The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  The signatory who most egregiously violated the spirit of their Christian revolutionary vow was Stanley James. A man of roving ways and unsettled religious convictions, he had been a cowboy in the Canadian Rockies and a rail-riding hobo in the American West. When he returned to Britain, he assumed his father’s Methodist pulpit in Wales, married, and started a family. He eventually drifted to London, apparently without his wife and children, where he worked for the FoR, sometimes edited The Crusader and delivered stirring pacifist socialist sermons to his Nonconformist Walthamstow congregation. He also grotesquely abused his ministerial authority to seduce idealistic vulnerable female congregants.

  The diaries and letters of three lower-middle-class women, Ruth Slate, Eva Slawson, and Minna Simmons, record in painful graphic detail how James preached from his pulpit the “religion of love which must unite all” while using a small private room in the church to have sex with some of them. “He [Stanley James] came to see me. We had a most lovely talk. We had been to Maude Royden’s meeting and it had been the means of one of those soul talks,” Minna Simmons confided to Ruth Slater in July 1916. Had Maude Royden’s lecture combined discussion of pacifist feminist antiwar work along with one of her frank chats about women’s healthy sexual desire when expressed in monogamous marriage? Perhaps, but Minna did not say. In any case, Stanley James used this opening to turn discussion of God’s love into his own lovemaking with her.

  Well dear we went into the front room alone and he kissed me, opened my dress and kissed my breasts too, and he said how he felt I was his. He was just going away when he came back and pleaded with me dear to give him everything a woman can give a man. I told him I was sure we should regret it but no dear anything that would make me his. ‘Well dear, I did.’ The tears I have shed have quite washed away any wrong I did.

  Tragically, Minna felt no rage at James, whom she eventually dismissed as an incorrigible “serial dipper.” Instead, she directed her fury at herself for loving James while she sought to shift the terms of their relationship to a higher non-physical spiritual plane. James apparently expressed no remorse for what he had done to her. He had more than lived up to one of his favorite pen names, “The Tramp.”216 Completely unaware of James’s despicable behavior, Muriel publicly extolled his “great work” to reporters eager to learn more about each of the signatories.217

  The 1921 Voluntary Poverty manifesto set the stage for Muriel’s even better-publicized refusal to accept her share of Henry Lester’s wealth at the time of his death in 1927. (Henry left an estate worth £62,000, a considerable fortune; he may well have spent at least that much keeping Muriel and Doris in poverty and supporting their various causes.) This was the moment that Muriel most fully colluded with the press to make herself appear to be an heiress, albeit for the sole purpose of drawing attention to her critique of capitalist wealth.

  The October 17, 1927 headline of the Daily Chronicle trumpeted “Rejected Legacy,” which told a romantic story about the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, Muriel Lester, who had “rejected” the £400 per annum inheritance her father had left her. (See fig. 5.12.) Muriel spoke before a crowd of Bow people whom she had gathered by circulating an open notice to the women of Bow that she intended to return their money by creating a “Restitution Fund.” She deftly played the part of anti-celebrity media darling who performed her own selflessness for the good of Poplar.

  ‘You know that my father made most of his money in East London,’ she said. ‘He got on very well with the workmen, but as they made the money I felt that the annuity of £400 a year which he left me ought to go back to the workpeople. However, I cannot find the people who made the money. So I decided that it should go to the people of Poplar and you have to decide what is to be done with it.’218

  With the advice of the Christian socialist author of The Acquisitive Society (1920) R. H. Tawney, Muriel handed over her money to a trust run by and for her neighbors.219 A group of local residents, mostly women, decided to subsidize “home helps” to mothers before and after childbirth.220 Inherited wealth was “outworn, cumbersome, unsporting and unchristian,” Muriel jauntily informed an interviewer.

  Her gesture was political argument and action. It was a deft ethical maneuver that allowed her to negotiate the tensions between her roles as loving late-Victorian daughter and twentieth-century Christian revolutionary modern woman. The Daily Chronicle summed it pithily: “Refused £400 a year legacy and now scrubs floors.”221 It also allowed Muriel to articulate a version of what today we might call “restorative justice” as a supplement to her commitment to the radical redistribution of resources. She was not giving money to anyone: she was returning it to those who had produced it in the first place. It is also an early example of creating a “restitution” fund as a way to rectify past injustices in the absence of a clearly identifiable injured party.222 Because Muriel could not find the individual men and women whose labors had created her father’s fortune, she returned to their community that which should have been theirs.

  5.12. This double portrait photograph captures Henry and Muriel’s mutually supportive and loving relationship. Dressed like a 1920s’ anti-flapper in monastic sackcloth fabric with a simple belt, Muriel looks reverentially at Henry Lester who reads an illustrated daily newspaper. “Henry Edward Lester and daughter Muriel,” Lester/6/6, Lester Papers. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)

  Muriel’s “rejected legacy” became part of an enduring mythology about her as the selfless English heiress who by the 1930s had become a “saint, a modern Joan of Arc” crusading around the world “for the Sermon on the Mount.”223 The Los Angeles Times’s church editor James Warnack contemplated history’s highest exemplars of moral virtue and spiritual leadership, the sources of “the real power and progress of civilization.” “The Nazarene was such a man and so was St. Paul, St. Francis and Spinoza—and, further back, Gautama Buddha, Krishna, Confucius and other sages.” These were predictable, perhaps even inevitable, choices. When he turned to the modern world, he found several “great ones” worthy of their predecessors: Gandhi, Kagawa, and Albert Schweitzer—“yes, and Muriel Lester and Evangeline Booth.”224 This was the extraordinary company that Muriel Lester kept in 1936, at least for her far-flung admirers.

  Nellie did not live to see Muriel disinherit herself or attain global renown. By war’s end, the physical boundaries of Nellie’s world grew smaller as her health worsened. She played no part in Muriel’s marches and protests from 1918 onward; nor did she contribute any more articles for Kingsley Hall’s annual reports. In one undated Christmas letter to Muriel, she asked her to “excuse this scribble & shaky hand its heart is on its hook”—a humorous expression she used to describe the chest pains that dogged her footsteps and kept her close to 58–60 Bruce Road. “During these constant and terrible attacks one could not sit up with her, hour after hour,” Muriel recalled, “without realising that in Nell one saw a type of the dispossessed, suffering their age long oppression at the hands of an acquisitive society.”225

  This was not how Nellie saw herself, Muriel acknowledged. Even at such times, Nellie’s wit remained as expansive as ever. She was amused by the postman’s struggle to decipher May Hughes’s funny handwriting as he delivered a letter addressed to “Nellikin.” “Miss Hughes” was, Nellie decided, “one of the best true as steel, never mind.” Nellie even made light of wartime food shortages that tested her ingenuity to produce good meals: “Good bye God bless you all my old friends have a lobster for a change.”226

  In December 1922, Nellie sent Muriel her last letter, a Christmas greeting. (See fig. 5.13.) Despite its brevity, Nellie’s note is a rhetorically and emotionally complex piece of writing. It opened with her usual wit and dexterity. “A real live gentleman sent me 3£ to do what I like,” she told Muriel, “so I hand you one to do what you like.” Nellie’s humor quickly gave way to an uncharacteristic air of exhaustion and sadness at her uselessness. It wasn’t just that she felt unworthy of such a large gift, “I don’
t deserve & I know it.” She also felt “I am no good for anything in your line.” Physically incapable of withstanding the rigors of factory labor after leaving London Hospital and the Whitechapel Lunatic Ward in March 1910, Nellie had become Muriel’s partner in the everyday work of Christian revolution. Twelve years later, that too she could do no longer. “Even you only love me and keep me it’s quite enough to know that. Nell.” The blotted overwriting on the page suggests that Nellie struggled with the word “love.” It appears that she also wrote the word “like”—uncertain which sentiment most accurately captured Muriel’s feelings for her in her diminished condition. Her terse closing indicated unusual reserve, nothing like the long effusive final salutations of her previous letters.

  5.13. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, Christmas 1922, Nellie Dowell Letters, Lester Papers. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)

  Muriel publicly offered the Kingsley Hall community a highly edited rosy version of this letter that erased the psychological demands it made on her.

  Nell was superlatively human, and steel strong in her likes and dislikes. She had a genius for always being on the spot when needed, an instinct for knowing how to make people comfortable even in the presence of her mortal pain. Her generosity was staggering. One Christmas, a pound note arrived for the children’s work; a pound note from Nell—it was like the gift of a thousand pounds from another.

  Muriel needed Nellie, or perhaps more aptly, her final memories of her, to be a source of light, humor, wisdom, and courage as she faced the world without her. As with her brother Kingsley’s death, Muriel did not mourn because Nellie had “entered into fuller life.”227

  A few weeks after penning her Christmas message, Nellie was admitted to the very same hospital—the Poplar and Stepney Poor Law Sick Asylum renamed St. Andrews—to which Harriet Dowell had taken her when chorea first struck her in 1890. She stayed nine days before returning home to 58 Bruce Road on January 26.228 She died there on January 31, 1923.

  No medical case files survive for St. Andrews from this period. Muriel could not bear to narrate Nellie’s final encounter with the medical establishment that had so singularly failed her. She used words to articulate feelings beyond the power of words themselves. All she would say was that Nellie’s final experience of institutionalization was so bad that “it is recorded in another place,” by which Muriel presumably meant in Heaven. It was not lost on Muriel that the Poor Law had outlived Nellie Dowell, her “dearest friend and neighbor,” so cruelly buffeted by its inhumanity. Much had changed in the provision of poor relief, medical care, and social welfare since the early 1880s, in no small measure because of the political and affective labors of men and women like George Lansbury, Muriel Lester, and Nellie Dowell. But not enough.

  5.14. Muriel Lester, “The Salt of the Earth,” 8th Annual Report, Kingsley Hall (1923), 15.

  Muriel probably sat down to draft her biographical sketch of Nellie, “From Birth to Death,” soon after Nellie’s death. She incorporated many passages of “From Birth to Death” into her only published account of Nellie’s life, “The Salt of the Earth.” (See fig. 5.14.) This was a very well-chosen title. For Christian revolutionaries, to be the Salt of the Earth was to live the exalted ideals of the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” (Matthew 5:13). Reverend Richard Roberts, Muriel’s FoR friend and colleague, glossed the meaning of this famous phrase. “Men who are salt” have “achieved a definite Christian personality,” he argued. “The business of the Church in the world is the manufacture of salt, the creation of moral personality.” Only such people had the “grace and the power” to “arrest and destroy the principle of self-regard and degeneration….”229 Muriel inscribed Nellie as the embodiment of the Sermon on the Mount, God’s words made flesh.

  For so much of Nellie’s life, Poor Law officials and medical doctors made her into a “case,” to be helped, studied, disciplined, and managed. This Muriel would not do. She drew upon a much older literary genre, the exempla, which served religious writers as an “example” and “an illustrative story.”230 If Nellie’s letters are the most full-bodied loving documents in Muriel’s vast archive, “The Salt of the Earth” is the most full-bodied loving essay Muriel ever wrote. In offering these judgments, I can’t pretend to hide behind the mask of historical objectivity. In telling their story, I have argued that part of what makes their entwined histories so compelling is how they always connected politics and feelings; head and heart; mind, body, and spirit.

  CONCLUSIONS

  The Great War must be counted among the most decisive and dramatic ruptures in British history. For many, it was no less than the midwife of modernity and its aftermath merely a continuation of war-by-other-means. In imagining what a reconstructed postwar Britain might become, Muriel, Doris, Nellie, and their Kingsley Hall friends used mundane practices to unmake and remake the late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropic legacy they inherited. Violence, trauma, fragmentation, loss are the familiar keywords in how men and women in the 1920s and ’30s—and subsequent historians—have characterized the shift from so-called Victorian to modern values. Since 1924, Virginia Woolf has trained us to listen for the sound of “breaking and falling, crashing and destruction” “in or about December 1910” when, she insists, “character changed.”231 Others use no less violent language but insist that the Great War extinguished Victorian liberalism. War’s carnage, we are told, produced a decade of escapist long weekends and violent “aftershocks.” Britain demonized and brutalized outsiders—Jews, women, Indian nationalists, trade unionists—as impediments to making whole the fragmented national body.232

  Without disputing the cogency of such interpretations, I have elucidated their dialectical alter ego.233 Muriel and Nellie’s friendship and their shared labors at Kingsley Hall underscore the gradual evolution of and continuity in social action from the 1880s to the 1930s, a sensibility of inclusive hospitality to outsiders, and the emergence of a “peaceable” postwar consensus animated by Christian values and politics.234

  Religion at Christian revolutionary Kingsley Hall admitted no division between the damned and the saved, the true convert and the false witness. Muriel articulated the far-reaching inclusivity that flowed from her understanding of God’s love in a moment of piqued annoyance at her own—and others’—failure to live a fully Christian life. “If there is one person in Number Sixty [Bruce Road] whom we feel we can’t love,” she admonished, “to that extent Christ is failing. He is reviled, neglected, forsaken, unloved, rejected of men and crucified again every time we let one person remain outside the circle of our heart’s love.”235 Secreted in the very heart of Muriel’s revolutionary Christianity was a God so loving that He embraced and loved everyone: Catholic and Protestant, Jew, Muslim, and Hindu; rich and poor; black and white; and even those who questioned or denied His existence. What Muriel did not and could not see is that the refusal to exclude was—and is—not the same as compelling everyone to be included. This distinction eluded her self-critical field of vision.

  For Muriel, Nellie’s life enacted the Sermon on the Mount’s revolutionary message of love. Nellie’s last written words in her final letter to Muriel testify to the transformative power of this love while subtly asking Muriel to accept its limits. “You only love me and keep me it’s quite enough to know that. Nell.” The phrase that jolts is “keep me,” and all that it implied about Nellie’s deepest desire to be Muriel’s and, perhaps, her economic dependence on Muriel. During the last years of Nellie’s life, Muriel had done everything she could to free herself from possessions and possessiveness as a way to enact Christian revolution in her personal life. Determined to distance herself from the philanthropic gift economy of the Victorian Lady Bountiful, Muriel wanted to believe that it was possible to separate altogether loving and keeping. Nellie, the match factory girl who never st
opped yearning for a lady’s clean white hands, comforted herself knowing that Muriel both loved her and kept her. This was Nellie’s truth and it was “quite enough” for her.

  * * *

  * The bluebird of happiness was a popular symbol of domestic, household-centered happiness.

  Afterlives

  MURIEL ADDRESSED THE FESTIVE CROWD assembled in September 1928 to celebrate the opening of the new Kingsley Hall on Powis Road, a block from 58–60 Bruce Road. (See fig. A.1.) In the fourteen years since founding Kingsley Rooms, much had happened in Muriel’s life and much more in the world. Rachel Lester’s death in 1918, followed by Nellie’s in 1923 and Henry Lester’s in 1927, had loosened the ties binding her to Loughton and East London. After years of intense engagement with the affairs of household, street, neighborhood, and borough, she had begun to apply the techniques of reconciliation that she and Nellie had developed in Bromley-by-Bow to the British Empire. By the time she returned in 1927 from extended sojourns to the ashrams of India’s best-known anti-colonial nationalists, Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi, Muriel had embraced fully the concept of “world citizenship” as part and parcel of her ethics and politics of Christian revolution. She made herself into a member of Gandhi’s corps of white western women engaged in informal diplomacy on behalf of his and India’s great cause.1 If Nellie had served as intermediary between Muriel and their Bow neighbors, Muriel now took on this role for Indians and Britons. As she explained to Tagore in 1934, she saw herself as “a sort of safety-valve, a message taker, from side to side, an interpreter in a small way—longing for our two races each to bring the best out of the other—instead of continually annoying and misunderstanding the other.”2