The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  25. See Whitechapel Infirmary, Admission and Discharge Register, March 14, 1910, STBG/WH/123/45, Stepney Board of Guardians, London Metropolitan Archives..

  26. Muriel Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1.”

  27. E. W. Morris, History of London Hospital (London, 1910), 225.

  28. Dr. F. J. Smith Case Notes.

  29. Ibid.

  30. On Smith’s career, see Obituary, F. J. Smith, MD, FRCP, Consulting Physician, British Medical Journal 3045 (May 10, 1919): 593–94.

  31. See entry dated March 8, 1910, Official Ward Book, No. 2 (mislabeled 1909), LH/N/6/13, London Hospital, Royal London Hospital Archives. There was clearly some sort of error here since March 8, 1910 was a Tuesday, not Saturday as indicated in the record.

  32. For her admission, see Porters Admission and Discharge Registers, March 11, 1910, Whitechapel Infirmary, STBG/WH/123/45, London Metropolitan Archives.

  33. Ernest Hart, Report of the Lancet Sanitary Commission for Investigating the State of the Infirmaries of Workhouses, 1866; “The Condition of Our State Hospitals,” Fortnightly Review 3 (December 1865): 218–21; “Metropolitan Infirmaries for the Pauper Sick,” Fortnightly Review 4 (April 1866): 460–62.

  34. See Certification of Lunacy of A.A., April 28, 1904, Whitechapel Infirmary, STBG/WH/115/2 and Certification of Lunacy for R.K.S., October 31, 1905, STBG/L/118/2, Bromley-by-Bow Infirmary, 1904, London Metropolitan Archives.

  35. This detail comes from corrected typescript that Muriel labeled, “1916-Very Early Account of Finding the Prayer of Relaxation,” 2/1a, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate Institute.

  36. Muriel Lester, Ways of Praying (London, 1932), 22.

  37. Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me (London, 1937), 63–67.

  38. Lester republished this article as a separate chapter of her book, Ways of Praying, 20–23.

  39. Medical anthropologists have explored deeply the relationships between curing and healing the body. See Thomas J. Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing (Basingstoke, 2002)

  40. I am certain that she did not write this document in 1916: the date refers to the time that she suffered her collapse.

  41. These dates don’t quite square. Born in December 1883, Muriel turned 33 in December 1916; eighteen months after Kingsley Hall’s founding was mid-August 1916. Surviving files from the LCC suggest the new kinds of challenges Muriel faced as she sought to negotiate bureaucracies to pass inspections and get official approval for the new Kingsley Hall. See “Report to the Theatres Committee made on Kingsley Hall, Botolphs Road, Bow,” and associated correspondence, GLC/AR/BR/07/2946, London Metropolitan Archives. Apparently, Muriel withdrew her application for a music license.

  42. On Bright, See Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social (Cambridge, 1994); on overwork as explanation for men’s breakdowns, see Janet Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York, 1991).

  43. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, February 14, 1912, Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.

  44. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, August 1912, Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.

  45. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d. [December 1912], Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.

  46. On political debates and discursive pathologies surrounding spinsters written in the context of early 1980s feminist debates about violence, pornography, and sexual pleasure, see Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880–1930 (London, 1985). On women and mental illness, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (NY, 1987).

  47. There is a substantial scholarly literature on the bodies of female hysterics, New Women, feminists, and suffragettes—as well as their representation. See Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Suffrage: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1904–1914 (Chicago, 1988); on spinsters’ and suffragettes’ body politics, see Martha Vicinus, Independent Women, Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (Chicago, 1985), chap.7; on hunger strikes, see James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA, 2007), chap. 3. For a vivid, political analysis of forced feeding, see Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, Some Personal Experiences (London, 1914).

  48. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 64–65.

  49. Ibid., 38.

  50. Muriel Lester, Typsescript autobiographical draft with corrections, 2/1(a), Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  51. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 40.

  52. Mary Baker G. Eddy, Science and Health with Key to The Scriptures (Boston, 1906), 16.

  53. See Thomson Jay Hudson, “The Truth About ‘Christian Science.’ A Psychopathic Study,” Everybody’s Magazine 4:22 (June 1901): 672.

  54. Mary Baker G. Eddy, Science and Health with Key to The Scriptures (Boston, 1906), 19.

  55. See Mary Baker Eddy, Unity of Good (Boston, 1887), 9–10.

  56. See William Arthur Purrington, Christian Science: An Exposition of Mrs. Eddy’s Wonderful Discovery (New York, 1900), 6.

  57. See “The Origin of ‘Christian Science,’ ” Blackwoods (May 1899): 847. On excess stimulation as symptom of modern urban life, see Georg Simmel’s account of “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds., The Blackwell City Reader (Oxford, 2002).

  58. Sir William Osler, “The Faith That Heals,” The British Medical Journal (June 18, 1910): 1471–72

  59. See “Harvest News,” Master Mind Magazine (January 1912): 112.

  60. See Thomas Troward, “What is Higher Thought?,” The Hidden Power and Other Papers Upon Mental Science (New York, 1921; 1936), 213–14.

  61. On the commodity culture of early twentieth-century British medicine, see Takahiro Ueyama, Health in the Market Place: Professionalism, Therapeutic Desires, and Medical Commodification in Late-Victorian London (Seattle, WA, 2010).

  62. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 41.

  63. Ibid., 32.

  64. See Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College, vol. 4 (Cambridge, 1912). For his matriculation record (he joined Caius in October 1906) see TUT/01/01/06; for his examination results, see Praelectors’s Book, 1899–1920. He was involved in the college Musical Society and performed in various concerts. See the Caian, editions XVIII and XIX. I thank the archivists at Gonville and Caius for their help.

  65. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, late 1912, Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate. On the culture of bourgeois invalidism, see Maria Frawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2004).

  66. Ben Platten, writing on behalf of Muriel’s men’s night school members, was glad to “see you disregarded the usual custom of (supposed) mourning”; but the eulogies praising Kingsley’s good life made him feel “envious” and discontented with his own “little good work.” Ben Platten to Muriel Lester, September 13, 1914, 2/5, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  67. Muriel Lester, “K.H.,” Typescript Autobiography, 2/1a, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  68. “Notes and Jottings,” Mill Hill Magazine 13, no. 4 (December 1914): 130–31. I thank the school’s archivist, Marion Taylor, for her help.

  69. Charles Carpenter, a leader in the Band of Hope temperance movement in Devon, founded Huntley in 1878. It attracted prominent Congregationalists including Hugh Price Hughes.

  70. For local press reports about her charitable activities, see “Teignmouth,” Devon and Exeter Gazette, December 6, 1912, 5 on opening Wesleyan school work rooms; for her work with the local Pleasant Sunday Afternoon, see “Teignmouth,” Devon and Exeter Gazette, January 31, 1913, 5; for her involvement with the branch of the Wesleyan Foreign Missions Society, see “Teignmouth,” Western Times, March 4, 1913, 2.

  71. See Black’s Guide to Devonshire, ed. A. R. Hope Moncrieff, 17th edition (London, 1902), 60. For a comprehensive guide to hydropathic establishments in Britain and Europe with an account of their various restorative treatments, see B. Bradshaw’s Dictionary of Mineral Waters, Climatic Health Resorts, Sea Baths, and Hydropathic Establishments, 1903 (London, 19
03). On Huntley, see p. 43.

  72. Entire books praised Torquay’s curative powers such as Dr. Charles Radclyffe Hall, Torquay, In Its Medical Aspect as a Resort for Pulmonary Invalids (London, 1857).

  73. See James Orr, “Faith-healing and Mind Cure in America,” London Quarterly Review (January 1904): 100–127.

  74. There is a burgeoning and brilliant scholarship about the “reenchantment” of modernity that pushes back against Max Weber’s hugely influential account of the rise of disenchanted, bureaucratic rationality. On the “reenchantment” of modernity, see Michael Saler, As If: The Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (New York, 2012); and Alex Owen, British Occultism and the Place of the Modern (Chicago, 2004); Simon During, Modern Enchantment: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA, 2002). My thinking about body disciplines across East-West divides has benefited from ongoing conversations with Kate Imy. See Kate Imy, “Spiritual Soldiers: Masculinity and the Body in the British Indian Army, 1900–1940,” PhD in progress, Rutgers University.

  75. She borrowed the phrase “The Renascence of Wonder,” from a celebrated essay by the renowned literary critic Theodore Watts-Dunton, who traced this revival of wonder to the early Romantics and their capacity to challenge accepted conventions with “eyes of inquiry and wonder.” Watts-Dunton explicitly connected “wonder” to the modern world’s recuperation of the life-giving force of the “primitive.” See Theodore Watts-Dunton, “The Renascence of Wonder in English Poetry,” in D. Patrick, ed., Chambers Cyclopedia of English Literature, vol. 3 (London, 1903). For Muriel’s use of this phrase, see Muriel Lester, Why Worship (Nashville, 1937), 13.

  76. See Jay Winter on the dialectic of World War I as the “modern” war that unleashed an avalanche of the “unmodern.” Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995), 54. For a contemporary example, see Arthur Machen’s wonderful novel The Great Return (London, 1915). It opens with an Eastern “spiritual” mystery, compactly transformed into a Reuters press announcement, which the narrator then uses to consider the impact of war on the religious and psychic lives of Britons living in the Welsh countryside.

  77. On Conan Doyle and his creation Sherlock Holmes as examples of the ironic imagination of “enchanted disenchantment,” see Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (New York, 1912), chap. 3. On spiritualism and scientific research, see Janet Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York, 1991); and Alex Owen, Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago, 2004). See also Rene Kollar, Searching for Raymond: Anglicanism, Spiritualism and Bereavement between the Two World Wars (Lanham, MD, 2000), esp. pp. 11–15 on Conan Doyle.

  78. The bachelor son of Britain’s queerest clerical family, Robert Hugh Benson had been ordained as an Anglican clergyman by his father, the erudite Archbishop of Canterbury. See A. C. Benson, Hugh, Memoirs of a Brother (London, 1915), 134.

  79. She later paid homage to Lawrence’s influence on her during her lecture tour in the United States in 1930 that provided the core of her book, Ways of Praying. See also Patricia Faith Appelbaum, Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture Between World War 1 and the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), 115–16.

  80. The Practice of the Presence of God, Being Conversations and Letters of Brother Lawrence (Nicholas Herman of Lorraine), New and Revised Edition (London, 1906), 59, 62.

  81. Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism (London, 1914, 1991). Foreword by Canon John Tyers, xiii, xv, 2, 24. See also chap. 6 on “Love and Will.”

  82. In her last unpublished autobiographical writings written when she was 81, she recalled her prewar rambles with Doris in the Cornish countryside with Doris reading “Evelyn Underhill’s book on Christian mystics” as she read histories. See Muriel Lester, “Prologue,” 2/1a. Bishopsgate. An excerpt from Underhill’s poem, “The Liberated Hosts,” graced the inside cover of Kingsley Hall’s Second Year Report for 1916, about the “friendship of the happy dead” with the living.

  83. See the vitriolic exchanges in the British Medical Journal during the summer of 1910 between various medical doctors and Rev. Boyd about the Guild’s dangerous interference in the domain of allopathic doctors’ medical expertise. For the opening exchange, see Rev. Francis Boyd, “On Faith and Healing,” and Stanley Bousfield, “Spiritual Healing and the ‘Guild of Health,’” British Medical Journal (Aug 20, 1910): 464–65.

  84. The replacement of the priest-confessor by the psychoanalyst is one of Foucault’s influential metanarratives about madness, mental health, and modernity. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York, 1965). It was this long-term “secular” tendency against which Guild members like Gladys Edge and Muriel Lester battled. Edge worried that people were “turning to professional psychologists for inspiration and healing” rather than to Jesus. See G. N. Edge, “Vital Thought and Health,” Guild of Health Monthly For the Study and Practice of Spiritual Healing 1:2 (May 1924): 7–8.

  85. “Guild Notes,” Guild of Health Monthly For the Study and Practice of Spiritual Healing 1:1 (April 1924): 3.

  86. One of the Guild’s leaders, the Bishop of Kensington, John Primatt Maud, connected the Guild’s interest in mind concentration to the extraordinary powers wielded by Yogis. See his “Healing by Spiritual Means,” Guild of Health Monthly 1:2 (May 1924): 6.

  87. Conrad Noel and Percy Dearmer were two of the Guild’s best-known leaders. Dearmer surveyed faith healing across several millennia in Body and Soul: An Enquiry into the Effect of Religion Upon Health (New York, 1909). On his contributions to the Guild, see Nan Dearmer, The Life of Percy Dearmer (London, 1940). On the Guild’s critique of Christian Science and its stance on the Incarnation, see Harold Anson, “The Incarnation and Christian Science,” God in Relation to the Material World, Papers Read at the Guild of Health Conference held at Girton College, Cambridge, 1922 (Croydon, 1922), esp. 17.

  88. On the links between religion and queer sexuality in the late nineteenth century, see Harry Cocks, “Religion and Spirituality,” in H. G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook, eds., The Modern History of Sexuality (New York, 2006), 157–79.

  89. For a subtle and convincing analysis of this, see Joy Dixon, “ ‘Dark Ecstasies’: Sex, Mysticism, and Psychology in Early Twentieth Century England,” Gender and History, 25: 3 (November 2013).

  90. See Eustace Miles, Avenues to Health (London, 1902); see also Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowka, Managing the Body, Beauty, Health and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford, 2010). Miles was notably nondoctrinaire and offered readers a wide array of healthy life choices from which he invited them to select the ones that worked best for each person.

  91. Underhill does not specify to whom “psychoanalysis” refers. After World War I, her published work refers explicitly to Freud.

  92. The texts from which Tagore and Underhill worked had faint similarities with the originals. Scholars agree that the “poems” or “songs” are less “translations” of Kabîr than works inspired by him. See Sisir Kumar Das, ed., English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 1 (New Delhi, 1994), 622.

  93. Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” (1895) dramatically contradicted its bold opening lines by showing that such borders collapse when “two strong men stand face to face.” Kipling emphasized exchange, connection and dialogue—not separation—between East and West.

  94. See Mrinilina Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate” Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995), 21. See also Narasingha Prosad Sil, Vivikananda, A Reassessment (Selinsgrove, PA, 1997), especially chap. 11 on his Western audience.

  95. See “Swami Vivekananda in England,” Friend of India and Statesman (November 20, 1895): 21.

  96. See Peter Van Der Veer, “Spirituality in Modern Society,” Social Research 76:4 (Winter 2009): 1106. My thinking about the
global circulation of knowledge about body practices is indebted to Joseph Alter’s Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia, 2000).

  97. Muriel Lester, “Brethren of the Common Table,” London Evening Standard, April 2, 1921.

  98. Muriel Lester, What IS Kingsley Hall? n.d., printed circular, Lester/7/2/12, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  99. Kuhne and Just sought to reconnect humanity with the primitive healing force of water, light, air, and earth. “The more animal heat one has,” Just declared, “the healthier one is.” Kuhne and Just both drew upon Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of the body and health in their writings even as Mohandas Gandhi gratefully acknowledged his debts to them in his biomoral vision of public health, The Nature Cure. See Adolf Just, Return to Nature, The True Natural Method of Healing and Living and the True Salvation of the Soul, trans. Benedict Lust (New York: 1896; 2nd ed., 1904), 11. For a powerful analysis of the place of “stories” in the history of mind–body healing see Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind–Body Medicine (New York, 2008).

  100. See Hervé Guillemain, La Méthode Coué. Histoire d’une pratique de guérison au XXe siècle (Paris, 2010).

  101. Henry Lindlahr, Practice of the Natural Therapeutics (Chicago, 1922, 5th ed.), Part One, Section One.

  102. Muriel and her close friend Rosa Waugh Hobhouse viewed allopathic medicine as a form of violence against the body in its use of drugs and surgical interventions. See Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: A Brief Comparison of Two Schools of Medicine,” unpublished typescript, Box 1, Rosa Waugh Hobhouse Papers, Hadspen.

  103. The pioneering French psychologist, J. M. Charcot, had famously argued in 1892 that faith cures had remarkable curative powers for diseases rooted in hysterical origins, but none at all for bodily disfigurement such as amputation. See J. M. Charcot, “The Faith-Cure,” New Review 8:44 (January 1893): 19.