall’s opening less than three weeks away, she moved to another hotel, Erin Hall in Torquay, a haven for invalids and semi-invalids seeking restorative sea breezes.72 Remarkably, neither Muriel nor Doris ever wrote a single word about Muriel’s deteriorating health, much less her absence from Bow during the crucial weeks before the opening of Kingsley Hall. Not for the first or last time, Doris along with Nellie and their circle of friends must have taken over many of Muriel’s jobs.
Muriel’s divided life, Nellie’s hospitalization, Kingsley’s illness and death, and the pressure of her growing public obligations in Bow contributed to her deteriorating mental and physical condition in the years between 1910 and her breakdown in 1916–17. To add to Muriel’s woes, her father survived a serious illness while her mother’s angina worsened in 1915. One calamity seemed to follow another. Her socialist, pacifist, and feminist politics in wartime Britain, examined much more fully in the next chapter, provoked suspicion, anger, and sometimes violent assaults on her person and her reputation. These tense years severely tested her commitment—and Nellie’s—to loving neighbors who did not love them.
Muriel’s “God is Love” theology, along with her engagement with Tolstoyans and vegetarians in the first decade of the twentieth century had already brought her into close contact with a range of religious and ethical traditions far outside mainstream Nonconformity. All of these factors encouraged her to explore early-twentieth-century Britain’s flourishing pluralistic culture of medical, spiritual, and healing practices. This was a contentious domain. Allopathic doctors, hospitals, and medical schools discredited and disparaged their many rivals. And devotees of various forms of divine healing overlooked what they shared in common, the better to viciously attack one another.73 At the same time, it was a moment of great fluidity that made it easy for Muriel to borrow from many different traditions in forging her own approach to faith, spirituality, the body, and health.
4.7. Kingsley Lester’s precarious health preoccupied the entire Lester family. After his death in 1914, his sisters opened Kingsley Rooms and Kingsley Hall to commemorate his altruistic life and their love of him. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)
4.8. The Bishop’s Teignton Hydropathic resort was a well-appointed sanatorium favored by the Lesters and many other wealthy Nonconformists. Huntley’s, Bishop’s Teignton Hydropathic. (Postcard in author’s possession.)
MURIEL LESTER’S SPIRITUAL THERAPEUTICS
If religious modernism and evangelical missionary Protestantism framed Muriel’s religious life in the first decade of the twentieth century, Christian mysticism and faith-healing traditions in dialogue with Eastern “spirituality” and German naturopathy shaped how she cared for her mind, body, and spirit during the next several decades. The powerful currents of late-nineteenth-century secular modernity strengthened the movement toward a world characterized by disenchantment, bureaucratic efficiency, and scientific rationality. But this is only part of the story. The new century also gave abundant signs of a spiritual renaissance buoyed by revived interest in magic and mysticism, faith and feeling.74 Muriel borrowed the phrase “The Renascence of Wonder” to characterize moments of childlike joy that she believed were essential antidotes to the soul-deadening mechanized routines of adult life in the modern world.75 World War I’s industrialized mass violence heightened the ostensibly anti-modern tendencies of modernity by fueling interest in paranormal religious-psychic phenomena.76 To cope with the irrationality of the war’s indiscriminate carnage and the loss of his own soldier-s
on Kingsley, Britain’s beloved master of ratiocination, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publicly affirmed his longstanding attraction to Spiritualism. So too did many others. Theirs was a grief that refused to accept the finality of death. The unquiet war dead seemed only too happy to converse with the living.77
Christian Science and its eccentric offshoots were only one among many sources of Muriel’s evolving spiritual therapeutics. The more complicated her own life felt, the more she was drawn to Christian apostles of simplicity. She turned to Robert Hugh Benson’s queer novel, Richard Raynal, The Solitary (1904) about an androgynously beautiful fifteenth-century mystic and ascetic contemplative, who espouses simplicity and silence in making himself a vessel for God’s message.78 The seventeenth-century lay Carmelite kitchen worker from Lorraine, Brother Lawrence, helped Muriel reconceptualize the relationship between the body, illness, prayer, and spirituality.79 His Catholicism proved no impediment to his popularity in early twentieth-century Britain. Perhaps it was his emphasis on the disciplined hard work involved in opening one’s heart to God’s presence, in disavowing worldliness, that paradoxically appealed to the Protestant strivings of women and men like Muriel. His maxims as well as his conversations and letters (published as The Practice of the Presence of God) circulated widely in cheap editions like the 6d “New Heart and Life Booklets” published in “artistic wrappers” by H. R. Allenson and available in English and Esperanto. Lawrence offered homely advice about how he brought God’s loving presence into every moment of his life by emptying his heart so God could fill and possess it. His was emphatically a lived, felt, embodied theology of the everyday. Being with God required neither church nor chapel since God could be found from within.