Muriel Lester and Nellie Dowell lived in the same city,
but
worlds apart. Muriel was the daughter of a wealthy Baptist
shipbuilder, while Nellie was a Cockney slum girl. Seth
Coven has carefully researched their lives, friendship and
shared work, to create this account of THE MATCH GIRL AND
THE HEIRESS. I found it fascinating and there is always
something new to learn.
Nellie's father died at sea in 1881 when she was five, and
her mother had five children to provide for - gradually
all
her goods went to the pawnbroker. Then the children were
taken from their mother to poorhouses, seeing their mother
only one Sunday a year. Trinity House, which controls
Britain's lighthouses and shipping on the Thames, provided
a pittance from its charitable trust for widows of seamen.
Mrs Dowell also worked in a match factory. But women
simply
did not earn as much as men and could not hope to support
a
family. Child labour - in workhouses or factories - came
cheaply, just as it did with slave children in America or
child brides in India. These circumstances were examined
by Muriel Lester, who was born in 1883. Many well-off
ladies considered it a religious and charitable duty to
become involved in the lives of less well-off women and
children.
New Women in the 1890s, were unmarried educated middle-
class women with a measure of independence. They looked
into social issues and spoke to journalists, promoting
trade unions. These were the forerunners of the
suffragettes. By contrast Nellie Dowell was selling
vespas
and lucifers aged twelve. White phosphorous was used in
making matches and an occupational disease was phossie
jaw.
When strikes crippled R Bell & Co. the match factory, and
the issue of transporting products to Britain's colonies
arose, Nellie, aged twenty-three, was one of the girls
sent to New
Zealand to make matches to sell there. Nellie later worked
in Sweden and when she returned to London, supported her
own mother. Muriel Lester, who met Nellie in the early
1900s, wrote her biography when they worked together as
friends. Muriel herself was the subject of much writing,
since she crusaded on behalf of the poor, was a friend of
Ghandi, and when she was left a legacy, donated it to a
trust for the people in the area where her father had made
his money.
I found the story presented in THE MATCH GIRL AND THE
HEIRESS is no simple social history, but a detailed
rendering of the times from which many novels are now
drawn. We can see the early globalisation of manufacturing
and trade, the migration of labour, mobilising of trade
unions. Laws were changed, such as raising the age of
consent from thirteen to sixteen, due to women raising
awareness of the ease with which hungry girls selling
matches on street corners could be induced to sell
themselves. Conditions in New Zealand's factories were a
vast improvement over London's. Seth Coven who has poured
considerable research into this work, has given us much
food for thought.
I have only skimmed over the story of these two women, who
remained close friends until Nellie's death, so I hope I
have encouraged you to read their highly individual story
and come to understand the lives of our fore-runners
better. THE MATCH GIRL AND THE HEIRESS deserves a
thorough
read and is both entertaining and thought-provoking.
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.
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