The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  Muriel’s unsuccessful negotiations with the London Society clarified her priorities. Power struggles among members of the Executive Committee of the National Union and fighting among fellow feminists and suffrage campaigners in 1914–15 helped to make the erstwhile social investigator and Liverpool social worker, Eleanor Rathbone, into a savvy political operator. Rathbone learned “never to let an impossible ideal get in the way of an achievable good.”100 Based on the actions she took, Muriel seems to have taken away quite different lessons from her experience with feminist and suffrage politics in 1914–15. She deepened her commitment to the “impossible ideal” of bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. In the future, she sought alliances with people, organizations and movements that squarely shared her pacifist Christian ideals.

  If the prestige of the London Society’s glittering list of supporters and its experience with women’s clubs had initially lured Muriel, these assets had come at far too high a price. The impeccable philanthropic pedigrees of Kingsley Hall’s first two residents, May Hughes and Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, offered more than enough cachet to assure the benevolent public that the Lesters’ new scheme was trustworthy. Hughes and Waugh Hobhouse, like the Lesters, were fervent pacifists, socialists, and feminists. The daughter of the great public school reformer and novelist of muscular Christianity Thomas Hughes, May Hughes was a beloved figure in East London by the time she moved into her tiny room above Kingsley Hall in February 1915. The renown of her goodness and love for the people was so great that her offer to help, Muriel acknowledged, “set us free from every pang of anxiety.”101 Hughes literally took the clothes off her back and swapped them for the rags of her poor neighbors, to the consternation and sensitive nostrils of her closest friends. Rosa Waugh occupied the room just across the hallway from Hughes. Rosa may have been a penurious art educator attached to one of the London County Council’s evening recreation schools for poor children but her father Benjamin Waugh and brother-in-law William Clarke Hall were world-famous leaders of the child welfare movement. Muriel’s early speeches and press reports about Kingsley Hall invariably mentioned the distinguished lineage of the Hall’s first two residents. Such references signaled continuities between their Victorian philanthropic fathers and their daughters’ gentle but radical recasting of their paternal inheritances.

  Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence believed that the early-twentieth-century women’s movement marked the birth of a new religion. Not so for Muriel. Feminism was too riddled with internal conflicts, its leaders too willing to wage war against one another, to offer Muriel and Kingsley Hall a safe spiritual and political home. Nor had Muriel come to feminism seeking a new religion. She remained quite happy with the faith that she had never lost.

  RECONCILIATION AND CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION

  During World War I, pacifism occupied the center of Muriel’s faith while her faith served as the foundation of her pacifism.102 In the fraught summer of 1914, Muriel and Men’s Adult School members discussed and debated, line by line, the Sermon on the Mount. “It took us months to get through those three chapters [Matthew 5–7],” Muriel recalled, “so modern and revolutionary did they prove to be.”103 After August 4, Muriel defiantly refused to pronounce “a moratorium” on the Sermon on the Mount even as she witnessed, seemingly overnight, the disappearance of Britain’s vibrant culture of antiwar internationalism.104

  The Sermon on the Mount had immense implications for Muriel’s thinking about relations between men and women, rich and poor, white and black, metropole and colony, state and society, the community and the individual. Part of what made her such an effective platform speaker and leader was her sincere refusal to separate theory and practice, love and politics, stories about her life and stories about changing the world. Her experiences in wartime Bow propelled her toward increasingly radical ideas about revolutionary Christianity. At the same time, her exposure to and contact with Christian revolutionary thinkers associated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR)—Henry Hodgkin, Theodora Wilson Wilson, Wilfred Wellock and Bernard Walke—reshaped her daily life and Nellie’s at Kingsley Hall. What Muriel put together, her ideas about Christian revolution and her quotidian practices, I prize apart by analyzing Muriel’s immersion in Christian revolutionary ideas during and immediately after World War I. No doubt Nellie had her own ideas about Christian revolution, but the absence of surviving sources precludes analysis of them. The next section puts these ideas back into conversation with Nellie and Muriel’s activism and partnership in Bromley-by-Bow.

  The Sermon on the Mount, from its injunction that “whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” to its admonition that “Ye cannot serve God and mammon,” had long provided radicals with powerful arguments against the market-based logic of industrial capitalism in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Britain.105 John Ruskin, denouncer of mammon’s soul-destroying impact on modern workers, knew every word of it by heart because, he explained, it contained “the things that Christ thought necessary for all men to understand.”106 Tolstoy took the Sermon’s “Law of Love” as the basis for his entire religious and social program of redistributive economics, his rejection of war and militarism, and his doctrine of non-resistance in the face of evil. The Anglo-Catholic social critic G. K. Chesterton quipped that the Sermon was “sanity preached to a planet of lunatics,” a view Muriel enthusiastically endorsed.107 For both of them, the Sermon on the Mount was an ethical ideal and a guide to living in the world. Charles Gore, the influential Bishop of Birmingham and founder of the Christian Social Union, argued that the Sermon announced a “new social order,” which encapsulated the whole of the “moral law of the Kingdom of Heaven.”108 The Right Reverend Charles Stubbs, Liverpool’s clerical champion of democracy, imagined reorganizing his beloved city according to the Sermon’s lessons. Where Jesus told his followers to “Love your enemies,” political economists instructed theirs to “undersell your friends;” where Jesus enjoined, “resist not evil,” political economists advised striking first, “lest ye be struck or locked out.”109 (See fig. 5.7.)

  Like Stubbs, Muriel anticipated the day when political economy and “the philanthropical finance” of the Charity Organisation Society [COS] would give way to “humanitarian enthusiasms.”110 The last extant sentence of “From Birth to Death” bitterly recounts the COS’s heartless rejection of Harriet Dowell’s plea for help in the aftermath of Nellie’s catastrophic hospitalization in 1910. Its “philanthropical finances” were anathema to Muriel. There would be neither Poor Law nor Charity Organizers nor paupers in the world that Muriel and Nellie toiled to create.

  5.7. Charles Williams Stubbs, Christ and Economics, In the Light of the Sermon on the Mount (London, 1894), 64–65.

  No group of men and women thought more deeply about the implications of the Sermon on the Mount in wartime Britain or exerted a more powerful influence over the Lesters’ ideas about Christian revolution than the pan-denominational Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR). Doris and Muriel joined FoR committees in October 1915. Doris appeared as a founding member of the Educational Subcommittee of the FoR in the Minutes of Council for October 11–12, 1915 but she seems to have done very little with the group.111 Muriel joined Tom Attlee (brother of the future Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee) and Henry Hodgkin among others on the Social Service Committee. She tackled key tasks such as preparing leaflets about the labor conditions of wartime women’s work, which earned her a place on the General Committee by 1917.112 By the early 1920s, the London Union of the FoR was so closely connected to Muriel that its General Committee sometimes met at 60 Bruce Road or Kingsley Hall.113 From the 1930s through the ’50s, Muriel was the FoR’s global spokeswoman and “traveling Secretary.” By the time she retired to her modest cottage in Loughton on the edge of Epping Forest, she was, Vera Brittain asserted, the FoR’s “best known woman evangelist” who “habitually repudiated convention” while speaking in her soothing musical voice.114

  The Fellowship, founded in C
ambridge in late December 1914, traced its origins to feverish attempts by liberal Protestants to affirm their commitment to friendship, peace, and brotherhood in the summer of 1914.115 From August 1 to 3, a group of Christians from across Europe had met on the German-Swiss border in Konstanz for the World Churches Conference. Before boarding their trains to return to their respective homes, the Quaker leader of the Christian Student Movement in Britain, Henry Hodgkin, embraced Lutheran pastor and secretary of the Church Committee for Friendly Relations between Great Britain and Germany (Kirchliches Komitee zur Pflege freundschaftlicher Beziehungen zwischen Großbritannien und Deutschland), Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze. They declared their indivisible “oneness in Christ.” This gesture of manly amity was vital to how the Fellowship narrated its beginnings. It signaled the centrality of love in the Fellowship’s radical Christian politics and its defiance of the bellicose patriotism that demanded Germans and Britons face one another as enemies.116

  From the outset, the FoR proclaimed its goal “to establish a world-order based on love … and to take the risks involved in doing so in a world which does not as yet accept it.”117 Alienated by mainstream Protestant churches’ uncritical enthusiasm for war, the FoR’s founders felt called to “a life of service for the Enthronement of Love in personal, social, and national life.”118 Hodgkin, Richard Roberts and Lucy Gardner led members in prayer to forge a community, which shared their conviction that true Christianity was irreconcilable with war in all forms: the violence of everyday life in capitalist societies; the exploitation of native peoples in empire; and armed struggles on the battlefronts of World War I. Karl Marx, J. A. Hobson, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Vladimir Lenin among many others had connected the exploitation of workers at home to the extraction of resources and violence of imperial domination abroad.119 What was distinctive about the FoR as avatar of “The Christian International” was its attention to the micro-workings of power in daily life, its insistence on the religious foundations of revolution, and the rejection of force as a means to achieve its aims.

  Henry Hodgkin brilliantly analyzed the deforming dynamics of unequal power in everyday life, where it stealthily operated in the interstices of social relations. He admired the passionate energy of Christian idealists like Muriel but cautioned that it was unethical for them—and for him—to allow charisma and intellect to overawe others, even for their own good. “The type of forceful personality that makes the best propagandist” was, Hodgkin warned, “the very one which is most liable to fall into this cardinal error.” “Even if we avoid the more obvious danger of domination,” he continued, “we may convey a sense of superiority in our tones and gestures.”120 The risk of such acute reflexivity was that it would foster both self-critical awareness of the unintended effects of power and paralysis. Being a Christian revolutionary was hard work. It demanded striking a balance between monitoring one’s words and body language with the capacity to act decisively. The project of dismantling deference, Hodgkin knew, was always a two-way affair that required the consent of all parties involved. The rich and powerful could not simply divest themselves of their privileges because they wanted to. Nor would their good intentions bring about a Christian revolution. This required the active equal partnership and will of the poor and outcast.

  Muriel never acknowledged the dangers of such subtle, unintentional forms of “domination” as she reflected upon her relationship with Nellie and their mutual friends in Bow. Nellie did—though not in Hodgkin’s abstract language. She refused to be Muriel’s equal, I have argued, because she did not want to be. She loved Muriel at least partly because Muriel was so different from her.121 Muriel’s upper-class accent, word choices, and gestures always marked her social superiority in Bow, though this too she never acknowledged.

  From the moment she stepped onto Indian soil in 1926 en route to visit Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi in their respective ashrams, she was oppressively aware of how her status as a well-to-do white Englishwoman trapped her within a matrix of colonial inequality. Muriel echoed Hodgkin in recognizing that even minutely small gestures contained within them and reproduced the whole bitter legacy of empire. The “low bow of the grave faced Hindu” was the Janus face of the “imperious snatch—a quick, jerky action that is quite unmistakable—of the English master without a word of thanks.”122 Indians’ reverential devotion to their English masters was little more than a mask, a survival strategy to avoid hard swift kicks. “I tried to explain to them [Indians] that I was not their master—but [the village headman] insisted I was, and was right.” In one of those many moments when Muriel ruthlessly dissected her own ideas and actions, she confessed to Doris, “I am [their master], so are you and we are responsible—it is awful.”123 Race in India made painfully visible to Muriel what class in Bow did not. Even the most zealous commitment to Christian revolutionary principles in her personal dealings with others could not undo deep histories of exploitation.

  Coming from a wide range of religious and political positions, FoR members never attempted to paper over their disagreements. Instead, they sought common ground that celebrated difference while allowing them to work corporately to achieve their goals. “Undifferentiated cosmopolitanism” aspired to an unhealthy universalism that obliterated the “treasures” of difference, Hodgkin contended. The FoR’s approach to difference lay at the heart of “reconciliation” as a tool for resolving conflicts between individuals, peoples, and nations alike. Reconciliation was, Hodgkin explained, rooted in a “passion for harmony.”124 It was, like Christian Revolution, a method as well as a way of thinking, living, and feeling. It was never a fixed destination. Retribution, reparations, and retaliation between individuals and warring nations had no place in this method of peacemaking. Muriel and other FoR leaders decoupled the process of reconciliation from acceptance of blame and apology: one freely forgave perpetrators before and without their acknowledgment of their wrongdoing. For the Welsh Methodist minister Richard Roberts, who came up with the name Fellowship of Reconciliation, reconciliation was nothing less than the art and practice of turning enemies into friends.125

  The FoR posed big and truly important questions about God, humanity, and the world. It also allowed itself to get bogged down in arcane fine points that got in the way of effective action. Even practical thinkers like FoR members Lilian Stevenson and Maude Royden found themselves caught up debating whether “moral indignation” fostered an “attitude of condemning others” rather than openness to working with others to overcome disagreements. Meetings regularly stretched over several days with Quakerly silences occasionally interrupting the intense flow of animated talk. It’s hardly surprising that the General Committee failed to recruit even one “working class member” to join its ranks.126 What laboring man or woman could afford to give up two days of work to ponder (as the future Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, did in March 1915) whether something could be called a “compromise” if it had been “involuntarily” imposed?127 The atmosphere at FoR meetings was so rarified that one of its most heterodox members, Reverend Stanley James, longed for the appearance among them of “a sweaty, mud-stained and foul-mouthed soldier from the Front.”128 Such a man would not have ruffled Muriel. Plenty of them lived around her, Doris and Nellie in Bromley-by-Bow. It’s hard to imagine how Muriel summoned the patience—and found the time—for these gatherings. We know that she did, even during her protracted nervous breakdown of 1916–17.

  Muriel’s work with the FoR brought her into close contact with ever-widening circles of thinkers who critiqued and reconceptualized Europe’s and Britain’s place in the world. Hodgkin’s writings about Christian revolution, for example, generously cited past and present poets and religious leaders from around the globe. By so doing, he textually enacted his plea to transcend the borders dividing people from one another. Lay Religion (1918) opened with Hodgkin’s homage to the “great sages” of China; it moved deftly from Evelyn Underhill’s “regulative principle of love” to Rabindrana
th Tagore’s image of “white robed simplicity” in his poem, “Nationalism,” to Keshab Chandra Sen, leader of the Brahma Samaj, on Christ’s combination of supreme meekness, truth telling and fearlessness in the face of death.129 In Hodgkin’s hands, quotation performed global fellowship. This was a technique Muriel often borrowed in her programs and services at Kingsley Hall, which liberally included writings from many different traditions.

  The global dimensions of the war spurred some of its keenest opponents, including Muriel, to conceptualize “world citizenship” as a stimulus to and necessary corollary of Christian revolution. The group of men and women associated with the publication of the radical pacifist paper the New Crusader—renamed the Crusader when its first editor was jailed—offered Muriel a far-reaching analysis of global war, global capitalism, and imperialism. (See fig. 5.8.) There were substantial overlaps in personnel and ideas between Britain’s various pacifist, antiwar, and anti-conscription groups.130 The restless former cowboy and Welsh Methodist minister Stanley James worked very closely with Muriel on the Social Service Committee of the FoR. At the same time, he wrote regular columns for the New Crusader and supported Kingsley Hall.131