I. A Medieval Catholic in a Protestant Country

Francis of Assisi was by no means the property of Britain's Roman Catholics, who were roughly seven percent of the population of England and Wales in 1890;Footnote ¹¹ Francis was embedded in many areas of nineteenth century British culture. Pethick and Neal's story, and Sabatier's, encapsulate the protestant encounter with Catholicism—its rituals, its churches and art works, its monasticism—that widened in the late Victorian era, as Patricia Appelbaum has shown.Footnote ¹² St. Francis was also being recovered for socialism, philanthropy, and communal living; the “Franciscans” of these decades emerged principally from among Anglican and nonconformist social reformers. In the 1870s John Ruskin had recognized the Brothers as a model of male communal life and had proposed to build a rural spiritual commune; he went to Assisi, dreamed of St. Francis, and copied an early portrait of Francis.Footnote ¹³ In the 1880s, Francis was, as one scholar has put it, “the unofficial patron saint” of Oxford House and Toynbee Hall, and an exemplar of a new kind of masculinity and of Christian community.Footnote ¹⁴ Socialists took up “simple” lives for the sake of parity with workers or to achieve freedom from the possessions that wealthy households like their own were rapidly accumulating. The Franciscan message was welcome at the West London Mission. The heterodox socialism of the 1890s, as Stephen Yeo has persuasively shown, could easily accommodate the WLM's Methodism along with Franciscan poverty and such movements as dress reform, sexual experimentation, anti-imperialism, vegetarianism, land reform, Ibsenism, Marxism, feminism, and artistic innovation. In Robert Blatchford's words, socialism “must be a religion” and socialist “conversions” were registered with passion and enthusiasm.Footnote ¹⁵ Through Sabatier's Franciscan rubric, the two Methodist Sisters and other philanthropic “slummers”Footnote ¹⁶ dramatized their desire to imitate Jesus, as well as their love for the poor, their hopes for socialist reform, and their confidence in the democratic community and polity.

The Life of St Francis's greatest appeal at the mission was its insistence on the saint's social message's relevance at the fin de siècle. Francis's religion had been directed at transforming the human heart and conscience, a lesson that “in these dying days of the nineteenth century,” counseled Sabatier, needed to be recovered.Footnote ¹⁷ Sabatier laid emphasis on Francis's initial privileged position in the social order: he was a dissolute and extravagant son of a wealthy, violent, and status-conscious cloth merchant—“the bankers of the time,” commented Sabatier. Francis's road to poverty was a hard one as he vacillated between arrogance and humility, finery and rags. Finally, in 1209 in his late twenties, after having a number of preliminary religious experiences, he encountered a text seemingly aimed at himself. At a Mass at the little Santa Maria degli Angeli chapel of the Portiuncula near Assisi, he read from Matthew 10:9–10: “Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff.”Footnote ¹⁸ Renouncing his sumptuous clothing, Francis began to dress in the simple tunic of local peasants; he gave up all his money and goods and collected a following of like-minded men and women. He was an appealing figure, not only pious but also playful and exuberant, a lover and composer of music.Footnote ¹⁹ His charity, charm, openness, and deep piety attracted many followers—though Francis insisted that they be “brothers” and “sisters” rather than members of formal orders. He insisted on the band's absolute poverty, the sharing of anything they had with each other and with all comers.

Historians have tended to undervalue the “Franciscan” thread running through this important generation of Victorian and Edwardian slum activists and social reformers. The activists' ambition in living close to the poor was to foster deeper bonds than those generated by the often-ridiculed “friendly visiting,” satirized most tellingly by Henry James in The Princess Casamassima (1886).Footnote ²⁰ Many rejected the settlement system as well despite its Franciscan coloring. Edith Lees Ellis—friend of Edward Carpenter, wife of Havelock Ellis, early member of the Fellowship of the New Life—was one of the critics of conventional slumming. By living in comfortable settlements surrounded by deep poverty, well-meaning wealthy settlers displayed their insincerity. Those who really want to aid the poor, she said in 1893, would live among them and share their poverty rather than present themselves “as patrons and philanthropists.”Footnote ²¹ The American reformer Jane Addams came to recognize that one's own body could make a statement of love for the people—what she called Tolstoy's “sermon of the deed.” Journalist and nursing educator Honnor Morten, an exceptionally wealthy woman who founded a “simple-living” settlement in Hoxton in the late 1890s, described her own motives for living in poverty in practical terms:

The Franciscan-inspired “simple livers” were simultaneously followers of Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, F. D. Maurice and T. H. Green, and they segued a few years later with Tolstoyans. They included high church clergymen who coupled dramatic gestures of bodily self-denial with political advocacy for the poor. Simple livers could unite socialist, feminist, or anti-imperialist political positions with radical ideas about home decoration, cooking, social work, religion, sex, and love. Whitman merged a language of friendship across classes, religious ecstasy, and sexual yearning;Footnote ²³ Carpenter could personify democracy as a well-muscled naked male worker, and his critiques of Victorian masculinity and femininity overlapped his vigorous anti-imperialism.Footnote ²⁴

In this intellectual and political setting, Sabatier's Life of St. Francis proved catalytic for Pethick and Neal, transforming them from generous and empathic missionaries into dedicated and simple-living neighborhood and youth workers. There is little sign that either Sister lost her religious faith in 1895. Rather, they rejected the aim of evangelizing the poor. The mission's approach ameliorated poverty only “by halves” as they came to see it. Francis's story provided stirring new forms of Christian service to the poor with which the West London Mission leadership, despite its own enthusiasm for Sabatier's book, could not fully engage. In 1895, after seven years of dedicated mission affiliation for Mary and four for Emmeline, the two left the mission, storing their luggage at Paddington Station while they searched for cheap housing.

II. The West London Mission: “Garrison in the Centre of the Foe”

The mission and its Sisterhood in particular were ideal matrixes for Mary and Emmeline's first excursions into public life. Methodism's long tradition of female preaching and leadership—which John Wesley had wisely accommodated through his doctrine of the “extraordinary call”—was muted among Wesleyan Methodists by the 1880s but not obliterated, and the WLM Sisterhood drew on it in maintaining its high status and relative autonomy.Footnote ²⁵

Opened in 1887, the mission was in a precinct newly carved out by the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road. Soho—which was often defined to include the district north of Oxford Street, Fitzrovia, where Emmeline and Mary lived and did much of their work—was a remarkably cosmopolitan region with sizeable populations of French, German, Italian, and Yiddish speakers.Footnote ²⁶ Even in the Victorian years, Soho was notorious for illegal betting, after-hours drinking, clubbing and prostitution; in the late 1890s, Charles Booth's investigator, George Duckworth, got an earful from his police informants.Footnote ²⁷ The West London Mission targeted some of these local vices. It sponsored anti-music hall demonstrations, attempted to rescue actors for Christ from their lives on stage, and kept up regular preaching and demonstrating outside the district's numerous public houses. Social-research-minded staff member Arthur Sherwell reminded his fellow missioners of the numbers of common lodging houses in the area, of its overcrowding, and of the distorting influence of the luxury trades on local jobs and workers.Footnote ²⁸

The WLM was one of several metropolitan centers of the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion's Forward Movement, whose aim was to evangelize the inner-city poor.Footnote ²⁹ Led by its dynamic superintendent, Hugh Price Hughes, the WLM was in the vanguard of what Callum Brown calls “the salvation industry.” It represented an aggressive, socially engaged and politically liberal nonconformity. Hughes's ambition was to “out-evangelise” the Anglicans on the one hand and the Salvationists and Methodist splinter sects on the other. Soho was already extremely thick with churches, missions, and charities, but its high status in evangelical circles as “the center of shameless wickedness” was one of its attractions for Hughes. He had turned down a position as head of the East London Mission finding its scale too small for his ambitions.Footnote ³⁰ The West London Mission would be a “garrison in the centre of the foe.”Footnote ³¹ Other draws were Soho's nearness to the Houses of Parliament, which would enable a greater evangelical political presence, and its close proximity to such strongholds of “Mammon” as the West End clubs, hotels, and mansions.

Mission practices were certainly a far cry from Franciscan simplicity. To get attention and capture souls, the WLM sponsored professional-quality orchestras, brass bands, lantern shows, and street pageantry. In its heyday in the 1890s, and despite a general decline in the Methodist presence in Britain,Footnote ³² the WLM was a heavily staffed institution with two large Sunday religious services as well as a crowded Sunday “conference” conducted by Hughes—all at St James's Hall, Piccadilly, which seated 2,500 and from which both pews and pew rents were removed.Footnote ³³ While its formal congregants were only 1,342 in 1893,Footnote ³⁴ many times more than this number attended church services or participated in the programs of the mission's numerous branches. The WLM was one of the many “institutional” churches in urban Britain, incorporating substantial philanthropic efforts.Footnote ³⁵ Until it moved to Kingsway in 1910, the mission operated from five main centers, three in Soho, another—Mary and Emmeline's base—in Cleveland Street in Fitzrovia, and another in Chalton Street, Somers Town. The mission staff included five or six clergymen, five physicians, six nurses, a dentist, and hundreds of other volunteers, including the Sisters, the great majority of whom resided in or near the mission. The children's clubs, nursing services, dispensary, workhouse teas, mothers' meetings, literary lectures, mothers' meetings, People's Drawing Rooms and myriad other services were defined as forms of Christian service that did not have to be justified by producing converts. The Sisters of the People, the West London Mission's ornaments and workhorses, were pivotal in nearly all of these ventures.

Hughes was a shining example of liberal nonconformity who, as his only recent biographer believes, completed the work of John Wesley by extending his theology into the national political arena. Like Wesley himself, Hughes was an “organizing genius.”Footnote ³⁶ Along with his friend Mark Guy Pearse, who served as co-superintendent, Hughes was not only in charge of the mission from 1887 until his death in 1902, but also editor of the highly successful weekly, the Methodist Times. The “supercharged”Footnote ³⁷ prototype of the “Nonconformist conscience,” he was a temperance enthusiast and an ally of Mrs. Ormiston Chant and his district's other anti-vice crusaders.Footnote ³⁸ He had worked with Josephine Butler and supported women's suffrage and civic rights as well as women's participation in the annual Wesleyan Conferences, where policy was made. He lent mission support to the labor movement. Hughes had a lively sense of humor, but there are hints that he also had a “dictatorial” streak, over which his wife exercised some “mellowing” influence.Footnote ³⁹

Hughes's theology in this period enjoined compassion and activism on behalf of workers and the poor; the WLM was its main medium. He referred to his incarnational form of Christianity as “ethical” or “social” Christianity. As Richard Helmstadter has characterized it, incarnationalism defined God as a father rather than a judge, revered Christ's life and deeds, and saw Christian love as due to all of humankind.Footnote ⁴⁰ Salvation was a collective as much as an individual process.Footnote ⁴¹ Hughes had begun his career as a conservative, and it was Congregationalist minister Andrew Mearns's Bitter Cry, published in 1883, that had “converted” him to socialism, just as the book had attracted Neal and Pethick to the WLM. In associating himself with the urban poor and maintaining a friendly stance toward the revivalist Primitive Methodists, Hughes parted company with most of his fellow Wesleyan Methodist clergy.Footnote ⁴² He admitted, though, that he had to struggle to transform what he called his own “aristocratic Christianity” and to “become as democratic as Christ was.” As a part of the leadership of the oldest and most conservative division within Methodism, Hughes certainly knew that there were limits to how “democratic” his mission's practice could be.Footnote ⁴³

The two young Sisters were loyal WLM members, following mission injunctions without comment. They went into homes with Bibles and tracts; they were temperance advocates and street preachers. They prohibited dancing in the girls' club that they ran and exacted a promise from club members that would “sing no songs which they would not like Jesus Christ to hear.”Footnote ⁴⁴ They emphasized the importance of “the white flower” of chastity and disapproved gently of gaudy clothes and dancing to street organs.Footnote ⁴⁵ Mary very conventionally declared in 1890 that the “attractive power of the religion of Jesus Christ” would help to save the girls from “the degrading and demoralizing influences which blight so much of the young life of a great city.”Footnote ⁴⁶ They rejoiced at the (very few) conversions they made among the girls. Their central location in the mission may be seen through their many efforts on its behalf. Emmeline participated in fundraising delegations to other cities. Mary took a large role in the preparation of its monthly magazine, Advance!. Both had charge of their own weekly “classes,” the traditional social and devotional units of the Methodist churches, to which they were spiritual advisors. Through their families or their own friendships, they had personal ties with many of the mission's important male leaders. Another sign that the future rebels were full members of the mission religious community through 1895 was their Sunday assignment to the Enquirey Room at St. James's Hall, talking with dozens of female congregants and incorporating them into the mission's vast network by assigning them to classes.Footnote ⁴⁷

III. Total Immersion: Life as a Sister of the People

Their mission years offered both Sisters an ample education in the biology of poverty and the technology of class. Mary chaperoned a group of wives of striking Yorkshire miners for three weeks in London followed by a two-week visit to their Yorkshire town of Castleford. She and her lifelong friend Evelyn BuntingFootnote ⁴⁸ ran a mission employment bureau for several years, encountering the cruelties of the labor market. Emmeline also took on the more traditional philanthropic function of visiting the old people at the St. Marylebone Workhouse and entertaining its inmates on their monthly day out; this, too, was an education in workers' hardship and society's cruelties. Their intimate knowledge of the drudgery of poor wives and daughters would later convince Pethick and Neal of the necessity of a vote for women; throughout the suffrage years, their speeches and journalism referred to the special sufferings of poor women—husbands' drunkenness and violence, the terror of the workhouse, being deserted with children to care for.Footnote ⁴⁹ Lastly, like so many of the activist women of their generation—Henrietta Barnett, Kate Potter, Helena Swanwick, Lily Montague, Kathleen Courtney, Maude Royden and Honnor Morten among them—Pethick and Neal worked with a girls' club, an experience which proved pivotal in their Soho years. Their regular reports on the club constitute a narrative of their growing comprehension of poverty's power to shape the minds and bodies of London's slum children.

The club of which they were jointly in charge was the starting point of a friendship created by their shared passion for the girls. In Emmeline's words, “It was a queer destiny that threw two people together so unlike in temperament as we are.” As Sharon Marcus has pointed out, women's friendships in this era had a far more varied emotional range than envisioned in the two options that have received the most scholarly attention: sisterly solidarity or erotic attachment.Footnote ⁵⁰ Theirs was neither of these, though both appreciated their friend's charm and beauty. Their efficiency as a team and their shared political ideas underscored their mutual affection—an experience common to many of their peers. Some of the New Woman fiction from this era shows, in Diana Maltz's words, “how political loyalties fuel affection between comrades and, alternatively, how mutual ardor finds expression through shared political commitment.”Footnote ⁵¹ Mary and Emmeline's vivid differences might otherwise have kept them apart. Neal was sharp-tongued and this engendered “violent reactions of like and dislike.” Neal's utter lack of sentimentality—her heart was a “dried-up piece of leather,” she said—ndash;was apparent in her “vivid blue eyes,” caustic tongue, and ability to find the “fantastic” side of any subject.” Emmeline was warm, impulsive, and romantic. Mary, however, struggled all her life with “recurring melancholy,” according to her friend Laurence Housman, younger brother of the poet.Footnote ⁵² Though Neal and Pethick formed a close attachment that ended only with Mary's death in 1944, their first tie was the shared work and searing emotional challenges of the girls' club.

Mary admitted in 1894 that at the outset “the life of a working-girl [had been] almost an unmapped territory to me.” She was not implying that the club girls were primitive or exotic—though factory girls in their bright finery were indeed often described that way. Rather, she was digesting the isolation in which she had lived as a wealthy young girl and woman; her ignorance was also responsible for the reason she had begun the club: the fantasy of the “love and comradeship” she would offer the girls every evening in “a warm, bright room.” But she soon learned about the “sin and cruelty,” of clothing workshops, or the shame of having a drunken mother.Footnote ⁵³ The club experience would not be sweet. Knowing these young women would be a demanding experience but Walt Whitman's celebration of love across classes and of a “city of friends” encouraged the leaders to think of the club girls as comrades in a shared political project. Despite the club's apparently authoritarian government—some WLM clubs were far more self-governing than theirs—Mary and Emmeline represented themselves less as the girls' teachers than as their friends. Moments of calm intimacy with the club girls represented for the club leaders personal, political, and spiritual fulfillment. As Neal wrote expansively of those years, echoing Carpenter's words, “We lived—lived as only those can ‘who dream the impossible dream and it comes true.’”Footnote ⁵⁴

The club members' daily utterances provided the Sisters with potent evidence of the ravages of Soho's poverty. A child in a hospital given a cup of milk asked, “How far down may I drink?” A club girl whom they reproached for sending a postcard rather than a letter to thank a benefactor mildly explained that buying that card meant she had no supper that day. Another girl turned down the offer of a growing plant because her flat was “always dark,” and another became a widow at the age of eighteen due to a spouse's industrial accident.Footnote ⁵⁵ Another, older widow, who descended into mental illness along with one of her children, as her search for work failed month after month and the workhouse drew closer, haunted both Mary and Emmeline.Footnote ⁵⁶ Pethick eventually realized that the unattractive “dullness and apathy” of certain young people commented on by some club leaders was often a product of “semi-starvation or want of sleep,” a chronic problem for girls who could not get to sleep until the entire family went to bed. Through the club girls, the club families, and their own visits to the girls' employers to arrange annual summer holidays, the leaders learned the particulars of garment jobs for young women: low wages (seven or eight shillings a week); seasonal, unreliable work; and the poverty in which workers had to live as a result.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Sisters' analysis of capitalism and of English class society was deeply informed by the girls' stories, as Margaret McMillan's would be by the children of Deptford.Footnote ⁵⁸ Neal's socialist framework became clearer, enhanced like McMillan's by the sight of young girls' scrawny bodies. She wrote, “If what John Ruskin says is true, that ‘the worst thing that can be said of any nation is that it has made the lives of the young girls sad and weary’ then England can write many bitter things against herself.” Mary's visit to a suburban boarding school a few years after taking charge of the girls' club was a painful revelation about class and corporeality. She was mindful of the “bitter contrast” between healthy, beautifully dressed middle-class girls and “those whom I meet four nights a week.” And she knew, too, that “the fathers of my girls were creating the wealth on which the fathers of those other girls send their daughters to suburban boarding-schools.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Nonetheless, indicating their full participation in the WLM community, and surely with a nod toward donations from approving readers, the Sisters presented themselves as educators of mannerly and “pure” young women, “earnest Christians,” and teetotalers. Throughout the club's history, meetings ended with a kneeling prayer and a hymn, not unusual in other contemporary children's clubs. Early in the club's history, the prayers “desperately amused” the club members, and when requested to kneel down they “roared out with laughter.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The exclusion of dancing and drama as club activities would become a focus of frustration for Mary and Emmeline. Though intensely relished in many London girls' clubs,Footnote ⁶¹ neither was permitted at mission events. Mary and Emmeline eventually introduced them through a back door in the form of games and athletic drill.Footnote ⁶² After World War I, dance halls—some enormous, where women almost always predominated among the patrons—would sprout all over London to meet this demand.Footnote ⁶³ Neal and Pethick's next girls' club, no longer under the mission's jurisdiction, would be built around singing and dancing.

IV. Public Activist: Sister Mary and the Coal Lockout

Hughes's rejection of the two Sisters' Franciscan-inspired proposal in 1895 came as a particular surprise because in the fall of 1893, less than two years earlier, he and Neal had worked together in harmony and friendship in support of striking coal miners who charged that their employers had cut their wages. Hughes's and Mary's public utterances in support of the miners differed little, which suggests that the superintendent was informally educating Mary. The months of the coal strike—technically a lockout by the coal owners—in which Mary assisted Hughes, offered her an entry into a national world of labor and socialist politics. At the same time, Mary represented the WLM and carried out the mandate that Hughes had given her.

The labor action was massive, involving well over three hundred thousand Yorkshire and Lancashire miners. In Yorkshire it was marked by the discipline of the workers and the violence at the Featherstone colliery when troops called in by the coal owners fired into a gathering of workers killing two and injuring many more.Footnote ⁶⁴ The lockout began in July and was settled in November more or less in the workers' favor through a Board of Conciliation presided over by Lord Roseberry.Footnote ⁶⁵ Rather belatedly, in October, Hughes took a leadership role among London clergymen in organizing strike support. The strikers were heavily Methodist, especially Primitive Methodist, and their union, the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, was led by Methodist teetotaler Ben Pickard, M. P.Footnote ⁶⁶ It was thus easy for Hughes to mobilize his and other congregations in their support.Footnote ⁶⁷ Surely one of Hughes's agendas in taking a central role in the strike support was to attract unionized urban dwellers to Methodism. Hughes preached in defence of the miners, raised funds for them in St. James's Hall, spoke on their behalf elsewhere, and wrote editorials on the strikers' rights in the Methodist Times. Picard reported after the lockout's conclusion that approximately 40,000 pounds had been raised through both small and large contributions.Footnote ⁶⁸

When the radical Sun newspaper in early October of 1893 sponsored a group of mining wives from the Yorkshire village of Castleford on a visit to London, it was Mary whom Hughes asked to chaperone them for three weeks.Footnote ⁶⁹ Early on, after Mary had successfully conducted an evening service for the wives when no clergyman could be found, Hughes joked affectionately that Neal's title was now “Sister Mary, Local Preacher”Footnote ⁷⁰—a lay position not officially open to Methodist women until 1910 and even then with restrictions.Footnote ⁷¹

In partnership with Hughes and the mining wives, Mary was thus catapulted from Soho philanthropy into the heart of class warfare on a national scale. It was a crucial moment. Socialism had revived after mid-Victorian doldrums, important political actors had acknowledged the urban “social problem” and the labor movement was making formal inroads into Parliamentary politics. The wives were vigorous organizers who canvassed for funds and spoke at demonstrations and rallies.Footnote ⁷² Beatrice Webb, along with other Fabian and labor movement dignitaries, joined Mary and Sister Lily on the platform at St. James's Hall when a mining wife, Mrs. Dickinson, spoke movingly at a special Tuesday evening “Women's demonstration and fundraiser.”Footnote ⁷³ They joined Hughes at the Sunday afternoon service.Footnote ⁷⁴ Wives appeared on several of the twelve platforms at a large Hyde Park demonstration where speakers and sponsors included representatives of many London unions, several members of the London County Council, the Social Democratic Federation, the Independent Labour Party, miners' union representatives, and Fabians, including G. B. Shaw.Footnote ⁷⁵

The union's “living wage” slogan evoked decades of contestation between political economy's exponents and its critics over what really constituted a nation's wealth, a debate in which evangelicals had been prominent.Footnote ⁷⁶ Neal found congenial Hughes's support of the living wage, his evocation of Ruskin, and his recognition of the corporeal experience of poverty. The 1893 strike's central issue was especially vivid as coal was a resource that represented Britain's world economic dominance and whose free trade was a triumph of political economy, as Chris Otter has observed.Footnote ⁷⁷ To simplify Catherine Gallagher's argument, the controversy over national wealth had, since Malthus, always been about “soma economics”—the bodies of workers. In the essay whose title, “The Veins of Wealth,” is about both mining and human blood, Ruskin ultimately says a nation's true wealth is measured by the quantity and quality of its human lives—“full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures.” As a system of thought, Ruskin charged, “mercantile economy” was indifferent to human vitality and could only envision national prosperity on the backs of workers who were “dim-eyed and narrow-chested.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Initially, Hughes presented his mission's sponsorship of the mining wives as an act of charity: “It is our duty to feed the starving thousands of women and children who are the innocent victims of the terrible strife.”Footnote ⁷⁹ He indeed sounded like a “social-mission worker,” the label that another Christian socialist, the Rev. Samuel Keeble, uncharitably gave him.Footnote ⁸⁰ By the following Sunday, however, Hughes had become a whole-hearted “living wage” supporter, insisting on its necessity for miners, workers in “the most laborious and perilous of all industries.”Footnote ⁸¹ During Hughes's lifetime, the humanitarians had “discovered” hunger, and in his lectures and sermons Hughes endorsed the rights of the workers to health and physical comfort.Footnote ⁸² He began one sermon with the biblical passage from 2 Timothy 2:6—“The husbandman that laboreth must be the first to partake of the fruits.” Hughes's support laid Ruskinian emphasis on miners' bodies: “stomachs,” “blood,” and “bone.” Full stomachs were the legitimate goal of the miners' labors. “Starvation wages” were not part of Britain's heritage, and the laws of supply and demand were not “forces of nature in the presence of which we are helpless.” A strike is a war that “pits an empty stomach against a full purse,” said Hughes, evoking Ruskin's “wan” laborer and fat capitalist.Footnote ⁸³

In her strike journalism, Mary also evoked the miners' need for and right to bodily comfort, and she described the physical pain the newly reduced wage would bring. More generally, she defined the lockout in socialist terms as a part of a “momentous and ever-narrowing struggle between the privileged classes and the proletariat, between capital and labour.” In response to accusations that the miners were living in luxury, eating salmon for breakfast and providing their wives with grand pianos, she—as someone who knew how the rich lived—lashed out:

Mary intermixed Scripture with reportage and socialist argument. As one instance, she presented the miners as martyrs, “climbing the new Calvary that they may learn yet another word of the new faith,” and urged her readers to imitate Saint Veronica, who, as Christ struggled with the cross he was carrying, wiped the sweat from his brow.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Mary's chosen text, Veronica finds a homely and concrete way to ease Christ's pain. Mary, too, was in touch with the concrete. She had more hands-on contact with poverty than her male peers. She knew something about the lives of Soho working girls and had been spending her days with the miners' wives. She would eventually live in the mining village of Castleford for two weeks. Her reporting included the bodily and the domestic: the fact that many of the wives in the London delegation were illiterate, that several had had to borrow boots and clothing for their trip, that the younger wives lacked the stamina of those from an earlier and better-fed generation. In Castleford, Mary witnessed the miners' bare homes, everything of value pawned, and learned about the children who were ill and died.Footnote ⁸⁶ As with her vivid comparisons of factory girls with well-off young ladies, Mary chronicled poverty's indelible traces in flesh and bone.

V. Tension and a Tipping Point

From the spring of 1894, Advance! showed signs of a change in the mission's atmosphere, particularly at Mary and Emmeline's Fitzrovia base, Cleveland Hall, where there were new projects and a new frankness. Early in 1894, the workers there had inaugurated a “People's Drawing Room,” providing space, relative quiet, leisure, a ready supply of games, some entertainments and refreshments for adults and children.Footnote ⁸⁷ At about the same time Emmeline grandiosely announced a new “departure,” closer to a settlement educational model. She asked Advance! readers to imagine their own knowledge of art, history, science, beauty, and books entirely “blotted out”—the situation of “the average working man and working woman.” The Cleveland Hall staff intended to respond to this situation with a range of speakers and classes. This was conventional but Sister Emmeline sounded strangely defensive in declaring this program compatible with the mission's mandates. She wrote that “our religion” should give inspiration to “the whole of life;” there is no distinction between the “sacred and the secular, the spiritual and the non-spiritual.” Expanding slum dwellers' faculties is as much God's work as preaching the gospel, she declared.Footnote ⁸⁸ With this, she became a missionary redefining herself as an educator.

Socialism and the labor movement became more salient topics in Advance! by 1894. Along with the usual reports of country outings and children's teas, Advance! now included articles on such subjects as “The Labour Church,” “Books for Social Workers,” the work of Edward Carpenter, and Walt Whitman's “Prayer of Columbus.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Emmeline and Mary's friend Sister Kathleen wrote bitterly of the inequality of wealth from her vantage point in a slum abutting great wealth. In “The Play Hour” she describes mission children being bullied by others at the nearest outdoor play space, a cemetery, and wonders rhetorically why the children cannot play in the spacious and beautiful gated square nearby, which “belongs to rich people.”Footnote ⁹⁰ “One of the Sisters” quotes from Priestly Prime's poem, “Out of Work”—the lament of a worker now considered too old to hire–she denounces free competition, sure that soon the state will protect such workers. An unsigned article on “Philanthropy and Poverty” asserts that poverty cannot be blamed on drink; the problem has to be seen “[as] an economic one.”Footnote ⁹¹ A report by Neal insisted that expecting better moral conduct among the Soho population was “a bitter mockery” until their material lives improved.Footnote ⁹²

Mary, meanwhile, was privately exploring agnosticism—though not in the pages of Advance!. She was reading William Hale White's semi-autobiographical and highly regarded Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881), an account of a young nonconformist clergyman's loss of faith after an encounter with Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's poetry strikes Rutherford “like Paul on the road to Damascus,” dissolving the rigid “systems” that had enclosed him and substituting “a new and living spirit.” Neal found White's books positively “delicious,” and “the most inspiring human documents which I have ever read.” In her view, young social and religious workers needed to read only three “textbooks of the inner life:” Mark Rutherford, the writings of Edward Carpenter, and the writings of Thomas à Kempis.Footnote ⁹³

Some of the more orthodox officials began to refer to Mary, Emmeline, and their associates as “that element,”Footnote ⁹⁴ according to Pethick-Lawrence's memoir. Mary's later account of the simmering conflict is sharper and more detailed than Emmeline's. According to Neal, when Emmeline excitedly described to her WLM co-workers a moment of intense personal communion with a girl in prison, saying that “the spirit of the girl” went out to her, some began to feel that she was “getting off the right lines!” In another setting, when Mary testified that she sometimes thought more in terms of helping humanity than working for Christ, she was “pulled up and warned of danger!”Footnote ⁹⁵

Yet despite these significant and growing differences among the staff, there was no sign of a rupture at this point. Hughes's own political awareness had been sharpened in the coal strike. Mission personnel had always included socialists and social workers, and the Sisterhood in particular encouraged religious diversity. Emmeline's intention at this time to continue at the mission was registered in Advance!'s report on Cleveland Hall's plans for 1895, which mention a Literary Institute with thirty members that she was about to launch.Footnote ⁹⁶

It was Sabatier's biography that gave concrete form to the tension at the WLM. The book and Hughes's extensive glosses on it valorized intimacy with common people and evangelists' sharing the poverty of those around them. It stressed that all gestures of love were holy. The atmosphere of excitement, innovation and change at the WLM generated by Hughes's own letters and commentaries was just as important. Mary's unpublished autobiography contains the only start-to-finish account of the impact of the book on her and Emmeline in 1895. The conflict that the biography of Francis engendered is not mentioned in the many contemporary biographies of Hughes—with the one exception of his daughter Dorothea's, discussed below—or in the later autobiography of his wife. Emmeline's autobiography refers to Hughes's anger at her and Neal and his “heavy hand” in refusing the Sisters' initiative,Footnote ⁹⁷ but it outlines with more passion her emotional private conversation with treasured family friend Mark Guy Pearse after her decision to leave the mission.

VI. A Saint for the 1890s: Paul Sabatier's Life of St. Francis

St. Francis was a suitable if not obvious avatar of the movement Pethick and Neal would eventually join. Ridiculed by Voltaire but better appreciated by French romantics, Francis had excited the interest of occasional German and French scholars by the middle of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁸ In Britain, scholars had been presenting Francis either as the “quintessential popish idol” or as a pious eccentric.Footnote ⁹⁹ Saints in general had also recently been downgraded among Wesleyan Methodists, who in 1883 had removed the collect, epistle and gospel readings for the saints from the Book of Offices used by most congregations.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Yet, as Eileen Yeo and other recent scholars of British women and religion have pointed out, the masculine valence of most forms of Protestantism frustrated prominent non-Catholic contemporaries of Mary and Emmeline. The Catholic monastic tradition and its saints, with their mix of genders and their creative piety, appealed to them. Both offered a “divinely sanctioned public role for women,” as Josephine Butler put it.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Butler, who wrote a vivid biography of St. Catherine, with whom she closely identified, deplored Protestantism's inability to honor saints in general and implied that male elders were simply embarrassed by those holy women who had stepped out of the “woman's sphere.”Footnote ¹⁰² Francis, however, might be seen as an honorary female, as he had a strong attachment to Clare, the young neighbor who became his disciple, head of her own order, and eventually a saint herself. To many of his contemporaries, moreover, Francis was feminized as an intimate of “Lady Poverty” and a devotee of birds and flowers.

This version of St. Francis promoted a vital new kind of religion aimed at transforming “the human heart and conscience.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Sabatier presented the first modern scholarly study of St. Francis, carrying out a project that Ernest Renan had entrusted to his protégé.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For all its boldness, the book was not envisioned as a blockbuster; it was published at the author's expense in French in 1893 and the following year Louise Seymour Houghton translated it into English. Sabatier's study made use of new documents, many of which he had himself uncovered. As Franciscan scholar Laurence Cunningham has noted, the new biography departed from traditional Catholic hagiography and from the mythologizing of Francis's earlier biographers. It addressed a wide audience that included protestants as well as Catholics.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For British readers the Life of St. Francis was enlivened by generations of Victorian medievalism—Scott, Rossetti, Pugin, the pre-Raphaelites, Morris, and so on. In his 2012 study, André Vauchez refers to the Life of St. Francis as “a veritable thunderclap in a serene sky,” which substituted the “official” peaceable and mystical Francis for a powerful gospel-centered religious reformer who had unleashed enormous popular enthusiasm.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Sabatier's style was informal and his interpretative scope broad; his perspective was as much that of a historian as of a theologian. He commented on the geography and history of Umbria, the religious enthusiasms and mental simplicity of the medieval Italians, the century's heresies and upheavals, and what Francis learned from the excommunication of dissident Christians.

In contrast to the more traditional readings of the saint as a hermit or ascetic, Sabatier's Francis had many women friends and a tender relationship with Clare. While Francis's own preference was for “the selfish repose of the cloister,” as Sabatier saw it, Francis nonetheless recognized that the Brothers' central work would not be contemplation or prayer, but vernacular preaching among the population offering practical messages for social and religious life. Sabatier's Brothers were proto-Socialists who viewed money as “the special instrument of the devil;”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ their utter lack of possessions and full equality within their own ranks enabled easy intimacy with the poor and with the natural world.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Sabatier's was a decidedly anti-papal version of the story. Francis was a free spirit but a cautious one. His father, whose travels often brought him to France (the source of the saint's name), had told Francis about the persecution of the Waldensians. Francis thus made a point of showing respect for the priesthood and obedience to the Pope, and he sought papal approval for his Brotherhood. Yet in Sabatier's reading, Francis's efforts to protect the Brothers eventually failed. The community's cherished rule of absolute poverty, its rejection of intellectual leadership in Christendom, and its independence from papal control were eventually overturned. “The Machiavelli of M. Sabatier's story,” as one reviewer put it, was Cardinal Ugolino (the future Gregory IX).Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The Life of Saint Francis was an enormous success worldwide–praised, reprinted, reviewed widely, and translated quickly into twenty languages, the Russian version by Tolstoy. It was awarded the crown of honor by the French Academy and speedily placed on the Vatican's Index of Prohibited Books. Forty-four editions of the French version were published between 1893 and 1931.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In Britain the biography generated a Franciscan craze; historian Mary Heimann lists over 150 new biographies of Francis published in England alone between 1890 and 1939 by both protestants and Catholics.Footnote ¹¹¹A contributor to the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine explicitly claimed Francis for protestants, saying, “Christian people, to whom a papal canonization means nothing, will always . . . acknowledge Francis of Assisi as a saint of God” rather than of the Catholic Church.Footnote ¹¹² Lay men and women, living ordinary daily lives and pledging extreme simplicity, established a number of Anglican and Catholic Third Orders and Franciscan communities.Footnote ¹¹³ As G. K. Chesterton later playfully caricatured the craze, Francis

Paul Sabatier himself, who lived until 1928, was uncomfortable with the St. Francis vogue, writing in 1908, “When I see the theories of English Aesthetics and American snobs whom I led to Assisi I repent but for a moment to have written a Life of Saint Francis!”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Hughes's initial enthusiasm for the Franciscan project cannot be doubted. He and his wife, both reading the biography while travelling in the fall of 1894 for Hughes's health, sent back regular encomia. “The book had filled our minds with the most romantic anticipations,” Hughes wrote in his journal.Footnote ¹¹⁶ He thought Francis “one of the best and loveliest Christians that ever breathed,”Footnote ¹¹⁷ and he was drawn by his willingness to “put himself as literally as possible into the place of those he desired to aid.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ By coincidence the Hugheses and Sabatier were staying at the same hotel in Assisi. The two men became friends and spent many hours walking and conversing. They had a great deal in common: they shared a “high estimate” of Clare as well as of Francis, and Sabatier knew of and supported the principles of the Forward Movement and the mission.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Hughes saw Sabatier, not completely accurately, as a fellow Christian socialist. Both clergymen saw Francis as an exemplar of the “liberal sector” of the church which has “always been crushed by the Vatican,” though Hughes's commentaries place less emphasis on Francis's negotiations with Popes and prelates.Footnote ¹²⁰ However, while Sabatier did not question Francis's asceticism, Hughes was horrified at Francis's treatment of his body, especially when Francis rolled in thorns and spent Lent in a bare and dark cell in the monastery basement. He was disgusted in general by the association of austerity and self-punishment with holiness. Visiting the room that Clare and her companions had occupied for forty years brought the WLM Sisters to Hughes's mind and he rejoiced that they did not live in such “repulsive quarters.”Footnote ¹²¹

Hughes's enthusiasm was contagious, as it always was. His letters and articles on Francis poured in during his travels, and on his return he devoted several of his regular Sunday afternoon conferences at St. James's Hall to the subject.Footnote ¹²² He announced that he was planning “a new campaign founded on the main conceptions of the saint.” His daughter, Dorothea Price Hughes, believed that her father was indeed planning to gather a group of men and women in London “filled with the self sacrificing loving spirit of Francis and Clara, content to have only the necessities of life so long as they could have communion with their Saviour and with suffering humanity as they did.”Footnote ¹²³ To confirm this impression, on January 13, 1895 Hughes concluded a sermon introducing Francis to his congregation with a call to action that Emmeline and Mary took very much to heart. He said,

VII. “Horribly Conventional and Uninspired”

Along with many in their circle of friends, Mary and Emmeline embraced the Francis who befriended even the poorest, the Francis for whom no gesture of love went too far. In contrast to the early Franciscans, life at the WLM began to look “smug and comfortable and horribly conventional and uninspired.” Echoing critics of the first male settlements in East London in the 1880s as artificial and anti-democratic, Mary's later commentary focuses on the biography of Francis as crystalizing her increasing discomfort with ordinary mission life:

As their friend Sister Kathleen put it after her own departure, mission life had become a “dreary matter of fact sordid gray plain doing of our duty.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The ferment around St. Francis, Emmeline commented later, made her and Neal more conscious of the “platform of superiority” on which they inevitably stood as purveyors of God's truth to persons who were usually not seeking it. The conversion agenda as well as the class barrier walled the Sisters off from the girls they loved.Footnote ¹²⁷ They would remain Christians but no longer be missionaries.

The first sign that Hughes's return to London had given him second thoughts on voluntary poverty came at a welcome-home dinner at the Sisters' residence in Fitzroy Square, an event recorded only by his daughter and biographer, Dorothea Price Hughes, who was there. In keeping with the mission's long tradition of gentle teasing, Sisters in brown cowls served bread and water to their guests on a bare table. Katherine Price Hughes found the joke very funny but suppressed her laughter—which Dorothea could nonetheless see in her mother's eyes; Hughes apparently did not, quickly ending the fun and taking the floor with inspiring stories about Francis.Footnote ¹²⁸ Hughes soon called a meeting at which members were invited to say what was “in our hearts.” Neal and her friends were “full of hope,” as Mary remembered it, “sure of his sympathy and insight.”Footnote ¹²⁹ The young Sisters requested permission to live “amongst the people” rather than in the Sisters' residence in Fitzroy Square. Emmeline recalled that she and Mary had jointly presented their idea in a letter to Hughes, a proposal he sharply rejected at a Sisters' Fitzroy Square regular Saturday breakfast.Footnote ¹³⁰ The parties in this controversy were, on the one hand, the two Sisters (with, it appears, a few other Sisters and Arthur Sherwell, a candidate for the ministry and their co-worker at Cleveland Hall); and, on the other, Hughes, several of the other clergy and lay leaders, and a few of the other Sisters. Katherine Price Hughes never articulated a position of her own, but her silences, and her many subsequent gestures of friendship toward Neal and Pethick—plus her sanctioning of a similar request only two years later by two other Sisters—suggest her sympathy for the rebels. In any case, Neal and Pethick staged a very extravagant May Day pageant, took the club girls on their annual country holiday in September, and then sent Mrs. Hughes their letter of resignation.Footnote ¹³¹

There is no clear explanation of Hughes's apparent about-face in 1895, and the numerous guesses here are evidence of this. Hughes's biographer, Christopher Oldstone-Moore, notes the cluster of deep disappointments that engulfed him in the spring and summer of 1895, which may have sapped his normal liberality. These were setbacks for liberalism, temperance, and nonconformity, including, in July, the defeat of the Liberals in the general election and of the Progressive party majority in the London County Council.Footnote ¹³² Or, perhaps Mary and Emmeline's proposed solo residence in Soho challenged the Sisterhood's unspoken in loco parentis function—likely disturbing to Hughes's notions of female respectability and his obligations to the Sisters' well-off mainly Methodist families.Footnote ¹³³ The Sisters' scheme may have elicited associations with the celibate slum priests or the High Church Sisters of St. Mary at the Cross who glorified scrubbing and cleaning—which smacked of the monastic austerities that Hughes found so repellant. In his disapproving remarks on Francis's self-scourging, Hughes had said, “Mr. Pusey and his followers have introduced this sort of thing in England to a far greater extent than many imagine.”Footnote ¹³⁴ In another context Hughes had said, “Ladies did not come to the Mission to sweep floors and cook themselves scanty meals, but to help the people of whom they were the sisters.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Hughes's refusal of the Franciscan challenge suggests that the WLM may have reached the limits of its radical community involvement. True, Hughes encouraged the staff to run for local government offices; two of the Sisters would eventually be Poor Law Guardians; and one of its clergymen, C. Ensor Walters—who would be Hughes's successor as superintendent—was elected to the St. Pancras vestry in 1897, and then to the London County Council. By way of contrast, though, take the more activist Congregationalist Mansfield House and its Canning Town Women's Settlement.Footnote ¹³⁶ Mansfield House and Canning Town went much further than the WLM, not so much in “simple living” as in political involvement. Rebecca Cheetham, the Canning Town women's settlement's first warden, was a member of the National Union of Women Workers, and the local cooperative movement. Mansfield House and Canning Town settlers, including Cheetham, were elected to the West Ham Borough Council, the local School Board, and the Board of Guardians. Settlers campaigned regularly on behalf of socialists and Progressive candidates. In 1898 Mansfield House coordinated the creation of a coalition of socialist and Labour leaders in West Ham that won twenty-seven out of the council's forty-seven seats.Footnote ¹³⁷

After the departure of Sisters Mary and Emmeline, Hughes seems to have decathected his mission work. Was this due to the loss of several of the WLM's most active and enthusiastic members? Was this due to the fact that his close friend and co-superintendent, Mark Guy Pearse, came to support the dissidents financially and morally after a tearful appeal from Emmeline?Footnote ¹³⁸ In any case, from the fall of 1895 onwards, Hughes turned his attention to what Dorothea Price Hughes called “the distinctly and strenuously ecclesiastical portion of my father's career.”Footnote ¹³⁹ In 1896 he became the first president of the Evangelical Free Church Council, whose aim, one Hughes had long cherished, was to unify the nonconformist sects. His Free Church Catechism, published in 1899, sold nearly 200,000 copies.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Two years later Hughes became president of the Wesleyan Conference with the aim of bringing the Forward Movement into the mainstream of Methodism.Footnote ¹⁴¹

VIII. Slummers and the “Franciscan Spirit”

That Emmeline and Mary saw Francis through an optic that invited a dramatic response is not surprising. The message they found in the Life of St. Francis, as already suggested, had been resonating throughout secular and religious culture; the “neo-Franciscans” and simple livers were responding to the wide economic and cultural changes of the fin de siècle. Products of Britain's second industrial revolution, a flood of consumer goods inundated the wealthy—“such a congestion of unused wealth and property, such a glut, as surely the world before has never seen,” as Edward Carpenter, eloquent and tireless advocate of “simplification,” saw it. Money and goods spawned an unceasing and harassing pressure for accumulation and for the maintenance of status. The “enchanted palace[s]” of the rich encased a “slow poison and paralysis.” Early in his own simplification process, Carpenter burned his dress clothes.Footnote ¹⁴² Many novelists, for their part, were disturbed by the commodification of art of all forms, which had become mere objects for shoppers and markers of status.Footnote ¹⁴³ Sister Kathleen of the WLM “cursed the selfish luxury of the wealthy, whose drawing rooms shriek ‘Money, Money,’ the minute you open the door.” Kathleen wondered: “When will we get back to that simplicity of life that would be possible if we lived Christ's life?”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Economic theory, too, was laying new emphasis on consumption and the market—“the marginal revolution” affected by William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras and Carl Menger, whose books date from the 1870s. For marginal utility economists, consumer desires determined the value of goods, not labor or forms of production, and certainly not morality or justice. Among late nineteenth-century economists, Alfred Marshall was unusual in his reservations about marginal utility theory, and in his belief in the relevance of charity, duty, or chivalry in consumer choice. He disapproved of “lavish expenditure” and advocated forms of consumption that promoted “the well-being of the nation.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

However insincere it may have seemed for young people to voluntarily, and almost always temporarily, reject the comfort to which they had been born in favor of the hardships of poverty, their goal was the lifting of a great barrier—money—between themselves and the people. Certainly Francis's poverty, and that of many of the Brothers, had been voluntary. As Sabatier presented him, one of Francis's disciples, Brother Bernardo, refused alms offered to him on the grounds that “by the grace of God, whose will we are accomplishing, we have voluntarily become poor.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In writing about Kingsley Hall in Bow, founded in 1915, Seth Koven draws attention to William James's examination of “voluntary poverty” in The Varieties of Religious Experience. As James viewed it, choosing poverty was not self-indulgent play-acting but a statement about equality before God that promotes democracy. He identified “fear of poverty” as a deadly “moral disease” among the wealthy which the voluntarily poor were determined to conquer.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Rosa Hobhouse Waugh, one of the first Kingsley Hall residents, defined her own choice of poverty as a privilege that would enable her to apprehend “the inner reality of our neighbors' experience.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Franciscans could be found among Anglican clergymen. Novelist and historian Walter Besant insisted that Oxford House and Toynbee Hall were in the Franciscan mode—a label that scholars today endorse, though it makes much better sense for Oxford House, where so many of the ascetic-minded high churchmen began their careers.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Exemplars of Franciscan simplicity could be found among Anglo-Catholic priests such as Robert Dolling, Osborne Jay, Lincoln Wainright, and Charles F. Lowder who rejected the comforts of their clerical peers and lived alongside their parishioners in East London (Dolling mainly in Portsmouth), and often supported workers' political causes.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Wainright, “regarded as a saint by the people of Wapping,” according to Wapping resident Grace Foakes, was appointed an assistant priest under Father Lowder at St. Peter's, London Docks, and became vicar in 1884. He died there in 1929. Franciscan gestures seem to have been natural to him. Though the church's social service work had been previously hived off to deaconesses, he personally took it over. He was there to break up fights or to help people write wills. He regularly gave away the clothes he was wearing and gave up his own dinners during the 1889 dock strike, where he served as one of the mediators.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Members of High Church Anglican James Granville Adderley's (1861–1942) Society of the Divine Compassion, founded in 1892, also followed what Adderley called “the Franciscan model” by living with few furnishings and little heat and, like their low-church and atheist peers, doing their own “crude” cooking and housework.Footnote ¹⁵² His 1894 novel celebrating the Franciscan movement of his time, Stephen Remarx: A The Story of a Venture in Ethics, is a tale of martyrdom and also a reminder that simple living was a political act that could invite retaliation. The nobly born Stephen founds a small society who live in servants' rooms in a house Stephen inherits in Chelsea. He is hounded by upper-class hatred and ridicule and dies accidently after being hit by a snowball thrown from a hotel window. Adderley later published an appealing short life of St. Francis (1902) closely based on Sabatier's study,Footnote ¹⁵³ and was a Franciscan in another way: merry and playful.

Simple living and social experimentation were threaded through socialist communities.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The Fellowship of the New Life, founded in the early 1880s by some of the followers of the controversial sex reformer James Hinton, was dedicated in part to simple living. Fellowship members believed in social reform, but they emphasized private, personal transformation as the basis of a new world.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Edward Carpenter, though now a wealthy man with £6000 per year, lectured a Fellowship audience on the simplicity of “Economies of Daily Life” in 1886. To interlocutors who held that “material things” ought to be subordinated to “spiritual things,” he explained that stone or varnished wood floors were easier to keep clean than fitted carpets and suggested that men wear a woolen shirt and pants and an overcoat to camouflage their odd appearance.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Earlier, Carpenter had retreated to a farm he bought in Millthorpe, a tiny village in Derbyshire, and began market gardening in a house he shared with a number of mainly working class men and women. The sexual attraction to rural and working men which drew him there was muted in his public utterances.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ He was swamped with visitors curious about “simplicity” and within a few years had a great many imitators.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In Bristol in the late 1880s and early 1890s a group of union activists combined socialist politics with feminism. Two of these Bristol socialists, close friends Helena Born and Miriam Daniell, lived together in a small working-class house decorated with “practical simplicity” and bare floors, perhaps on Carpenter's recommendation. By the late l880s, the Bristol community began to hold teas, dances and socials that included women, men and children as a way of building gender equality. Here Katharine St. John Conway, a Newnham College graduate and high school classics teacher, was converted to socialism and simplicity when striking cotton workers entered her church for shelter; within a few days she was determined to abandon her privileges in order to experience “the joy of companionship, the glory of life lost and found” in workers' struggles.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Simple livers were of course just one small strand among the reformers of the 1890s. Boredom, discomfort, and heavy rain on rural communes repelled many who tried simplicity. Others took little interest in the personal transformation at the core of simple living. In one instance, Carpenter's friend Isabella Ford, another hard-working union supporter, was drawn not to simple living gestures but to the transformation of laws and institutions. Ford seems to have worried little whether her life in the family's spacious country home, Adel Grange, amidst servants and gardens might be a barrier between her and the working women she supported so energetically.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ She had doubts, too, about the value of mixed-sex communal residences of any kind. In Ford's novel of life among urban slum reformers, On the Threshold (1895), published just as Mary and Emmeline were beginning their own simple-living experiment, several characters are dismissive of ”communistic households” and Kitty, one of the book's two heroines, tartly comments that in homes like these women would surely end up doing “the cooking and scrubbing, and washing and mending.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ The American settlement leader Jane Addams was another who ultimately rejected simple living. She was fascinated by Tolstoy, and visited him at his country estate in Russia in July of 1896. There Tolstoy chided her for her elegant travelling dress and income based on revenues from her family's distant farm in Illinois. Addams became convinced enough of the importance of simplicity to institute “bread labor” for herself at Hull House in the form of two hours of work per day in the settlement's bakery.Footnote ¹⁶² But the press of work at Hull House put an end to this experiment.

The simple living style of the Black sisters—Clementina, Constance, Emma, and Grace—who did their own housework in their flat in Fitzroy Street in the 1880s formed another part of the context into which Sabatier's St. Francis was so cordially welcomed. The Blacks are a reminder of the interconnections between simple living and the feminist-inspired concern for rational, simplified housework exemplified especially by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. For the Blacks, cooking and cleaning were “gesture[s] of identification with labour;” Sheila Rowbotham sees Ruskin's influence in their new respect for housekeeping—the process that transforms money into life. Clementina Black, later in her life, took housekeeping seriously enough as a social form to propose, as part of a new feminist-inspired concern for recognizing the value and easing the drudgery of women's work in the home, new household forms in which tasks like cooking and laundry would be socialized, done communally.Footnote ¹⁶³

Journalist, nurse, and school board member, Honnor Morten was most explicit of all in her allegiance to St. Francis, St. Clare, and simple living. Whether in the Strand or in Hoxton in East London, she wore a brown cloak advertising that she had “caught the St. Francis spirit,“ as her friend journalist Arthur Porritt put it.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Indeed at some point in the 1890s she had begun to spend time at Assisi. Morten had become acquainted with Hoxton poverty while working there with the Charity Organisation Society, but expanded her community ties as a nurse and midwife, and eventually, in 1897, as a settler. Morten, daughter of a wealthy Richmond solicitor, followed a trajectory that began with volunteer nursing, continued through journalism,Footnote ¹⁶⁵ and continued to her choice of Hoxton over her “sumptuous home in one of the old Stuart palaces at Richmond.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Here she did her own housework and lived on a worker's income. Next, probably in 1898, Morten and a handful of settlers, both men and women, moved into ordinary workers' flats in Nile Street, establising the Hoxton Settlement, of which she was the warden. Most of their programs were aimed at children. They “allow [ed] themselves no luxuries” and “lived there as the people lived, for weeks and months, scrubbing, washing, cooking, marketing, and all the rest,” as journalist Hulda Friederichs wrote with an implied shudder.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Morten was elected to the School Board for London in 1897 while residing in Hoxton, though she represented Southwark, and she advocated for equal pay for women teachers.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ By 1899, she had also became a regular lecturer on first aid, health, and childcare to women incarcerated in Wormwood Scrubs, with the aim of helping the women to make practical use of the time on their hands.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

The affinity of “Franciscans” like Morten and “Tolstoyans” like Jane Addams and J. C. Kenworthy is illustrated in Morten's relationship with Aylmer and Louise Maude, longstanding British residents of Russia who were friends, translators and critical disciples of Tolstoy. Tolstoy, already a great novelist by this time, emerged in the 1870s as a Christian prophet of resistance to the state, of agricultural labor for sustenance (“bread labor”) and of absolute simplicity in dress and diet. By the 1890s he was an international figure who carried out a vast correspondence; dozens of disciples and visitors were found daily at his country estate about a hundred miles from Moscow. William T. Stead, in his 1888 The Truth about Russia, sympathetically popularized Tolstoy's new religion for English-language readers, and some of the collective farms and settlements in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s were inspired by Tolstoy. John Colman Kenworthy, a Christian socialist and former associate of Mansfield House, had already founded a Brotherhood Church in Croydon when he became a Tolstoyan convert. He visited the master in 1895–1896 and seems to have then converted the Brotherhood to a reverence for agricultural “bread-labour,” for it established an agricultural commune in rural Purleigh, Essex, in 1897.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Indeed Tolstoyan colonies emerged all over England in these last years of the nineteenth century, their very wide extent ably surveyed recently by historian Charlotte Alston.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Aylmer and Louise Maude, who had moved to Britain in 1897 with their four sons, were neighbors, critical participants, and generous donors to the Purleigh settlement.Footnote ¹⁷² After the dispersal of the Purleigh colony in 1904, they helped Morten to found a colony for disabled London children in the Sussex village of Rotherfield and here Tolstoyan and Franciscan principles intermingled. When a journalist visited the settlement in 1910 it included four adult women volunteers, called Sisters, and four children, all living in a tasteful arts and crafts cottage. Others boarded out in the neighborhood, and they accommodated a total of about seventy children a year. The adults had to affirm that they “desire[d] to oppose all luxury and extravagance and the anti-social multiplication of our daily wants.” Clothed in a ”short, simple dress, the sleeves which can be turned up to the elbow,” they did all of the housework including cooking and cared for the ailing children.Footnote ¹⁷³ Morten's Franciscan seriousness was exemplified not only in her dress and her two simple living experiments but in the anonymous biography of St. Clare she published in 1910, titled The Life of an Enclosed Nun: St. Clare and her Order, according to her obituary in the London Times.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

IX. Fulfillment: Somerset Terrace, 1895–1901

Pethick and Neal emerged from the semi-enclosed world of the mission in the early fall of 1895 to establish their own version of simple living in Somerset Terrace, Duke's Road, off the Euston Road. Their bold experiment was at an easy walking distance from Cleveland Hall. They were determined to live on the “smallest amount on which a girl could live with decency.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ In his 1897 study of West London, their friend Arthur Sherwell coyly named them “Friendly Workers Among the Poor.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ They would live and work together here for six years, seeing their new flat as a stop on Whitman's “open road” where all could sojourn. Mary Neal remained and worked in the district until 1915. As Emmeline phrased it later in 1909, “We had already discarded the old idea of philanthropy. We wanted to pay our debts. That was all. To us had been given what was denied to others.“Footnote ¹⁷⁷ In their case there were no Franciscan trappings on their persons or in their flat, but they did live on a joint income of eighty pounds a year, the social work itself subsidized by wealthy friends and by the WLM's Mark Guy Pearse, who sold stories written by Mary on his busy lecture circuit.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ As they had yearned to do, they did their own cleaning and cooking—Mary found she had a talent for the latter, though Emmeline did not. Wrote Pethick-Lawrence gleefully later, when guests came to visit and stayed to dine, “We turned the tap into the porridge!”Footnote ¹⁷⁹

In their six years at Duke Street as independent actors, Neal, Pethick, and their co-workers productively and imaginatively redeployed the cultural capital of their mission work to enrich the lives of their neighbors. They founded additional children's clubs and made contact with other youth leaders, such as Lily Montagu and Mary Ward. They developed sophisticated music and dance programs with the children.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Their settlement had a representative on the St. Pancras Borough Council, and Emmeline was a school manager for three elementary schools in the Cumberland Market area. Teaming up with Jewish girls' club directors Lily and Marian Montagu to buy a seaside house in Littlehampton, Sussex, which they named “The Green Lady Hostel,” they expanded their earlier innovative practice of two-week country holidays for working girls.Footnote ¹⁸¹ A dressmaking cooperative that Mary had dreamed of as a Sister became a reality with Maison Espérance, on Wigmore Street, designed to meet the needs of the overworked and underpaid young seamstresses who had joined their working girls' club. The workshop offered an eight-hour day, a forty-five hour workweek, and a minimum weekly wage of fifteen shillings regardless of the season. A chastened Emmeline forty years afterward, still recognizing the value of their simple-living Duke Street years, wrote, “The fact was that all we could do was to change our own manner of living, and to change the conditions of a few.”Footnote ¹⁸²

X. Afterwards

St. Francis left divergent traces in the lives of the former Sisters. Mary Neal was permanently transformed by her Franciscan encounter and lived a life of simplicity, social service, and communion with nature. She was often poor and looked it; indeed sympathetic passersby occasionally offered her food or rides. In 1923 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence organized a hundred of her friends, many from the West London Mission, to pledge a total of a hundred guineas for her. Mary's brother had helped to buy her a house, Green Bushes, in Littlehampton in 1922. Neal generously took on the permanent care of two young boys, both children of friends, and worked as a volunteer children's magistrate for twelve years, an occupation for which she was well suited and which she found immensely absorbing. Pethick married wealthy barrister, journalist, and Mansfield House settler Fred Lawrence in 1901 and certainly forsook the Franciscan ideal. The Pethick-Lawrences, however, provided a country retreat for London children, bankrolled the Women's Social and Political Union through 1912 and remained militant suffragists after that. Emmeline was a founding member of the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom and its treasurer for seven years and was active in several feminist organizations including the Women's Freedom League, as well as the League of Nations Union. Fred and Emmeline cared for Mary in their home, Fourways in Surrey, in the last four years of her life.

The latter-day Franciscans created few permanent institutions, in contrast to their larger, wealthier, and less experimental contemporaries, who founded Toynbee Hall, the Women's University Settlement, Canning Town Settlement, or the West London Mission itself, the latter quite active in the interwar period and in fact still in existence today. But they championed an activist Christ as a model for modern life, and St. Francis demonstrated to them how that model could be followed. One of the few Franciscan—and Tolstoyan—successors of the 1890s experimenters was Kingsley Hall, founded in 1915 in Bromley-by-Bow by the Lester sisters, Muriel (1883–1968) and Doris (1886–1965), and inspired by Francis's form of Christianity. The Lesters' father, who had begun his life and built his fortune in the district, endowed it. The wealthiest of the Kingsley Hall residents formally renounced their fortunes. The organization sponsored a nursery school and community center based on the principle of members' collective self-government and radical sharing. Staff members were active in neighborhood life and local government. Muriel extended its message of Christian cooperation and peace through her activism in the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.Footnote ¹⁸³

The Franciscans of the 1890s added deep practical knowledge to the movements for social justice and political change that they would continue to be part of, and the Sisters' later careers—Mary's for example, as a rural children's magistrate, Emmeline's as a suffragist whose focus as a journalist was on the rights of poor women—often demonstrated a detailed grasp of the operations of poverty. Rather than nascent institutions, the Franciscan and Tolstoyan communities of the 1890s are better seen as forerunners in using the body as a witness for justice—in the making of the “political” into the “personal,” to use more recent terminology. Followers of Francis and Tolstoy sustained Christian inspiration into the twentieth century, as exemplified by suffragists who went to jail, “Tolstoyans” who refused military service during the First World War, and the peace campaigners who defied the government. Eglantyne Jebb, a founder of Save the Children, was known for her austere life and for the plain brown dresses and large crosses she often wore. In the next decades of conflict, cruelty, and world war, their numbers would expand and their tests would go far beyond living on a worker's wages.