The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

Overview

How two extraordinary women crossed the Victorian class divide to put Christian teachings into practice in the slums of East London

Nellie Dowell was a match factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soulmates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of Christ's teachings. The Match Girl and the Heiress paints an unforgettable portrait of their late-nineteenth-century girlhoods of wealth and want, and their daring twentieth-century experiments in ethical living in a world torn apart by war, imperialism, and industrial capitalism.

In this captivating book, Seth Koven chronicles how each traveled the globe—Nellie as a spinster proletarian laborer, Muriel as a well-heeled tourist and revered Christian peacemaker, anticolonial activist, and humanitarian. Koven vividly describes how their lives crossed in the slums of East London, where they inaugurated a grassroots revolution that took the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to achieving economic and social justice for the dispossessed. Koven shows how they devoted themselves to Kingsley Hall—Gandhi's London home in 1931 and Britain's first "people's house" founded on the Christian principles of social sharing, pacifism, and reconciliation—and sheds light on the intimacies and inequalities of their loving yet complicated relationship.

The Match Girl and the Heiress probes the inner lives of these two extraordinary women against the panoramic backdrop of shop-floor labor politics, global capitalism, counterculture spirituality, and pacifist feminism to expose the wounds of poverty and neglect that Christian love could never heal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691158501
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/18/2015
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Seth Koven is professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

CHAPTER ONE

Victorian Childhoods and Two Victorian Children 21

The Education of Nellie Dowell 23

The Apprenticeship of Muriel Lester 57

Conclusions: The Challenges of Unlearning 75

CHAPTER TWO

Capitalism, from Below and Down Under: The Global Traffic in Matches and Match Girls 77

The Work of the Match Girl in Victorian Culture 79

How Match Factory Women Became Match Girls 85

Match Girls' Militant: Why the Bell's Match Factory Strike of 1893/94 Failed 95

Metropolitan Match Girls Abroad: Immoral Circulations of Matches and Match Girls 104

Conclusions 130

CHAPTER THREE

"Being a Christian" in Edwardian Britain 135

"God Is Love" 137

Foundational Fables, Ethical Awakening 154

God's Empire 171

From Paupers to Citizens 177

Conclusions 181

CHAPTER FOUR

Body Biographies in War and Peace 184

Taking Nellie's Temperature 186

Narrating Nellie 190

"You don't look near so well really" 201

Muriel Lester's Spiritual Therapeutics 212

Bodies at War 219

Grammars of Difference, Erotics of Illness in Nellie's Letters to Muriel 226

"Why it is I don't know" 237

Conclusions: Dialects for the Heart 252

CHAPTER FIVE

Love and Christian Revolution 256

Henry Lester's Gift 261

Feminisms at War 274

Reconciliation and Christian Revolution 288

"Love your enemies, bless them that curse you" 301

Telling the Truth, Becoming an Heiress 315

Conclusions 328

Afterlives 330

Manuscript Sources 353

Notes 357

Index 435

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Koven's beautifully written and exquisitely researched book illuminates, with brilliance and great perception, issues of class, capitalism, empire, gender, and love in early twentieth century Britain."—Jane Shaw, Stanford University

"A brilliantly told tale of the unlikely love of two women divided by class but empowered by the ideals and practice of radical Christianity. This 'intimate history' transforms conventional narratives about charity, class, gender, and labor in the early twentieth century."—Lynn Hollen Lees, University of Pennsylvania

"Seth Koven's luminous account of the unlikely chemistry between Muriel Lester (self-abasing slumming lady) and Nellie Dowell (self-improving match factory girl) sheds new light on their shared milieu of Edwardian Christian radicalism: a counterculture of religious modernism founded on a theology of love, with revolutionary opportunities for pacifism, feminism, and anti-imperialism. A rare and brilliant history of the ethical subject."—Leela Gandhi, Brown University

"This powerful, moving, and innovative book tells the story of the relationship between two women—one a 'grande dame of global pacifism and social justice' and the other a 'Cockney cosmopolitan' who worked as a match girl in the United Kingdom and abroad. Koven brilliantly achieves exactly what he sets out to do: dissolve the boundaries between 'lives' and 'histories.'"—Deborah Epstein Nord, Princeton University

"This is a beautifully written and researched book, one that will stand as one of the best books in modern British history for years to come. The Match Girl and the Heiress is destined to become an instant classic. There is no other book like it."—Sharon Marcus, author of Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

"How ought one to live in a society defined by inequality? Through his subjects, Nellie Dowell and Muriel Lester, Koven tells a detective story of the heart with deep resonance for today's debates about poverty and wealth, class and empire, Christianity and capitalism, gender formation and same-sex desire, the welfare state and voluntarism. The Match Girl and the Heiress is a methodologically and conceptually inspiring work, with a fine sense of empathy, balanced by shrewdly calibrated assessments of motives and consequences."—Deborah Cohen, author of Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain

Editorial Reviews

…inspired by a cache of private writings that reveal a profound relationship between two women activists, [Koven] delves deep into the historical record to build an intriguing story of cross-class devotion…

The New York Times Book Review - Nina Burleigh

★ 11/17/2014
Rutgers University historian Koven (Slumming) has fashioned a scholarly yet highly readable jewel that tackles the big issues of early-20th-century England in an intimate way. Through the lives of Muriel Lester and Nellie Dowell, he brilliantly illuminates the growth of global capitalism, a revolutionary “God is love” Christian theology, war and pacifism, feminism and sexuality, and class and gender relations. Lester grew up in comfort, the beloved daughter of a self-made man who amassed a fortune in shipbuilding and took his Christian obligations seriously. Dowell, no less a beloved daughter, was born into a working-class family that was doing well until her father, a mariner, died at sea. In Dickensian fashion, the Dowells slipped further down the economic ladder, until Nellie was taken away to an industrial school to prepare her for a life of factory work. Meanwhile, Lester played with dolls and received an education, which led her into social justice projects. Dowell took a job in a match factory, joined the Factory Girls Club, and happened to meet Muriel. They forged an intimate friendship and partnership, “engaged in social, religious, and political work.” Against the socio-economic complexities of the Victorian Era, Koven astutely shows how the pair “strove to make themselves—and modern life—moral.” Illus. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

2014-10-22
Muriel Lester (1885-1968) was one of the best-known faces of the 20th century's global peace movement. Koven (History/Rutgers Univ.; Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, 2004) explains her strong connection to London's East End through her friend, orphan Nellie Dowell.It was Nellie who opened doors and taught Muriel the best way to help the poor of Bow and Poplar. Muriel and Nellie worked together to recast Victorian values and reimagine gender and class. Muriel based her social justice brand of Christianity on Tolstoy's interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. Muriel and her sister, Doris, fully supported by their wealthy father, moved to Bromley by Bow in 1912 and established Kingsley House in 1915. There, they provided Bible classes, a Montessori school, an adult school for men, a baby clinic and an alcohol-free pub. They lived next door to Nellie and her mother, though the author has no record of when they met. Nellie spent five years of her childhood in a Poor Law school before she became a match factory girl. She was valued and sent first to Wellington, New Zealand, and then to Sweden to teach workers the company's methods. However, her years of poverty and recurring bouts of rheumatic fever shortened her career and her life. Illness plagued both women, and Muriel insisted her "Prayer of Relaxation" enabled her recovery from a breakdown in 1916. Nellie served Muriel faithfully, and her letters show how she wished for an exclusive friendship. The author dwells excessively on the question of whether these two women were lesbians or chaste romantic friends. The real story here is the idealistic work of Muriel, Doris and Nellie as they fought for universal justice and economic equality. Koven demonstrates how these women changed the world's attitude toward the poor.

Kirkus Reviews

"Koven's book is finely researched and detailed as it traces the cross‑fertilisation of nonconformist religious movements with those of the early socialist, pacifist and suffragette elements of East London's political radicalism."

The New English Landscape

Winner of the 2015 Stansky Prize, North American Conference on British Studies

Winner of the 2015 NAVSA Best book of the Year Award, North American Victorian Studies Association

One of HistoryBuff.com’s 10 Can’t-Miss History Books of 2015

From the Publisher