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

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.

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).