by Seth Koven
A.6. Muriel (left) had a genius for creating what she called “synthetic families” with other unmarried female friends like Al (Alice) Whipps (center) and Mu or M. J. (Alice Muriel) Pullen (right), a longtime fellow worker at Children’s House. “Muriel Lester, Alice ‘M. J.’ Pullen, and Alice Whipps in garden,” Lester/6/8, Lester Papers. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)
On January 20, 1968, Muriel sat down to write her last will. For a woman who had lived in great simplicity, she had somehow managed to accumulate a lot of things: some from her parents; others from Doris; and still others, gifts from her admirers the world over. She carefully matched each object, saturated with history and meaning, with each of her many beloved friends and relations. To her niece, Margaret, Lady Bemrose, she left her “favourite possession,” her mother’s cracked Japanese bowl and lid, which had once graced the corner cupboard of Gainsborough Lodge’s drawing room. To Garry Lester Hogg, she left a teapot stand tile that Doris had purchased in Jerusalem in early 1939. To Al, she left a full page of lovingly chosen items—Pakistani silver spoons and a brooch and a red easy chair among them. (See fig. A.7.) She also penned a remarkable tribute celebrating Al’s generosity and their shared life of fellowship. At the top of p.102 in the humble notebook that served as Muriel’s unofficial will, she wrote “Al & I.” “We have for so long a time, shared our joys & sorrows, & the Ups & Downs of running a house &, at the same time keeping up the old fellowship with Bow & Dagenham folks that it is difficult to even try to separate my belongings from hers.”37
A.7. Muriel used a small notebook to include instructions to her executors about the disposition of her property to her many friends and relatives. “Al and I,” Notebook (1968) with handwritten directions to her executors disposing of her possessions, Lester/1/2/12, Lester Papers. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)
When Muriel wrote these words, had she forgotten Nellie? I don’t think so. Nellie’s disappearance from Muriel’s stories about herself, her neighbors, and revolutionary Christianity reflected a life in which love and friendship were the foundation of theology, ethics, social politics, and world peace. Nellie always mattered to Muriel. After her death in 1923, Muriel had moved on. As she had made clear after her brother Kingsley’s death in 1914, Muriel believed that continuing the legacy of the dead, not mourning them, was the only way to honor their memory. Muriel had done just that. She forged new relationships with many others like Al Whipps, who became her partners in bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. Their stories had mingled with and become hers. Like Muriel and Al’s “belongings,” it was difficult to “even try to separate” them.
Fair-haired little Nellie Dowell was a match girl only according to the logic and language used by the press in the late 1880s to describe both girls who sold matches on the streets and the female factory workers who made them. Muriel Lester became an heiress only long enough to publicly disinherit herself and set up the Restitution Fund. Theirs was a reciprocal, unequal, intimate, and emotionally charged relationship across a vast socioeconomic and cultural divide. This history of a match girl and an heiress, however, was no fairy tale friendship admitting of a simple moral fable. In place of flamboyantly disruptive acts of rebellion, we find in their story earnest self-scrutiny and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths joined with reverence for Victorian predecessors; in short, the peaceful adaptation of Victorian philanthropy to radical twentieth-century goals. Far from mounting a rearguard defense of “Victorian values,” Nellie and Muriel campaigned for an expansive and inclusive vision of citizenship grounded in Christian revolutionary principles of restorative social and economic justice. The history of Muriel, Nellie, Doris, and their “people’s house” challenges the trajectory of putative “de-moralization” from “Victorian virtues” to “modern” doubts so eloquently but unconvincingly traced by Gertrude Himmelfarb.38 Muriel’s preoccupation with a democratic but hyper-regulated management of dirt—sticky sediment in its infinite variety—betokened her refusal to create a sanitized domain of ethics apart from politics, of private life apart from public duty. Far from rejecting the relevance of values to social politics, Muriel and Nellie strove to make themselves—and modern life—moral.
Nellie and Muriel’s love and friendship took place at the fault lines between needs and dreams, between the messiness of day-to-day life and the pristine perfection of the not-yet realm of utopian aspirations, between the litter-strewn streets of Bromley-by-Bow and the precincts of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Their relationship, like the Christian revolution it signaled and advanced, was a process, a way of living in the world, an unfinished work-in-progress. Christian revolutionary love may have brought them together, but there were some wounds of poverty that even this mighty force could never heal.
Manuscripts and Archival Collections
Archives New Zealand Register of Unions and Employers Organisations Seddon Family Papers
Bishopsgate Institute
The Lester Papers
Doris Lester Papers
Nellie Dowell Letters
Muriel Lester Papers
Kingsley Hall, Papers and Reports Children’s House, Papers and Reports British Library of Politics, Economics, and Sociology Charles Booth Papers:
Poverty Notebooks
Religious Survey Notebooks
Fellowship of Reconciliation Papers London Union
England
Leonard and Kate Courtney Papers George Lansbury Papers
Essex Record Office
Annual Reports of the Essex Baptist Union Loughton Union Chapel Magazine Loughton Union Church
Deacons’ Minute Books
Minutes of Sunday School
Hackney Local History Archives Minute Book, The Club for Working Girls, Clifden Institute Records of Bryant and May Limited Hadspen, Somerset
Hobhouse Family Papers (Margaret Potter Hobhouse; Rosa Waugh Hobhouse; Stephen Hobhouse) India Office, British Library Files on Muriel Lester
Imperial War Museum (Gage Cengage) Women at Work Collection
Library of the Society of Friends, London Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, unpublished typescript autobiography Stephen Hobhouse Papers, typescript edited by Rosa Hobhouse London Metropolitan Archives Forest Gate School District Superintendent’s Reports and Journals Minutes of the Forest Gate School Managers Committee Register of Children, Poplar Board of Guardians Henrietta Barnett Papers
Unpublished Autobiography
Building Inspections and Approvals: Kingsley Hall Correspondence Marner Street School
Admission and Discharge Registers Log Book, Marner Street Evening Continuation Class for Males Oriolet Hospital Reports
Stepney Board of Guardians
Whitechapel Infirmary, Admission and Discharge Register Whitechapel Infirmary, Porters Admission and Discharge Registers, Lunatic Certifications Blue Plaques
Family Welfare Association
Longcot
Mary Hughes Papers, in private hands Loughton
Loughton District Historical Society Photograph Collection
Loughton Library
Benjamin Platten Papers
Photographs
New Clippings about Conscientious Objection School Notebooks
Letters, Diaries
Modern Record Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Clara Collet Papers
Victor Gollancz Papers
YWCA Archives
Queen Mary University, Mile End, London Constance Maynard Papers
Royal London Hospital Archives Records of St. Andrew’s (Poplar and Stepney Infirmary) Hospital Records of London Hospital
Medical Index
Patients Case Notes
Admission and Discharge Registers Official Ward Books
Swarthmore College
Muriel Lester Papers
Tower Hamlets Local History Library Clippings Collection
Rosa Hobhouse, manuscript materials collected for Mary Hughes biography Poplar Borough Council, Minutes Trades Union Con
gress History Archives On-Line Match Girls’ Strikes: strike register, correspondence concerning Bryant and May and R. Bell and Company Wellington
Wellington City Archives
Wellington City Council Rate Books Architectural Plans
Alexander Turnbull Library
Photograph Collection
Women’s Library (now transferred to BLPES) Agnes Maude Royden Papers
London Society for Women’s Suffrage Kingsley Hall Committee
Notes
Introduction
1. The essential starting point for work on Muriel Lester is Jill Wallis’s Muriel Lester: Mother of World Peace (Middlesex, 1993); see also Richard Deats, ed., Ambassador of Reconciliation. A Muriel Lester Reader (Santa Cruz, 1991); Vera Brittain, The Rebel Passion: A Short History of Some Pioneer Peacemakers (London, 1964). The family briefly did live at Hindhead in Surrey (c.1898–1901). Caroline Moorehead vividly describes Muriel Lester as “a tall, stately, cheerful and occasionally scatty woman with wispy fair hair wound in Catherine wheels over her ears and rather long teeth” as well as an “extraordinary figure in the history of European pacifism.” See Caroline Moorehead, Troublesome People: Enemies of War, 1916–1986 (London, 1987), 97.
2. On the idea of the “Cockney,” see Gareth Stedman Jones, “ ‘The Cockney’ and the Nation,” in Metropolis: Histories and Representations since 1800, ed. D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones, (London, 1989), 272–324. On Cockney as identity and form of linguistic representation, see Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), esp. Part Four. Muriel, like most middle-class writers, offered her own version of Nellie’s Cockney speech in her writings about her.
3. On the place and power of friendship as a form of politics, ethics and countercultural performance, see Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, 2006); on the “expressive power of friendship,” see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism (New York, 2004), 271. For essential work on the meaning of female amity in modern Britain, see Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women 1778–1928 (Chicago, 2004); and Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, 2007).
4. My work on “neighborhood” and “community” in Bow has been shaped in conversation with the immensely influential sociological study by Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London, 1957). I have also borrowed Jerry White’s remarkable attention to the microworkings of space, place, and persons developed in his two landmark studies, Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East-End Tenement Block (London, 1980); The Worst Street in North London: A Social History of Campbell Bunk, Islington between the Wars (London, 1986).
5. Muriel explored the global historical implications of small gestures such as the imperious “snatch” of the English in India in her chapter “Manners,” in My Host the Hindu (London, 1931). See also her account of the ways in which white Europeans fight against but ultimately capitulate to the deforming day-to-day imperatives of colonialism and empire in India, “December, 1926, Letter 14, Correspondence and Form Letters Written from India,” Box 1, Lester Papers, Swarthmore College.
6. Important work on bourgeois women’s philanthropy and social welfare activism in Britain includes Frank Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1980); Anne Summers, “A Home from Home: Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century,” in Sandra Burman, ed., Fit Work for Women (New York, 1979); Jane Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England (Aldershot, 1991); Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago, 1985); Deborah Nord, The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (Ithaca, 1989); Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992) and Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (London, 2012), chap. 2. See also Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004), chaps. 3 and 4. On the representation of middle-class women’s philanthropy in literature, see Dorice Williams Elliott, The Angel Out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (Charlottesville, 2002).
7. On the “domains” of the intimate, affect, and politics, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002), 12.
8. Rev. Bernard Walke founded the first chapter in Cornwall in 1918. See Bernard Walke, Twenty Years at St. Hilary (London, 1935)
9. Hayden Church, “Millionaires and Paupers Join in Self Denial,” Deseret News [Salt Lake City, Utah], July 2, 1921, sec. 3, 1.
10. See Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me (London 1937), 59.
11. See Public and Judicial Department, Subject: Miss MURIEL LESTER, IOR (India Office Records), l/P&J/12/445, British Library.
12. Private communication, Alice Mackay to Seth Koven, June 19, 2012.
13. Muriel collected these letters and put them into an envelope. When I first read them, they were listed under ML/4, Muriel Lester Papers, Box 4, Kingsley Hall, Dagenham. They have subsequently been rearchived and catalogued as “Letters from Eleanor “Nellie” Dowell, 2/5, Muriel Lester Papers, Bishopsgate Institute. On working-class writing and literacy, see Carolyn Steedman, The Radical Soldier’s Tale: John Pearman, 1819–1908 (London, 1988). On letters as sources for reconstructing female friendship, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1:1 (August 1975).
14. Hereafter, I refer to these letters as Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate. Nellie’s eleven surviving letters consist of fifty pages of writing (I count each side of the stationery as one page). Nellie dated only three of them, all from 1912. She used several different return addresses, indicating her residence at the time of writing. I use a broad range of internal evidence to offer likely dates for all the letters—varying from specific events in London history such as zeppelin raids over Bromley-by-Bow; events in Nellie’s and Muriel’s lives such as Muriel’s trip to Palestine and Egypt in 1910 or Nellie’s last illness and hospitalization from December 1922 to her death in January 1923; census and voting registers that give Nellie’s addresses; and passing remarks within letters such as the day of the week (i.e., raining on Sunday night) combined with the date and month (but no year). Imprecise and imperfect as these techniques are, they provide a reasonable approximation of chronology essential to my interpretation and analysis of the letters. In the body of this book, I indicate when I have made an educated case about the date of a letter. When I quote from the letters that Nellie herself dated, I indicate that in my text and endnote.
15. The two side-by-side houses were so closely connected that one worker recalled that she usually entered through Number 58 (Nellie’s house), walked through it to the back garden and then into the unlocked back door of Number 60. See Gwen Morley, “Timothy & the Angel,” Adventures in Fellowship, Being the Eight Annual Report of Kingsley Hall (London, 1923), 11.
16. The phrase comes from chapter four of Charles Dickens’s novel, Bleak House (1853). The landmark analysis of socioeconomic relations between rich and poor in Victorian London remains Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971).
17. For the United States, Linda Gordon has pioneered work that accentuates the role of poor women across racial divides in shaping social welfare in relationship to policy makers and middle-class female reformers. See Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York, 1994). For a more heavily “client-centered” approach, see Linda Gordon’s influential study, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (NY, 1988). For Britain, Lynn Hollen Lees’s Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998) notably d
emonstrates how the poor instrumentally used Poor Law policies and institutions to serve their own ends. In her hands, social policy operates at the intersection of the needs of policy makers, politics, and the poor themselves. Other major works that narrate and analyze social welfare from the perspective of its ostensible objects include Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford, 1993) and Anna Davin, Growing Up: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London, 1996).