The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

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 soul mates 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography

464 pages, Hardcover

First published December 4, 2014

Reviews

[Clare O'Beara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muriel Lester and Nellie Dowell are the subjects of this biography. Their tales are told against a well-presented, thoroughly researched backdrop of the 1890s and early 1900s in London and further afield.

Muriel was well-off, the daughter of a ship-builder. Nellie was the daughter of a sailor who drowned at sea, so that she and her siblings were taken from their mother into a poorhouse until she could get employment with the match firm where her mother worked. Women were not able to earn as much as men and could not support a family.

In her early twenties Nellie was sent by R Bell & Co, the firm, which faced strikes over low pay, bad working conditions and dangerous use of phosphorous, to make matches in New Zealand. The authorities here had read of the London working conditions and were determined not to allow such deplorable situations to arise, so Nellie was much better off. The firm saved by not exporting matches long distance, yet the materials to make them had to be imported from various countries.

Muriel like many New Women of the time was educated, well-off, in no hurry to marry and raised with Christian values. She and others went out to investigate social conditions, working women, factories and disease. They spoke with journalists and encouraged unions. Muriel met Nellie when the worker returned to London via Scandinavia. She wrote Nellie's biography, leaning on the fact of her childhood having been stolen from her. The two women remained close friends and Muriel travelled widely and became famous, a friend of Ghandi and ardent campaigner for human rights and women's rights.

This book is a great reflection of the wider times and while not a light read will draw in anyone who wants to know more about the changes in our modern world.

[Nicole Overmoyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reasons to pick up this book:

1. detailed history of Victorian England, especially in relation to Poor Laws and charitable endeavors
2. the contradiction of the poor girl (Nellie) and the rich girl (Muriel)
3. a reality compared with the Victorian England fiction lovers know from Dickens & co.

Reasons this book was not for me:

1. little is known about Nellie, save for what Muriel later wrote so the parts about Nellie turn into long treatises on generalities
2. the author seems to have trouble filling the gaps in the specifics as related to Nellie and Muriel, taking a wandering path from Point A to Point B
3. it is extremely heavy on the Christianity of the time, and yet seems to pay little attention to it at the same time, possibly because it has to balance Catholicism and Protestantism in it's critique

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest & original review.

[Robert Nurden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguing insight into early twentieth century social history in London East End

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through the story of the relationship between poor match factory worker Nellie Dowell and middle-class Muriel Lester, Koven explores the colliding worlds of rich and poor in East London and the growth of Christian philanthropy in the 1890s and early 1900s. Against a backdrop of the beginnings of the labour movement and trades unionism, Christian socialism and pacifism, this is a fascinating account of the lives and times of a particular group of “do-gooders” who in all sincerity and with great conviction worked for better social conditions. Meticulously researched and based on many original documents, this is a scholarly and academic book, but accessible to the general reader and always readable. I certainly learnt a lot and was intrigued to find out about such indomitable characters as Nellie Dowell, who has now deservedly found a voice.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's pretty serious nonfiction but shows two perspectives on the late 19th early 20th century socialist-nonconformist-labor-pacifist-suffrage movements. Two close women friends, one poor, one upper middle class who worked together in the East End slums of London to improve conditions and bring about "heaven on earth".

[Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting information, impressive research, but much material is unintergrated into main narrative.

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good indeed.

[Joyce]

Reviewed in The Christian Science Monitor