The Match Girl and the Heiress / Seth Koven.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Koven, Seth, 1958- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Great Britain--Social conditions--20th century.

Great Britain.

Feminists--Great Britain--Biography.

Feminists.

Social reformers--Great Britain--Biography.

Social reformers.

Women social reformers--Great Britain--Biography.

Women social reformers.

Lester, Muriel, 1883-1968.

Lester, Muriel.

Dowell, Nellie, 1876-1923.

Dowell, Nellie.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (465 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE. Victorian Childhoods and Two Victorian Children

CHAPTER TWO. Capitalism, from Below and Down Under THE GLOBAL TRAFFIC IN MATCHES AND MATCH GIRLS

CHAPTER THREE. "Being a Christian" in Edwardian Britain

CHAPTER FOUR. Body Biographies in War and Peace

CHAPTER FIVE. Love and Christian Revolution

Manuscripts and Archival Collections

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 357-434) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9780691171319

0691171319

9781400865420

1400865425

OCLC:

894790411