Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2014
An 1894 biography of St. Francis of Assisi was a milestone in the lives of two young urban missionaries. They were “Sisters of the People” at the dynamic and progressive Wesleyan Methodist West London Mission in Soho, a poor and overcrowded central London district. Sister Mary Neal and Sister Emmeline Pethick would eventually distinguish themselves nationally, Emmeline as a militant suffragist in tandem with her husband Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, and later as a feminist and peace activist; Mary as a music educator and folklorist. French protestant clergyman Paul Sabatier's scholarly but lyrical biography of Francis enthralled the mission's leaders, including the superintendent, Hugh Price Hughes. Francis's rejection of his family's wealth, his insistence on absolute poverty for himself and his followers, and his devotion to the poor presented a compelling model of Christian service, one that the two young Sisters found especially exciting. They resigned the Sisterhood in 1895 to live cheaply in workers' housing just north of their old turf. This decision launched them into a national community of Franciscan-inspired settlers, philanthropists, “simple livers,” and collective farmers—offering us a new perspective on fin de siècle social activism.
1 The book itself and its remarkable success in Britain and elsewhere will be discussed below. Paul Sabatier, Vie de S. François (Paris: Fischbacher, 1894)Google Scholar; Sabatier, Paul, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Houghton, Louise (New York: Charles Scribners, 1894)Google Scholar.
2 Neither woman has been the subject of a real biography. Their autobiographies are: Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline, My Part in a Changing World (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938)Google Scholar; and Mary Neal, As a Tale That is Told, unpublished manuscript (London: Cecil Sharp House). Neal also published two autobiographical essays: “The Broken Law,” Adelphi 3rd ser., 16 (January 1940): 147–150Google Scholar; and “A Victorian Childhood,” Adelphi 16 (April 1940): 278–286Google Scholar. The first of the Adelphi articles is an attempt to comprehend the break between her and Cecil Sharp that thwarted Mary's promising career in folk dance. Neal's great grandniece, Lucy Neal, OBE, curates an excellent and expanding website and accompanying program devoted both to Neal's biography, and to music and dance education in the present: http://maryneal.org. On Neal and Cecil Sharp, see note 180 below.
On Pethick, there is strikingly little. Harrison, Brian in Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)Google Scholar includes a detailed chapter on the Pethick-Lawrences, which says relatively little about Emmeline's years at the WLM, or about her political life after suffrage. Brittain, Vera's biography of Fred (Pethick-Lawrence: A Portrait [London: Allen & Unwin], 1963)Google Scholar has a few pages on Emmeline's life before she and Lawrence met in 1899 and on the Pethick-Lawrences' meeting and marriage. Also: Balshaw, June, “Sharing the Burden: The Pethick-Lawrences and Women's Suffrage,” in The Men's Share? Masculinities, Male Support and Women's Suffrage in Britain, 1890–1920, ed. Eustance, Claire and John, Angela V. (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1997), 135–157Google Scholar.
3 The main sources for this study are the mission's voluminous publications: Advance!, the mission's monthly illustrated magazine of about thirty pages; Hughes's detailed annual reports; books by mission members; accounts of the mission in the general press; the generous coverage of the Sisters in the Methodist Times; and autobiographies by each woman, Mary's unpublished. Correspondence between Mary Neal and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence has not yet been found. Many of the Pethick-Lawrence papers were destroyed after Emmeline's death by Fred and his second wife, the former Helen Cragg, a fellow suffragist. Some of these might have provided useful material on the period before their marriage; the material that disappeared included the manuscript version of Emmeline's autobiography, which was much longer than the published version. See Brittain, Vera, Pethick-Lawrence: A Portrait (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963)Google Scholar, 8. The correspondence between Fred and Emmeline in the early years of their relationship, from 1899, does survive, partly in digital form, at Trinity College, Cambridge.Though mission publications were written for a national Methodist clientele and aimed at fund raising and sustaining the mission's prestige, their sheer variety gives them considerable credibility. Mary and Emmeline were frequent, and sometimes candid and self-revealing, contributors to Advance!. Hughes and the staff members he appointed as editors of Advance! appear to have exercised relatively light censorship. The exclamation point in the title was dropped in 1897 when the newsletter resumed publication after a break of over a year—and indeed the magazine was more lackluster after Mary and Emmeline's departure. Mission publications gain credibility as historical sources because they are extremely numerous and have a variety of authors, editors, and purposes. The Sisters are also frequently documented in contemporary newspapers and periodicals.
4 Neal, As a Tale That is Told, 69. The accounts of Emmeline's arrival at the mission are inconsistent. Emmeline gives no date in her autobiography but notes that she left after “four or five years” (Changing World, 95).
5 The peak in number, 40, was reached in 1894; 25 or 30 were more usual. A handful of the Sisters were Anglicans in the 1890s, according to Mary Edith Gresham (Sister Edith), one of the founding Sisters, who was herself an Anglican. Mary Edith Gresham, interview by Edward Aves, January 1898, Harvester Microfiche, Reel 68, B242, Charles Booth Manuscripts Collection, London School of Economics Archive Division, 202–225. She believed that she was the only Sister whose “call” was “a social one, rather than for the saving of souls.” Labour and Life of the People of London, photocopy of Microfilm Reel 68, B242, Johns Hopkins University Library, Baltimore, Md.
6 See Hughes, Katherine Price, The Story of My Life (London: Epworth, 1945)Google Scholar, for accounts of her childhood friendship with Price Hughes, her marriage, home life, children, friendships, and years of widowhood after 1902.
7 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 72; Neal, As a Tale That is Told, 45. The most comprehensive study of women in Methodism is Lloyd, Jennifer M.'s Women and the Shaping of British Methodism: Persistent Preachers, 1807-1907 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. A short summary of Methodist women's activism from Wesley's time is provided by Hempton, David, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 137–150Google Scholar; and Walker, Pamela J., “‘With Fear and Trembling’: Women, Preaching and Spiritual Authority,” in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800–1940s, eds. Morgan, Sue and deVries, Jacqueline (London: Routledge, 2010), 94–116Google Scholar.
8 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 66–67; Mary Neal, As a Tale That is Told, 34. The authorship of the Bitter Cry is still disputed but is usually assigned to the Congregationalist Rev. Andrew Mearns. Hughes and Mearns were on friendly terms and the latter, as head of the London Congregational Union, donated a disused chapel, Craven Hall, to the WLM. Mearns, Andrew, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, ed. Wohl, Anthony (1883; reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1970)Google Scholar.
9 Neal, As a Tale That is Told, 284-85; Neal, “Victorian Childhood.”
10 See Clare Midgley's brief demonstration of this position in “Women, Religion, and Reform,” in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures, 138–158, and on women in the anti-slavery movement, Midgley, Clare's Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar. On women-centered theology, Julie Melnyk, “Women, Writing and the Creation of Theological Cultures,” in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures, 43. See the following studies of religion and women's activism: Summers, Anne, Female Lives, Moral States: Women Religion and Public Life in Britain 1800–1930 (Newbury, Berks.: Threshold, 2000)Google Scholar; Hewitt, Nancy, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Mumm, Susan, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
11 Figures on Catholics in England and Wales from Hoppen, K. Theodore, The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846–1886 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, 428, table 12.1.
12 Appelbaum, Patricia, “St. Francis in the Nineteenth Century,” Church History 78, no. 4 (Dec. 2009): 792–813Google Scholar. Appelbaum presents Sabatier's book in the context of a longer phase of Protestant interest in St. Francis that began with the 1830s and involved the rediscovery of medieval art and architecture as much as religion.
13 Appelbaum, “St. Francis in the Nineteenth Century,” 808.
14 See Matthews-Jones, Lucinda, “St Francis of Assisi and the Making of Settlement Masculinity, 1883–1914,” in What is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, eds. Arnold, John H. and Brady, Sean (Palgrave Macmillan 2011): 285–302Google Scholar. See also Koven, Seth, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, ch. 5; and Harris, Alana, “Building the Docklands Settlement: Gender, Gentility, and the Gentry in East London, 1894–1939,” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 9, no. 1 (March 2013): 60–84Google Scholar.
15 Yeo, Stephen, “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism. Britain, 1883–1896,” History Workshop Journal 4 (Autumn 1977): 5–56Google Scholar; Holroyd, Michael, Bernard Shaw, vol. 1, 1856–1898: The Search for London (New York: Random House, 1988)Google Scholar, 270.
16 The pioneering studies of middle-class women as urban explorers stressed the novelty and excitement, along with the dangers, offered by slum observation or service. See Vicinus, Martha, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Nord, Deborah E., Walking the Victorian Streets; Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Walkowitz, Judith, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar. For further discussion of the motives of women as slummers, see Koven, Slumming, 2004, ch. 5; Ross, Ellen, ed., Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1–39Google Scholar; and Mahood, Linda, Feminism and Voluntary Action: Eglantyne Jebb and Save the Children, 1876-1928 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)Google Scholar. A recent variation on slummers highlights exchanges among women philanthropists, and between philanthropists and their clients as in Rappaport, Jill, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Koven, Seth's The Match Girl and the Heiress (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. Heretofore I will use the term “slummers,” which originated in the era under discussion, with implied quotation marks. The phenomenon itself and the term are discussed fully by Seth Koven, introduction to Slumming, 2004.
17 Sabatier, Life of St. Francis, 279.
18 Ibid., 3, 68–70. See also Heimann, Mary, “St Francis and Modern English Sentiment,” in Christianity and Community in the West: Essays for John Bossy, ed. Ditchfield, Simon (Aldershot: Ashgate)Google Scholar, 200, 278–79. Bible verses are from the Revised Standard Version.
19 Armstrong, Edward A., Saint Francis: Nature Mystic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)Google Scholar, 218.
20 See Betensky, Carolyn, “Philanthropy, Desire, and the Politics of Friendship in The Princess Casamassima,” Henry James Review 22, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 147–162Google Scholar
21 Quoted in Koven, Seth “The ‘Sticky Sediment’ of Daily Life: Radical Domesticity, Revolutionary Christianity, and the Problem of Wealth in Britain from the 1880s to the 1930s,” Representations 120, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 45Google Scholar.
22 Addams quoted in Cracraft, James, Two Shining Souls: Jane Addams, Leo Tolstoy, and the Quest for Global Peace (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2012)Google Scholar, 37; Friederichs, “Hulda, “‘I Was in Prison’—The Story of Miss Honnor Morten's Wonderful Work,” The Young Woman 8 (October 1899–September 1900): 304Google Scholar. Cracraft's interesting book demonstrates Addams's fascination with Tolstoy's ideas and her short-lived effort to observe “bread labor,” as discussed in this paper's later sections. Tolstoy had hundreds of other friends and followers among American social reformers, anti-imperialists, and pacifists.
23 Cocks, H. G., “Religion and Spirituality,” in Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, eds. Cocks, H. G. and Houlbrook, Matt (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)Google Scholar, 163.
24 Carpenter, along with other defenders of homosexuality like Whitman and John Addington Symonds, insisted that homosexuals might be leaders in the evolution of cross-class friendships and of a new kind of community in general. See Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, ch. 3.
25 For some examples of this trend, seen from the 1850s and before: Wilson, Linda, “‘Constrained by Zeal’: Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century Nonconformist Churches,” Journal of Religious History 23, no. 2 (June 1999): 185–202Google Scholar; Lloyd, Jennifer M., “Women Preachers in the Bible Christian Connexion,” Albion 36, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 451–481Google Scholar. Other branches of Methodism also had sisterhoods: several of the other Forward Movement (Wesleyan) missions, the Primitive Methodists, and the Free Methodists. See Clive Douglas Field, “Methodism in Metropolitan London, 1850–1920, A Social and Sociological Study” (Ph. D. dissertation, Oxford University, 1974), 78.
26 White, Jerry, London in the Nineteenth Century: 'a human awful wonder of God' (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 139–145Google Scholar; Ross, Ellen, “Missionaries and Jews in Soho: ‘Strangers within Our Gates,’” Journal of Victorian Culture 15, no. 2 (August 2010): 226–238Google Scholar. See especially Walkowitz, Judith, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012)Google Scholar, ch. 1.
27 For example, they encounter prostitution of several grades, some residences of prostitutes, massage parlors, legal and illegal clubs, and public drunkenness. Constable R. J. French, interview with George Duckworth, October 21, 1898, Charles Booth Online Archive, http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgibin/do.pl?sub=retrieve_catalogue_record&args=b355,102.
28 Sherwell was an energetic and prolific writer on the politics of poverty and of alcohol in the 1890s and 1900s, publishing studies in Advance! about local problems, such as lodging houses. After his departure from the mission along with Emmeline and Mary, he published Life in West London: A Study in Contrast (London: Methuen, 1897)Google Scholar, which he dedicated to them; he also published The Temperance Problem and Social Reform (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1899)Google Scholar.
29 Hempton, Methodism, 191–192. Methodists did not succeed in capturing this new constituency, and a number of historians have argued that the expansion of churches of all denominations into extensive social service networks for poor constituents actually hastened their decline. This is Hempton's view, which is shared by Cox, Jeffrey in The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.
30 Hugh Price Hughes, “The Story of Our Working During 1896–7,” West London Mission annual report, London Metropolitan Archives, 16. Mission documents are part of the London Metropolitan Archive series of nonconformist religious bodies (4474). These annual report records cover 1888 through 1988. Hughes's peer, J. Scott Lidgett, whose 1891 Bermondsey Settlement was also a Forward Movement-inspired institution, pointedly called his a “settlement” rather than a mission, on the grounds that he intended the address the community's “social” needs over its spiritual ones. See Lidgett, J. Scott, My Guided Life (London: Methuen, 1936), 110–117Google Scholar.
31 Quoted in Hughes, Hugh Price, “Our Second Anniversary,” Advance! (December 1889), 44Google Scholar. On his rejection of the East London Mission appointment (which was accepted by Peter Thompson), see Walters, Arthur, Hugh Price Hughes: Pioneer and Reformer (London: Robert Culley, 1907)Google Scholar, 68.
32 There were about 450,000 Wesleyan Methodists in Britain in 1890, according to Oldstone-Moore, Christopher, Hugh Price Hughes: Founder of a New Methodism, Conscience of a New Nonconformity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 252. See also Bagwell, Phillip S., Outcast London: A Christian Response: The West London Mission of the Methodist Church 1887–1987 (London: Epworth Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Brown, Callum G., The Death of Christian Britain; Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001), 54–56Google Scholar; McLeod, Hugh, Religion and Society in England: 1850–1914 (New York: St. Martins, 1996)Google Scholar, 174. On theories of the decline of religious belief in general, and of Methodism in particular, see Hempton, Methodism, 189–209.
33 Bagwell, Outcast London, 8.
34 Ibid., 16. Booth pointed out in his Third Series that few of the Soho and Fitzrovia poor attended the Sunday service at St. James's Hall. While some young workers “employed in the great shops” were among the Sunday congregants, most came from outside of the district. Thus the mission actually did little to remedy “the spiritual destitution of West Central London,” in Booth's opinion. See Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People in London, 3rd ser, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1902), 194–195Google Scholar.
35 Percy Alden, warden of Mansfield House settlement in Canning Town, uses this term in his entry in Mudie-Smith, Richard's, Religions Life of London (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1904)Google Scholar, 42. Such churches were common from the 1880s. See McLeod, Hugh, “Thews and Sinews: Nonconformity and Sport,” in Modern Christianity and Cultural Aspirations, eds. Bebbington, David. W. and Larsen, Timothy (London: Sheffield Academic, 2003), 28–46Google Scholar. See also Erdozain, Dominic's highly skeptical discussion of this approach, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2010), 191–198Google Scholar. William Booth of the Salvation Army championed social services as ways of occupying the leisure time of the members, keeping them both from harm's way and from disputes over doctrine, which he saw as the “poison of hell.” See Phillips, Paul T., Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 179.
36 Oldstone-Moore, Hugh Price Hughes, 340.
37 The term, describing the way evangelical urgency transformed the humanitarian issue of slavery in the eighteenth century, is cited by Erdozain in Problem of Pleasure, 67.
38 Dorothea Price Hughes, Hughes's daughter, reports that Hughes said he invented the term. See The Life of Hugh Price Hughes By His Daughter, 3rd ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905) 357Google Scholar. See also Helmstadter, Richard, “The Nonconformist Conscience,” in Religion in Victorian Britain, ed. Parsons, Gerald (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1988), 4: 61–95Google Scholar, 94.
39 Oldstone-Moore, Hugh Price Hughes, 338–339; Stead, W. T., “Character Sketch of Hugh Price Hughes,” Review of the Churches 1, no. 1 (Oct. 1891): 43–44Google Scholar.
40 On the development of incarnational theology, see Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 5–6Google Scholar, 302, 334–336; Helmstadter, “Nonconformist Conscience,” 84–85; and Oldstone-Moore, Hugh Price Hughes, 111–112.
41 Hughes called Christ a social reformer who “came to save the Nation as well as the individual.” See the discussion in Oldstone-Moore, Hugh Price Hughes, 173–174.
42 Munson, James, The Nonconformists: In Search of a Lost Culture (London: SPCK, 1991)Google Scholar, l37.
43 Quoted in Oldstone-Moore, Hugh Price Hughes, 112.
44 “Sister Mary's Report,” WLM annual report (1889), 69. In discussing the amusements churches began to deploy to attract congregations, Erdozain does not mention dancing in particular, though it was a burning issue with the Nonconformist-sponsored girls' clubs. See Problem of Pleasure, 68–72. John Wesley's 1743 Rules of Society rejected ungodly amusements for Christians. In the early nineteenth century drinking, card-playing, “feasts,” theater-going, even children's games and amusements were proscribed by the governing Methodist Conference. The WLM encouraged games for children and even adults (such as the elderly workhouse residents who were regularly entertained with musical chairs), but nothing that involved gambling, not even charity lotteries.
45 The quotation by Mary is in a pamphlet she wrote after Emmeline's marriage called “My Pretty Maid,” Cecil Sharp Library, maryneal.org/object/6026/chapter1003. See also Sister Emmeline, “The Girls' Club,” Methodist Times [hereafter MT] (October 6, 1892): 1016.
46 Sister Mary, “The ‘Sisters of the People’ and their Work,” Advance! (October 1890): 9.
47 The first classes were formed in the 1740s. Other aspects of Methodist administration are summarized by Hempton, Methodism, 78. West London Mission, St James Hall Enquirey Book, 1889–1895, London Metropolitan Archives. Mary helped in the Enquirey Room throughout 1893; her last appearance there appears to be in March 1894, while March 3, 1895 was Emmeline's last appearance.
48 Evelyn Bunting was a daughter of Forward Movement activist and philanthropist Percy William Bunting, who, in turn, was a grandson of the early Methodist leader Jabez Bunting (1779–1858). He was a steward at the mission and its treasurer. Percy Bunting's sister Sarah Maclardie Amos, a close friend of Katherine Price Hughes since her teens, was a frequent participant in mission events.
49 For example: “The Fellowship Reunion, Miss Mary Neal,” Votes for Women (June 11, 1913): 606; Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, “Deliverance to the Captives,” Votes for Women (December 9, 1910): 160; “The Faith That is in Us: A Verbatim Report of the Speech by Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence at the Aldwych Theater,” Votes for Women (April 23, 1909): 577–79.
50 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 75; Marcus, Sharon, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, 5.
51 Maltz, Diana, “Ardent Service: Female Eroticism and New Life Ethics in Gertrude Dix's The Image Breakers (1900),” Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 2 (May 2012): 5Google Scholar.
52 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 74; Laurence Housman, foreword, As a Tale is Told, by Neal, 66.
53 Sister Mary, “The Cleveland Hall Girls' Clubs,” WLM annual report (1894), 102–104.
54 Sister Emmeline, “The Girls' Club,” MT (October 6, 1892): 1016; Sister Mary, “The Cleveland Hall Girls' Clubs,” WLM annual report (1894), 102.
55 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 106–107, 79.
56 Sister Emmeline, “The Girls' Club,” MT (October 6, 1892): 1016.
57 Pethick, Emmeline, “Working Girls' Clubs,” in University and Social Settlements, ed. Reason, Will (London: Methuen, 1898)Google Scholar, 103.
58 Steedman, Carolyn, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860–1931 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.
59 “The Girls' Club,” WLM annual report (1889), 47.
60 “The Girls' Club,” WLM annual report (1887), 68.
61 Not in Lily Montague's nearby club for Jewish girls, however. Montague promoted drama but disapproved of the girls' passion for dancing, especially in public dance halls. See Walkowitz, Nights Out, ch. 6.
62 Fellow Soho girls' club head Maude Stanley actively encouraged dancing, certain that “the English girl has a natural love of dancing.” Other girls' club workers corroborated Stanley on the joy and energy the club girls brought to dancing. Stanley, Maude, Clubs for Working Girls (London: Macmillan, 1890)Google Scholar, 2, 112–123, 129. See also Hobart-Hampden, Albinia, “The Working Girl of To-Day,” The Nineteenth Century 43 (May 1888): 726Google Scholar; Gleig, A., “Some Account of a Slum,” Monthly Review 22, no. 66 (March 1906): 115–116Google Scholar.
63 Walkowitz, Nights Out, 189–190.
64 The Featherstone events are described in convincing detail in Anonymous, Bullets for Bread! The Featherstone Massacre. We Would Rather Be Shot Down Than Hungered to Death, 1896, London School of Economics Selected Pamphlets, http://www.jstor.org/stable/602/18559. Another account of the strike may be found in Olivier, Sydney, “The Miners' Battle and After,” Contemporary Review 64 (July 1893): 749–764Google Scholar.
65 Supporting clergy included Canon Shuttleworth, Canon Scott Holland, Dr. Parker, and the Rev. Bernard Snell. Support also came from the Lord Bishop of Wakefield, the Christian Social Union president Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott of Durham, and most of the clergymen of various denominations throughout the striking colliery region. On the clergy, see the letters in response to “The Coal War. The Shadow of the Angel of Death,” MT, (October 5, 1893), 684; and “The Christian Church and the Coal War,” Review of the Churches 5 (1893–1894): 153–159Google Scholar.
66 Moore, Robert, Pit-Men Preachers and Politics: The Effects of Methodism in a Durham Mining Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 37–38Google Scholar. The eight-hour day in mines was not at issue in this strike though the TUC, the SDF and a number of Fabian legislators had been proposing compromise bills for some time. See McBriar, A. M., Fabian Socialism and English Politics 1884–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 243–245Google Scholar.
67 Colls, Robert, The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield: Work, Culture and Protest, 1790–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 118–131Google Scholar.
68 “Annual Conference,” Leeds Mercury (January 18, 1894): 8.
69 “Notes of Current Events,” MT (October 5, 1893): 682; and “The Coal War: The Shadow of the Angel of Death,” MT (October 5, 1893): 684. The Daily Chronicle listed, inaccurately, “Sisters Mary Ellen and Emily.” See “Miners' Wives in London,” (October 2, 1893): 5.
70 He titled her “Sister Mary, Chaperone of the Miners' Wives,” and “Local Preacher” in “The Coal War, the Shadow of the Angel of Death,” MT (October 5, 1893): 684. He also referred gratefully to Mary's and the Sisters' general willingness to perform “every variety of service”—recognition that the strike support work was an unusual request.
71 Field, “Methodism in Metropolitan London,” 61. Women were accepted as full local preachers in 1918.
72 “Meetings in London,” Daily Chronicle (October 9, 1893): 5; “Pulpit References. Mr. Price Hughes on the Situation,” Daily Chronicle (October 9, 1893): 5.
73 “The Coal War: Women's Demonstration in St. James's Hall,” MT (November 9, 1893), 764.
74 “The Coal War,” MT (October 12, 1893): 695; “Pulpit References,” Daily Chronicle, (October 13, 1893), 5; and “Labour Movement,” Daily Chronicle (November 8, 1893), 5.
75 “Mass Demonstration in Hyde Park,” The Sun (October 16, 1893): 2–3.
76 Gallagher, Catherine, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, introduction and ch. 1; and Bruce, Steve, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar, 97. Full-fledged Franciscan James Adderley considered the “living wage” demand far too modest. See his “Social Aspects of the Gospel,” in Vox Clamantiuim: The Gospel of the People, comp. Andrew Reid (London: A. D. Innes, 1894)Google Scholar, 103. Adderley is discussed below.
77 Otter, Chris, “Liberty and Ecology: Resources, Markets and the British Contribution to the Global Environmental Crisis,” in The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, ed. Gunn, Simon and Vernon, James (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 184–188Google Scholar.
78 Ruskin, John, “Essay II: The Veins of Wealth,” in Unto this Last and Other Writings (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985)Google Scholar, 187, 189.
79 “Notes of Current Events,” MT (October 5, 1893): 682.
80 Quoted in Jones, Peter, The Christian Socialist Revival 1877–1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, 408. Keeble had contributed to the Methodist Times, but eventually ended his association with Hughes and the paper. Keeble was probably right about Hughes. See Hughes, Hugh Price, Social Christianity: Sermons Delivered in St. James's Hall, London (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1895)Google Scholar.
81 “West London Pulpit: The Coal War,” MT (October 12, 1893): 695. The mobilization of this concept in the major strikes of the 1880s is well presented by Macrosty, Henry W., “The Recent History of the Living Wage Movement,” Political Science Quarterly 13, no. 3 (September 1898): 413–441Google Scholar. The belief that wages had to follow prices had “been plunging the unions into ever deeper apathy from which they had begun to recover in the 1880s.”
82 Vernon, James, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, ch. 2.
83 “West London Pulpit: The Coal War,” MT (October 12, 1893): 695. Hughes knew and had read Ruskin. He had some, though not great, knowledge of the social thought of the 1860s and 1870s. In 1890, Katherine Price Hughes's WLM class had given her a New Year's gift of ten well-selected works of Ruskin, including Unto This Last. “‘The Sisters of the People’ and their Work,” Advance! (February 1890): 69.
84 Sister Mary, “The Present Crisis,” Advance! (December 1893): 179–180.
85 Ibid.
86 Sister Mary, “The Coal War: ‘Locked Out,’” MT (November 2, 1893): 749.
87 Maybelle Pearse, “The People's Drawing Room,” Advance! (March 1894): 36–38. Maybelle Pearse was Mark Guy Pearse's daughter and a close childhood friend of Emmeline.
88 Sister Emmeline, “Religion and Life,” Advance! (March 1894): 42–44.
89 Whitman defined Leaves of Grass as “a New Bible” that would inaugurate a new religion. See Simonson, Peter, “A Rhetoric for Polytheistic Democracy: Walt Whitman's ‘Poem of Many in One,’” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36, no. 4 (2003): 356Google Scholar.
90 Sister Kathleen, “The Play Hour,” Advance! (April 1895); 56–57.
91 “One of the Sisters,” “Notes by the Way,” Advance! (August 1894): 112; “Philanthropy and Poverty,” Advance! (August 1894), 117–119.
92 Sister Mary, “Notes on the Open Road,” Advance! (June 1895): 89.
93 White, William Hale, Mark Rutherford, 3rd ed. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923)Google Scholar, 18. White's background was Bedford Congregationalism. McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 36. See also Wolff, Robert Lee, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: Garland, 1977), 346–353Google Scholar, 368–378; Neal, As a Tale That is Told, 70–71.
94 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 95–96.
95 Neal, As a Tale That is Told, 69–70, 10, 96–97.
96 Arthur Sherwell, “The Work at Cleveland Hall,” WLM annual report (1894), 99.
97 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 96.
98 Vauchez, André, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. Cusato, Michael F. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 233–234Google Scholar.
99 Margaret Oliphant, a Methodist commissioned by the Sunday Library for Household Reading, published her sympathetic portrait of St. Francis in 1868, and urged readers to consider suspending their skepticism of the miracles associated with him. See Heimann, “St Francis and Modern English Sentiment,” 280–281, 285–287.
100 Munson, The Nonconformists, 5; Jennifer Lloyd (SUNY Brockport), personal communication with author (January 2012).
101 Yeo, Eileen Janes, “Protestant Feminists and Saints in Victorian Britain,” in Radical Femininity: Women's Self-Representation in the Public Sphere, ed. Yeo, Eileen Janes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 127–148Google Scholar; see also Appelbaum, “St. Francis in the Nineteenth Century.”
102 Josephine Butler, “Woman's Place in Church Work,” Review of the Churches 1 (October 1891–March 1892): 313–15.
103 Sabatier, Life of St. Francis, xxi-xxii, 279.
104 Vauchez, Francis of Assisi, 234–235.
105 Cunningham, Laurence S., Saint Francis of Assisi (Boston: Twayne, 1976)Google Scholar, 112.
106 Vauchez, Francis of Assisi, 236.
107 Sabatier, Life of St. Francis, 105, 125.
108 Ibid., 125–127. Francis's rejoicing in the natural world and recognition of God in nature in his own writing and in that of his immediate followers may have been aimed at the Cathars' condemnation of the material world as the territory of the devil (Cunningham, Saint Francis of Assisi, 67).
109 Robert Steele, “Sabatier's Life of Saint Francis,” The Academy (August 11, 1894): 97.
110 Vauchez, Francis of Assisi, 237; Talar, C. J. T., “Saint of Authority and the Saint of the Spirit: Paul Sabatier's ‘Vie de S. François d'Assise,’” Catholic Historical Review 82, no. 1 (January 1996): 23–24Google Scholar.
111 Heimann, “St. Francis and Modern English Sentiment,” 281–282.
112 G. Stringer Rowe, “St Francis of Assisi,” Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine (February 1895): 103–109.
113 Heimann, “St. Francis and Modern English Sentiment,” 282–285.
114 Chesterton, G. K., St. Francis of Assisi (1924; repr., London: Continuum, 2001)Google Scholar, 7.
115 Vauchez, Life of St. Francis, 238.
116 Hughes, Dorothea Price, The Life of Hugh Price Hughes By His Daughter, 3rd ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905)Google Scholar, 405.
117 Hugh Price Hughes, “The Real Francis of Assisi,” MT (January 17, 1895): 37.
118 “Francis of Assisi: Address at St. James's Hall,” MT (January 31, 1895): 69. Chesterton pointed to the particularity, the personal nature, of Francis's acts of generosity, which he contrasted favorably with a “general love of humanity.” Quoted in Cunningham, Saint Francis of Assisi, 68.
119 Dorothea Price Hughes, Life of Hugh Price Hughes, 405, 658–659. The men corresponded and met in the years that followed. Hughes had attended a lecture by Sabatier at Sion College just a few hours before his death from a stroke in November of 1902.
120 “Our Italian Journal XIV,” MT (January 3, 1895): 9. The report is dated December 29, Rome.
121 Dorothea Price Hughes, Life of Hugh Price Hughes, 412–413, 416, “another of Hughes's Italian letters.
122 Katherine's autobiography, The Story of My Life (London: Epworth, 1945)Google Scholar, written fifty years later, mentions all of the Italian sites she and her husband visited, and an uncomfortable night in a bug-infested bed at Monte Cassino, but says nothing about St. Francis or even about visiting Assisi (84–86). This significant omission certainly suggests that she found this episode painful.
123 Dorothea Price Hughes, Life of Hugh Price Hughes, 430.
124 Ibid.
125 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 145; Neal, As a Tale That Is Told, 70–71.
126 Kathleen to Emmeline, October 21, 1895 (London: Cecil Sharp House); also reproduced at the Mary Neal Project, Winchester University, http://www.maryneal.org/file-uploads/files/file/1895p11a--K-letter-to-EP-L.pdf. Emmeline refers to her (incorrectly, it appears) as Kathleen Fitzpatrick rather than Higgins, as she is listed on the website.
127 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 95.
128 Dorothea Price Hughes, The Life of Hugh Price Hughes, 430–432. Dorothea presents this remarkable story without comment.
129 Neal, As a Tale That is Told, 71–72.
130 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 96.
131 Ibid., 97. Their names are not found in mission publications for many years. Later, Emmeline, now the wealthy and titled Lady Pethick-Lawrence, visited on significant WLM occasions, such as Katherine's many milestone birthdays. It appears that Advance! was not published in late 1895 and in 1896 as no copies could be found anywhere for these years. In the description of the social work of Cleveland Hall there is a reference to the Mothers Meeting suffering due to a “change of Sisters” (WLM annual report [1896–1897], 25).
132 Oldstone-Moore, Hugh Price Hughes, 267, 270.
133 This is Oldstone-Moore's strongly held view (personal communication with author, January 2012).
134 Vicinus, Independent Women, 76–77; “Our Italian Journal XVII,” MT (January 24, 1895), 58.
135 Dorothea Price Hughes, Life of Hugh Price Hughes, 433.
136 Percy Alden, Mansfield Houses's warden, offered Emmeline and Mary a base there after their departure from the WLM.
137 See “Alden, Sir Percy (1865–1944),” Wales, Tim, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. Matthew, H. C. G. and Harrison, Brian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, October 2005, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39606. Alden was a Christian socialist, but not a clergyman. He remained at Mansfield House until 1901. Also: Seth Koven, “Culture and Poverty: The London Settlement House Movement 1870–1914,” (Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1987), 532, 548–549; Iris Dove, “Sisterhood or Surveillance? The Development of Working Girls' Clubs in London 1880-1939,” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Greenwich, 1996), 98.
138 Two of the Pearse children, Guy and Maybelle, were connected with Mansfield House by the late 1890s and another son, Warwick Guy Pearse, worked directly with Mary and Emmeline. See, for example, “A Day in Caning Town,” The Temple Magazine 1 (October 1896–September 1897): 274Google Scholar describing Maybelle's service on a committee with Percy Alden to organize an art exhibit. Maybelle also illustrated the article.
139 Dorothea Price Hughes, Life of Hugh Price Hughes, 435.
140 Munson, The Nonconformists, 173.
141 Price Hughes's work in both organizations is expertly discussed in Oldstone-Moore, Hugh Price Hughes, ch. 8.
142 Carpenter, Edward, “The Enchanted Thicket,” in England's Ideal and Other Papers on Social Subjects, revised ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895), 166–168Google Scholar, http://books.google.com/books?id=4zgZAAAAYAAJ&; Rowbotham, Sheila, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London: Verso, 2011)Google Scholar, 94.
143 Mahoney, Kristin Mary, “Haunted Collections: Vernon Lee and Ethical Consumption,” Criticism 48, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 5–6Google Scholar, 43–51.
144 Sister Kathleen, “From Slum to Meadow,” Advance! (June 1894): 86–87.
145 One good example of a large literature discussing this shift from the labor theory of value to the market is Gagnier, Regina, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
146 Sabatier, St. Francis, 85.
147 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, (New York: Modern Library, 1902), quoted in Koven, “Sticky Sediment,” 43.
148 Koven, “Sticky Sediment,” 62n118.
149 Matthews-Jones, “St Francis of Assisi,” 295–96.
150 “Wainright” is the spelling found in “History of the Church,” St Peter's London Docks Church, http://www.stpeterslondondocks.org.uk/60/history-of-the-church, and on the blue plaque at clergy House where he lived from 1884 to 1929. Dolling is a God-like figure in the autobiography of Joseph Williamson, raised in poverty in Poplar by a young widow. Williamson later became a high-church slum priest as well. See Williamson, Joseph, Father Joe: The Autobiography of Joseph Williamson of Poplar and Stepney (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963)Google Scholar, 22, 28. See also Phillips, Kingdom on Earth.
151 Foakes, Grace, Between High Walls: A London Childhood (Oxford: Pergamon, 1974)Google Scholar, 22; McIlhiney, David, A Gentleman in Every Slum: Church of England Missions in East London 1837–1914 (Allison Park, Penn.: Pickwick Publications, 1988), 32–37Google Scholar; Menzies, Lucy, Father Wainright, a Record (London: The Religious Book Club, 1949)Google Scholar, xviii, 52, 54–56.
152 “Adderley, James Granville (1861–1942),” N. C. Masterman, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/54554. Laurence Cunningham classes the Society of Divine Compassion as a full Franciscan order. See Saint Francis of Assisi: Performing the Gospel Life (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 126–127Google Scholar; “Crude” quoted in Koven, Slumming, 2.
153 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1894), ch. 4; Koven, Slumming, 1–3, 273; Adderley, James, In Slums and Society (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916), 78–79Google Scholar; Adderley, James, Francis, The Little Poor Man of Assisi, 4th imp. (London: Edward Arnold, 1902)Google Scholar. Adderley thanks Sabatier for concrete help with the book, which includes a preface by Sabatier on Francis's contemporary relevance.
154 Rowbotham, Sheila and Weeks, Jeffrey, Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis (London: Pluto, 1977), 68–71Google Scholar.
155 Rowbotham and Weeks, Socialism and the New Life, 146; Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, 90.
156 Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, 94. These ideas on home décor, food, clothing, and footwear are spelled out in “The Simplification of Life,” in England's Ideal.
157 See the remarkable discussion of Carpenter's strategy, criticized by some contemporaries, in Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, ch. 3.
158 Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, ch. 5. Carpenter's hatred of shoes was appreciated by his friends. Harold Cox sent him a pair of sandals from India, thus inaugurating this most ridiculed aspect of British left culture (Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, 99).
159 Rowbotham and Weeks, Socialism and the New Life, 67–70, 93, 96. She married fiery Scottish socialist John Bruce Glasier after assuring him that she didn't cook, had a hole in her stocking and had thick ankles. The two joined the Independent Labour Party in 1893.
160 Ford did complain to Carpenter about the effort it took to run such a house. Isabella Ford to Alf Mattison, May 4, 1897, quoted in Hannam, June, Isabella Ford (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar, 66.
161 Ford, Isabella, On the Threshold (London: Edward Arnold, 1895)Google Scholar, 30, 34, 30. Ch. 2 of Livesey, Ruth's Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar discusses Ford's novel's satire of young fin de siècle London socialists.
162 Cracraft, Two Shining Souls, ch. 2.
163 Rowbotham, Sheila, Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2010), 124–125Google Scholar; Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism, 64, 60–61. Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) was invited to visit by the Blacks' friend Amy Levy to archly de-politicize the Blacks' domestic situation as “extremely picturesque” (63).
164 Porrit, Arthur, The Best I Remember (London: Cassell and Company, 1922)Google Scholar, 135. Porritt wrote for The Christian World and other religious papers. For more on Morten, see Ross, Slum Travelers, and Koven, “Sticky Sediment,” 46–47.
165 Porritt, Best I Remember, 135. See also Stronach, Alice, “Women's Work in Social Settlements,” Windsor Magazine 36 (1912)Google Scholar.
166 Porritt, Best I Remember, 134.
167 “Miss Honnor Morten,”Votes for Women (July 18, 1913): 621; E. M. E., “Women's Settlements,” in Hearth and Home: An Illustrated Weekly Journal for Gentlewomen (Sept. 14, 1899), 717–718; Friederichs, “‘I Was in Prison,’” 306–07.
168 Morten's feminism—she supported equal pay for men and women teachers—generated ridicule among many board members, and her strong opposition to corporal punishment earned her the hostility of a number of teachers. See Martin, Jane, “Gender, the City, and the Politics of Schooling: Towards a Collective Biography of Women ‘Doing Good’ as Public Moralists in Victorian London,” Gender and Education 17, no. 2 (May 2005), 157Google Scholar.
169 Friederichs, “I Was in Prison,” 307.
170 The Brotherhood's 1898 English translations of Tolstoy's What is Art? and The Christian Teachin g were important in extending Tolstoy's influence. See Holman, J. J. de K., “The Purleigh Colony and Togetherness in the Late 1890s,” in Tolstoi and Britain, ed. Jones, W. Gareth (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 135–150Google Scholar. One of the colonies, Whiteway, a breakaway group from Purleigh, still existed in the 1990s (147). See Diana Maltz's absorbing discussion of Whiteway and its relationship with C. R. Ashbee's “simple” Guild of Handicraft not far away: “Living by Design: C. R. Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft and Two English an Communities, 1897–1907,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011): 409–426Google Scholar.
171 Alston, Charlotte, “Britain and the International Tolstoyan Movement, 1890–1910,” in Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, ed. Beasley, Rebecca and Bullock, Philip Ross (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. See also her Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014)Google Scholar.
172 W. H. G. Armytage, “J. C. Kenworthy and the Tolstoyan Communities in England,” in Tolstoi and Britain, 153–183. Aylmer Maude was a Fabian activist and also a defender of Marie Stopes. See “Maude, Aylmer (1858–1938),” William Baker in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34944.
173 Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, M.D., “Practical Philanthropy and the Simple Life,” The Quiver (June 1910): 771–72.
174 “H. Morten,” London Times (July 16, 1913): 11. Morten's smoking, presented as jaunty and advanced by journalists, was probably responsible for the throat cancer that caused her death in her early fifties. The biography was Morten, Honnor, The Life of St. Clare and her Order (London: A. C. Field, 1910)Google Scholar. The author listed is “A Mother Superior.”
175 Neal, As a Tale That is Told, 74.
176 Sherwell, West London, 151.
177 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, “Why I Am in Prison,” Votes for Women (March 12, 1909): 429.
178 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 105.
179 Neal, As a Tale That is Told, 75. In Emmeline's older years she was served by a staff of eight; Fred Lawrence was handier in the kitchen than his wife (Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries, 234).
180 It was after Emmeline's departure that Mary Neal became more involved in teaching children English country songs, some having been collected by Cecil Sharpe. Eventually Neal began to popularize Morris dancing, her girls' club teaching the dances all over the country and performing them for paying audiences at London theaters. This is the part of Neal's life that is best known. See Judge, Roy, “Mary Neal and the Espérance Morris,” Folk Music Journal 5, no. 5 (1989): 545–591Google Scholar; Boyes, Georgina, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Bloomfield, Anne, “The Quickening of the National Spirit: Cecil Sharp and the Pioneers of the Folk-Dance Revival in English State Schools (1900–1926),” History of Education 30, no. 1 (2001): 59–75Google Scholar; and Walkowitz, Daniel, City Folk: English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 2010)Google Scholar, chh. 3-4.
181 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 120–121,132–33. With money from Fred Lawrence and Lily Montague's father, Lord Swaythling, the Green Lady was expanded in the early twentieth century; the Pethick-Lawrences also built a second country guesthouse mainly for Mary's “Esperance Club” members.
182 Pethick-Lawrence, Changing World, 119–120.
183 Muriel and Doris Lester both read and were transformed in 1901 by Tolstoy, Leo, The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life, trans. Garnett, Constance (London: William Heinemann, 1894)Google Scholar. See Koven, “Sticky Sediment,” 47; see also his The Match Girl and the Heiress. See also Wallis, Jill, Mother of World Peace: The Life of Muriel Lester (Palsson, Middlesex: Hisarlik, 1993)Google Scholar.