The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  178. For accounts of psychological interiority, modernity, governance, and coercion, see Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979); See also Nikolas Rose The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869–1939 (London, 1984), and Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London, 1989). On the role of expertise in the domain of social science and the rise of interwar non-governmental organizations as a new kind of privatized political sphere, see Matthew Hilton, James McKay, Nicholas Crowon, and Jean-François Mouhot, The Politics of Expertise, How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain (Oxford, 2013).

  179. For a fine overview of a wide range of approaches to and uses of psychology and popular “regimes of self-improvement,” see Matthew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2006).

  Chapter Five. Love and Christian Revolution

  1. H. G. Wells, The War That Will End War (New York, 1914). Wells insisted that Britons were fighting a war of “whole peoples” that demanded either total victory or complete defeat.

  2. What IS Kingsley Hall? (London, 1933), Lester/7/2/12, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  3. Muriel Lester, “The Salt of the Earth,” 15.

  4. On the Fellowship, see Jill Wallis, Valliant for Peace: History of the Fellowship of Reconciliation 1914–1989 (London, 1991), and Henry Hodgkin, Lay Religion (London, 1919), 218.

  5. This phrase appeared in all of Kingsley Hall’s promotional literature.

  6. Muriel Lester to household members at Kingsley Hall, 60 Bruce Road and Children’s House, undated circular letter (c.1929), Lester/2/3, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate. There were even more detailed rules about household and personal cleanliness and management for Children’s House after it opened in 1923. Muriel and Doris lived in Children’s House. See “The Rule,” n.d. (c.1923), Lester/2/2, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate

  7. On gossip as “secret diplomacy,” see Muriel Lester to “Dear Comrades of Number Sixty,” undated letter, Lester/2/2, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate. The argument that World War I was caused by “secret diplomacy” was widely accepted by the 1920s when revisionists assessed the war’s causes and consequences. For its use during World War I, see Bertrand Russell, “Secret Diplomacy,” The Tribunal, September 13, 1917, 2.

  8. On the roots of left politicians’ attraction to militarism before and at the outset of World War I, see Matthew Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, 1902–1914 (Basingstoke, 2013).

  9. Jo Guldi shows that disproportionate numbers of soldiers became Methodists, in part attracted by the mobile life and brotherly camaraderie of service. See Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 157–67. The most conspicuous conflation and connection between religious zeal and military discipline and organization in Modern Britain is William and Mary Booth’s Salvation Army.

  10. Halévy first tested his thesis that Methodism explained modern England’s immunity from revolutionary tumult in a 1906 article in La Revue de Paris. Halévy elaborated his argument in England in 1815 (1913). For revisions of Halévy, see Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (New York, 1973) and E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964).

  11. For a cogent summary of the history anticlericalism and de-Christianization in revolutionary France, see Mona Ozouf, “De-Christianization,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 21–32.

  12. Ross McKibbin argues that religion “inhibited” the emergence of “continental politics” in Britain; “what religion gave with one hand” to Labour leaders, “it took away with the other.” He argues that religion led Labour leaders to invest in the status quo rather than demand its overthrow. See Ross McKibbin, “Why Was There No Marxism in Britain,” English Historical Review (April 1984): 297–331.

  13. “VIOLENCE UPHELD AS SOCIAL WEAPON: Its Banning Would Aid Privileged, Prof. Niebuhr Tells Reconciliation Parley. GANDHI TACTICS LAUDED but They Are Not Suited to America, Miss Lester Says—Rautenstrauch Speaks,” New York Times, October 13, 1934, 11.

  14. Niebuhr elaborated his case against pacifism as incompatible with the actual workings of power in society in Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York, 1932).

  15. Lester acknowledged this criticism in an interview with an American reporter. “The young communists in the East End laugh at us … for believing the rich will part with their wealth voluntarily. They believe that only force will accomplish this, but we are more optimistic.” See Hayden Church, “Millionaires and Paupers Join in Self Denial,” Deseret News [Salt Lake City, Utah], July 2, 1921, sec. 3, 1.

  16. Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me (New York, 1973), 93–94.

  17. On the rejuvenation and growth of internationalism in interwar Britain, especially connected to the League of Nations and World Council of Churches, see Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society (Cambridge, 2012). On the growth of broadly based interwar movements against war, see Keith Robbins, The Abolition of War: The “Peace Movement” in Britain, 1914–1918 (Cardiff, 1976); James Hinton, Protests and Visions: Peace Politics in 20th Century Britain (London, 1989); and Peter Brock, Twentieth-Century Pacifism (New York, 1970).

  18. See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), 5.

  19. Burnett H. Streeter, “God and the World’s Pain,” in Lily Dougall, Harold Anson, et al., Concerning Prayer: Its Nature, Its Difficulties and Its Value (London, 1921), 19.

  20. See Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London, 2009), 2. Overy analyzes what he calls a “strong presentiment of impending disaster” widely shared in interwar Britain.

  21. Muriel Lester, “Draft Autobiographical Accounts,” Lester/2/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  22. See Muriel Lester, “Draft Autobiographical Accounts,” and “K.H,” Lester/2/1a, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  23. Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (London, 1918) suggested that love of power and hypocritical neuroses fueled his subjects’ religiously inspired zeal to better the world.

  24. In 1915, this was certainly undeserved praise although from the 1930s onwards, American newspapers regularly called Muriel “London’s Jane Addams.” See Robert Tate Allan, “Muriel Lester, the Jane Addams of London, Forsook Life of Ease for Christian Service,” Washington Post, December 21, 1940, 14.

  25. Muriel Lester, untitled typescript (12 pages), “Account of the Early History of Kingsley Hall,” Lester/2/3, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  26. Typescripts of speeches delivered at opening ceremony of Kingsley Hall, February 15, 1915, “Report of the Kingsley Hall Opening,” Lester/2/2, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  27. George Mortimer’s 1911 census data only indicates “dog biscuit manufacturer.” This factory can only be Spratt’s, which was located a short distance from their home on Blackthorn Street just along the canal, the Limehouse Cut, that literally “cut” through Poplar and Bow connecting the Thames to the River Lea. See Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien, and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London 5: East (New Haven, 2005), 48.

  28. See Nellie Dowell Letters, November 13, [1910], Bishopsgate; and Sarah C Williams, “The Problem of Belief: The Place of Oral History in the Study of Popular Religion,” Oral History 24:2 (Autumn, 1996): 27. See also Sarah C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880–1939 (Oxford, 1999). Hugh McLeod’s many books are the crucial starting point for any analysis of religious belief, secularization, and the urban poor in modern Britain. See his Religion and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1984) and Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London, and New York, 1870–1914 (New York, 1996). For a reperiodization of the debate over secularization that places women at the center of the story, see Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London, 2001).

  29. There is a well-established scholarly l
iterature about elite women’s “visiting” the poor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries including Frank Prochaska’s pioneering Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1980). For a reworking of “visiting” within the more egalitarian framework of Salvation Army slum sisters, see Jill Rappaport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (New York, 2012), chap. 5. Frederick Engels had depended upon two poor laboring women and sisters, Mary and Lizzy Burns, each of whom became his mistress, to guide his explorations of the slums of Manchester in the 1840s. For an early account of his relationships, see Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels: A Biography (London, 1936), 226. See also Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (New York, 1974), 98–100. Marcus foregrounds what he calls the mingling of the “erotic, the social, and the intellectual passions.”

  30. See Muriel Lester, typescript, “Remembered Moments on Receipt of a Radiogram,” Lester/2/3, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate. There is a second single-spaced typescript of this early history in the same file and the discussion of Nellie is on p. 9.

  31. In July 1912, she invited Alice Biscoe, a fellow matchbox filler, to join her at Muriel’s Bible class the next Sunday.

  32. Doris Lester, typescript autobiography, Lester/3/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate Institute.

  33. “Report of the Kingsley Hall Opening,” Lester/2/2, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  34. This was the expression she used in the 1931 Pathé film clip to characterize Kingsley Hall. The American socialist novelist Upton Sinclair included Elliott’s People’s Anthem in his 1915 edited anthology, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest (Philadelphia, 1915). The transatlantic circulation and shifting contextual meanings of Elliott’s poem have yet to receive scholarly attention. On its enduring power as a critique of socioeconomic injustice, see Francis Neilson, “The Corn Law Rhymes,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 10:4 (July 1951): 407–15. Alexis Easley emphasizes the conservative implications of Elliott’s endorsement of working-class domesticity in “Ebenezer Elliott and the Reconstruction of Working-Class Masculinity,” Victorian Poetry 39:2 (Summer 2001): 302–18.

  35. The surviving typescript of the evening notes that Lansbury took over from Mr. LeMare as chair of the ceremony.

  36. The extensive report of the opening ceremonies at Kingsley Hall in the East London Observer did mention Doris as well as Muriel. See “Kingsley Hall, Bow. A Club for Men and Women,” East London Observer, February 20, 1915.

  37. See Henrietta Barnett’s 1881 essay, “ ‘At Home’ to the Poor,” Cornhill Magazine (May 1881), in which she reminded readers that because “the minds of the poor being emptier” than their own, the poor needed more active entertainment. On the role of beauty in social uplift, see Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900: Beauty for the People (New York, 2006). On High Victorian attribution of positive moral value to well-chosen objects in relation to the shift from a theological focus on the “atonement” to the “incarnation” after 1860, see Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, 2006).

  38. See Andrew Goldstone on the occluded labor of domestic servants in aestheticist and modernist literature in “Servants, Aestheticism, and ‘The Dominance of Form,’” ELH 77:3 (Fall 2010): 615–43.

  39. See Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, Interplay of Life and Art (unpublished typescript autobiography, 1958–59), 114, Library of the Society of Friends.

  40. See Rosa Waugh Hobhouse to Stephen Hobhouse, 1917 in Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, ed. The Letters of Stephen Hobhouse, unpublished typescript, 377, Library of the Society of Friends.

  41. Muriel Lester, autobiographical manuscript about Kingsley Hall’s founding, Lester/2/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  42. Muriel Lester, “Kingsley Hall People,” First Year’s Report (London, 1916): 8. Sanitas Company’s London factory was in Bethnal Green in East London. See the company’s published guide by Charles Thomas Kingzett, How to Disinfect: A Guide to Practical Disinfection in Everyday Life, and During Cases of Infectious Illness (New York and London, 1895).

  43. For a vivid account of these communities, see Ruth Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex, and the Woman Question (New York, 1990); and on the leading figure within this countercultural configuration, see Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London, 2008).

  44. Edith Lees Ellis, “The Masses and the Classes, A Plea, a lecture given in Ancoats for the Ancoats Brotherhood,” (1893), 20–21.

  45. The history of domestic service and servants has recently attracted substantial scholarly interest. Carolyn Steedman repositions servants at the very heart of the history of class formation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge, 2007) and Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge, 2009); see also Lucy Delap, Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford, 2011).

  46. Honnor Morten, Questions for Women (and Men) (London, 1899), 92. The original settlers included Miss Rose Petty, the London School Board’s first appointed nurse. See E.M.E., “Women’s Settlements,” Hearth and Home (September 14, 1899): 436. Morten told an interviewer, “My tendencies are Socialistic, because, perhaps, I have worked and lived so much in the East end and know Whitechapel down to its boots—when it has any.” “Interview, Miss Honnor Morten,” The Women’s Penny Paper, November 29, 1890, 82–83. Morten had trained as a nurse under Eva Luckes in London Hospital, joined the School Board for London and established a settlement in workmen’s flats (Bleyton Buildings) in Hoxton in the late 1890s. In 1905, she founded her settlement in Rotherfield, called the Tolstoi Settlement, on funds generated by sales of the English translation of Tolstoi’s Resurrection. See “Miss Honnor Morten,” Votes For Women, July 18, 1913, 621. On Morten, see Ellen Ross, Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (Berkeley, 2007), 161–63.

  47. Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, M.D., “Practical Philanthropy and the Simple Life,” The Quiver (June 1910): 771–72.

  48. This capsule summary of daily life activities is based on the first two annual reports for 1915 and 1916.

  49. On Craven, see Enid Huws Jones, Margery Fry: The Essential Amateur (London 1966), 135.

  50. See “The Club,” Third Year’s Report (London, 1917): 3–4; “Kingsley Hall Club,” Fourth Year’s Report (London, 1918): 3–4; B. G. Platten, “The Evening Club,” Sixth Year’s Report (London, 1921): 11.

  51. Jack Rollason, “The Adult School,” Adventures in Fellowship, Being the Eighth Annual Report of Kingsley Hall (London, 1923), 17. In 1931, Jack’s wife Martha famously asked a shy but pleased Gandhi to dance at one of Kingsley Hall’s Joy Nights. See Rajmohan Gandhi, The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi (New Delhi, 1995), 115.

  52. While nondenominational and nonsectarian, the Adult School movement was, according to Charles Booth, an outgrowth of Quakerism. See Charles Booth, “Interview with Mr. G.H. Wilding, Secretary of the Old Ford Adult School,” May 29, 1897, B178, pp. 89–99, Booth Papers, BLPES.

  53. See A.W.R., “Mutual Help Home Mission,” The Illustrated Missionary News, October 1, 1895, on the Old Ford Adult School not far from Bromley-by-Bow.

  54. In It Occurred to Me, Muriel noted that she saw no reason why she should not expand her work to men. In her letter to the female residents of Number 60, she pointed out their tendency to pout and backstab and identified it with the fact that they were a group of women living together. See Muriel Lester to “Dear Comrades of Number Sixty,” n.d., internal evidence suggests 1923, Lester/2/2, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  55. Bruce Road Men’s Adult School, Minutes, June 21, 1914, Minute Book, Lester/1/1/3, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  56. There is a substantial and contentious literature exploring “community” and “neighborhood” and the relationship between the two as historical, sociological, imagined, an
d discursive constructs. Gillian Rose briefly surveys these debates and applies them to the “community” and “neighborhood” of Kingsley Hall, though she does not mention Kingsley Hall. See Gillian Rose, “Imagining Poplar in the 1920s: Contested Concepts of Community,” Journal of Historical Geography 16 (October 1990): 425–37.

  57. Bruce Road Men’s Adult School, Minute Book, June 1914, Lester/1/1/3, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  58. Muriel developed her arguments for women’s rights to full religious citizenship as preachers and leaders in Why Forbid Us? (London, 1930), published by the Society for the Ministry of Women.

  59. “Kingsley Hall, Bow,” East London Observer, February 13, 1915.

  60. The literature on women’s suffrage is vast, but several outstanding guides to its intricacies include Laura Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 (Oxford, 2003); Sandra Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1986); Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903–1914, (New York, 1974). The literature on women in wartime Britain is also extensive and rich in chronicling both well-to-do and working-class women’s work. See Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley, 1994); Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers and the First World War (London, 1998); see also Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, eds., Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London, 1987).

  61. On this election and the legal struggles that ultimately kept Cobden from actually serving on the Council, see Jonathan Schneer, “Politics and Feminism in ‘Outcast London’: George Lansbury and Jane Cobden’s Campaign for the First London County Council,” Journal of British Studies 30:1 (January 1991): 63–82.

  62. Kingsley Hall’s Second Year’s Report for 1916 listed Julia Scurr’s husband, John Scurr, as a contributor. See Muriel Lester and Doris Lester, Kingsley Hall, Bow, London. Second Year’s Report, (n.d., 1917), 28.