The Match Girl and the Heiress

The Match Girl and the Heiress

Author: Seth Koven

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-04-19

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0691171319

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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.


Princess Victoria Ka'iulani

Princess Victoria Ka'iulani

Author: Ralph Thomas Kam

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2024-10-02

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1476652082

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This new biography of Princess Victoria Ka'iulani goes far beyond most accounts of her life, which tend to dwell on nostalgic recollections of what could have been rather than the reality of her life. Many of the most cherished depictions of Ka'iulani originate from other people's reflections, rather than the actions and words of the princess herself. By using historical documents, including archival manuscripts, Hawaiian and English-language newspapers, government records, firsthand testimonies, poetry, and mele, a factual and thoroughly supported narrative of Ka'iulani's life during tumultuous times emerges, surpassing fairy tale-like portrayals.