| Description |
1 online resource |
| Contents |
Cover; the Match Girl and the Heiress; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; CHAPTER ONE Victorian Childhoods and Two Victorian Children; The Education of Nellie Dowell; The Apprenticeship of Muriel Lester; Conclusions: The Challenges of Unlearning; CHAPTER TWO Capitalism, from Below and Down Under: The Global Traffic in Matches and Match Girls; The Work of the Match Girl in Victorian Culture; How Match Factory Women Became Match Girls; Match Girls' Militant: Why the Bell's Match Factory Strike of 1893/94 Failed |
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Metropolitan Match Girls Abroad: Immoral Circulations of Matches and Match GirlsConclusions; CHAPTER THREE "Being a Christian" in Edwardian Britain; "God Is Love"; Foundational Fables, Ethical Awakening; God's Empire; From Paupers to Citizens; Conclusions; CHAPTER FOUR Body Biographies in War and Peace; Taking Nellie's Temperature; Narrating Nellie; "You don't look near so well really"; Muriel Lester's Spiritual Therapeutics; Bodies at War; Grammars of Difference, Erotics of Illness in Nellie's Letters to Muriel; "Why it is I don't know"; Conclusions: Dialects for the Heart; CHAPTER FIVE |
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Love and Christian RevolutionHenry Lester's Gift; Feminisms at War; Reconciliation and Christian Revolution; "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you"; Telling the Truth, Becoming an Heiress; Conclusions; Afterlives; Manuscript Sources; Notes; Index |
| 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 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"-- Provided by publisher |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
In English |
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Print version record |
| Subject |
Dowell, Nellie, 1876-1923.
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Lester, Muriel, 1883-1968.
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| SUBJECT |
Dowell, Nellie, 1876-1923 fast |
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Lester, Muriel, 1883-1968 fast |
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Lester, Muriel 1883-1968 gnd |
| Subject |
Women social reformers -- Great Britain -- Biography
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Feminists -- Great Britain -- Biography
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HISTORY -- Europe -- Great Britain.
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HISTORY -- Social History.
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HISTORY -- Europe -- Great Britain.
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Feminists
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Social conditions
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Women social reformers
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Frau
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Kapitalismus
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Christentum
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Feminister.
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| SUBJECT |
Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 20th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85056944
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| Subject |
Great Britain
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London
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| Genre/Form |
Biographies
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
1400865425 |
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9781400865420 |
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