There is a lost book by Dickens, one that recorded some of the most remarkable encounters of his life. Within it, he catalogued the stories told him by the women – prostitutes, confidence tricksters, thieves and attempted suicides – whom he interviewed before they were admitted to Urania Cottage, the refuge for fallen women he established in Shepherd’s Bush in the 1840s and effectively directed for a decade or more. The money – substantial sums, for this was “high-end philanthropy” – came from the immensely wealthy Angela Burdett-Coutts, but the initial scheme and much of its everyday direction was Dickens’s alone, his most important and most characteristic charitable venture. Jenny Hartley’s excellent new book tells this extraordinary story with compassion, common sense and a lively awareness of the unruly, self-dramatizing energies (both Dickens’s and the women’s) at play within and beyond the home’s four walls.

He was the greatest novelist of the age, Burdett-Coutts its richest heiress, and they were determined to offer a chance to people who had none, or only bad ones. They could only help a tiny proportion of the great tide of vulnerable young women who washed up in the prisons and workhouses of mid-Victorian England, but they did so with determination, energy and imagination. The aged Duke of Wellington, with whom the much younger Miss Coutts was conducting a clandestine courtship, dismissed prostitutes as “irreclaimable”. More resistance came from the women themselves, many of whom rejected the prospect of a year’s quiet domesticity followed by emigration to a distant colony that were the conditions for entry. But when Dickens wanted something, he invariably got it and, having signed up Miss Coutts and found a suitable building, chose everything from the dresses (piquing himself on getting wholesale prices from the drapers’ shop) to the inscriptions on the walls. Coutts wanted costumes made of plain “Derry” for the “girls”, but Dickens’s rhetoric was irresistible: “In these cast-iron and mechanical days . . . one colour and that of the earth, earthy, is too much with them early and late. Derry might as well break out into a stripe, or put forth a bud, or even burst into a full-blown flower. Who is Derry that he is to make quakers of us all, whether we will or no!”. Dickens loved the many roles the work demanded – confidant, counsellor, detective, judge – and became the home’s presiding deity and factotum, a man not too important to busy himself about the drains or canvass the merits of “a very big dog in a barrel” to keep everyone safe.

The women, former convicts for the most part, were a wilful lot, used to dumb resistance or suddenly “breaking out” when deference or virtue became a bore. When Dickens quizzed one on what she thought she would do when she emigrated, she engagingly replied “that she did not suppose, Mr Dickerson, as she was a going to set with er ands erfore her”. Much of the day-to-day running was deputed to a string of hard-working and highly competent women (various “grim”, “presumptuous” or “vinegary” assistant matrons had to be weeded out). The best-documented is Georgiana Morson, who had been left a widow in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest with two small children and a third on the way, but made her way back to Miss Coutts’s doorstep and subsequently coped with everything that Dickens and the fizzing energy of a houseful of adolescents could throw at her. Sex, drink or violence was usually the trouble, as when Jemima Hiscock “forced open the door of the little beer cellar with knives and drank until she was dead drunk; when she used the most horrible language and made a very repulsive exhibition of herself”, or when Sarah Hyam was found “carrying on in the kitchen with the Police constable employed to watch the place”. There were several imaginative escapes, rarely through the front door, including those of Hannah Morson (who went through the fence) and Mary Ann Shadwell who wriggled through the larder window, enterprisingly taking two shawls, seven dresses, two silver-topped scent bottles and the crimson tablecloth from the parlour as she went. The trickiest customer of all was probably Anna Maria Sesina “the pertest, vainest (preposterous as the word seems in such a connexion) and most deceitful little Minx in this town” who, after her inevitable expulsion, was last seen “walking in a jaunty way up Notting Hill, and refreshing herself with an occasional contemplation of the shop windows”. “I think”, wrote Dickens, “she would corrupt a Nunnery in a fortnight.”

In the face of such squalls, big and small, he was practical, prompt and uncondescending, steering deftly between the dangers of piety and perversity in his handling of the various dramas that arose, and happy to rush across London at a moment’s notice to sort them out. Why did he do it? No doubt there was a pleasure in setting up a chaste little harem for himself in Shepherd’s Bush, a real-life alternative family to his own on the other side of town, but there was never a sense that his care for these young women (some as young as fourteen) was compromising. In the house, there was no privacy, no clothes or possessions of one’s own, and constant mutual surveillance. The timetable was minutely planned, from six in the morning until ten at night, and inmates were assessed daily for “Truthfulness, Industry, Temper, Propriety of Conduct and Conversation, Temperance, Order, Punctuality, Economy and Cleanliness”. Although the women were to be “tempted to virtue”, self-discipline was the order of the day: “You must resolve to set a watch upon yourself and be firm in your control over yourself, and restrain yourself”. But there was no head-shaving or punishment, and Dickens rejected out of hand the coarse clothing and “philosophy of abjection” that characterized the reformatories and Magdalen hospitals of the period. Freed from the dusty Derry, Urania women were, as Hartley puts it, “dressed to progress”.

Most of what we know about this brave experiment comes from the many letters that Dickens wrote to Mrs Morson, her successors, or to Miss Coutts. He clearly loved, as perhaps the girls did too, the many domestic dramas that enlivened the worthy, self-improving days. But Hartley also tries to see past the busy, brightly-lit little figure, dashing from his desk to the Home to investigate a mystery or sort out a problem, to map the lives of the women before and after their Urania moment. It must have been hard work, for they often slip through the archival nets, leaving few traces or children (perhaps a legacy of their sexual past) behind, surviving only in an odd census entry or a passing reference in a letter. Hartley has tracked a few to their eventual destinations in Canada, Australia or South Africa; others, we know, fell back into their old ways. Only a single photograph, of Rhena Cole, formerly “the audacious Rhena Pollard”, survives of the more than eighty women that we know spent time in the home.

Hartley is fascinated by the lost “Casebook” in which Dickens recorded the stories of all the Urania women. They were obliged to tell him everything and, even if they sometimes lied or omitted things, it would still be an extraordinary document to read, for Dickens, we know, gained people’s confidence readily and was a deft and accurate reporter. Hartley has hunted widely, but the book probably went up in smoke in the great bonfire of his papers that Dickens lit one afternoon in the garden of Gad’s Hill. I think she overstates the case when she describes it as Dickens’s “ur-text, the book behind his other books” or posits that in filling it in he was writing “his sixteenth novel, but one he knew he could never publish”. She is on surer ground when she draws parallels between Dickens’s work at Urania Cottage and his own secret autobiographical writing. For, as he first imagined and then created the home for these young victims of bad parents or bad luck, he was also quietly exploring his own escape from childhood poverty and the street-life of nineteenth-century London. However different the successful and prosperous middle-aged novelist was from fifteen-year-old Emma Spencer, already a veteran of the Clerkenwell Workhouse and the Field Lane Ragged School when she arrived in Shepherd’s Bush, he also strongly identified with her and her kind. “A sloppy education”, he wryly confided to Miss Coutts, “is a kind of bringing up, that I think I can thoroughly understand.”

This is most clear in the dual obligation – storytelling, followed by silence – that marked the new beginning. Urania women were obliged to tell their story to Dickens but, once they had done so, were forbidden ever to refer to it again, either to each other, the staff at the home, or in their future lives. The parallel with the ways that Dickens handled his own family’s shameful secrets is striking. After John Dickens was freed from prison and the twelve-year-old Charles was released from Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, the Dickens family never spoke about the events again. His parents, Dickens wrote, were “stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least allusion to it, however far off and remote, from either of them”. He, by contrast, did tell the story but, like the Urania women, only to a single ear, that of his friend John Forster, who revealed nothing until after Dickens’s death. Telling the story once, then silence and a new start: for the Urania women, as for Dickens himself, a unique, taboo-breaking act of narration would act as a bridge to a new life.

It didn’t always work out like that, of course, and it was sometimes hard to persuade the women that the goal of eventual emigration and marriage in the colonies was anything other than transportation by another name. In Dickens’s novels of the period, it all seems fairly straightforward, as the scapegraces, misfits and fallen women of David Copperfield are shipped off to Australia, an upside-down world where even Mr Micawber can flourish. Real life was trickier, although Dickens never doubted his own ability to thrive in such circumstances, boasting that “if I ever went to a new colony . . . I should force myself up to the top of the social milk-pot and live upon the cream”. Hope for the first batch of Urania emigrants was high, but reports were far from encouraging. Although Dickens had arranged for a pet bishop of Miss Coutts to meet them off the boat, they had already done a bunk when he arrived, “leaving the worst character behind them”. Later groups did better, although the passage out – a glut of temptation after so much restraint – was always a difficult time. But overall, it is striking how clear-minded the Urania project was and how realistic and thorough in execution. Dickens and Burdett-Coutts were simply unwilling to be indifferent to the suffering that surrounded them, and unfailingly energetic in pursuing the chances of change for the better. Urania gave those who entered its doors decent food and clothing, some education, a library, a garden and even music lessons from Dickens’s old friend John Hullah, Professor at King’s College London. It was less than Dickens’s own children had, but a long way from the oakum picking that was the norm elsewhere. Caroline Chisholm, a fellow advocate of emigration, asked Dickens if it really was true that his ex-prostitutes “had Pianos”. “I shall always regret”, he told Miss Coutts, “that I didn’t answer yes – each girl a grand, downstairs – and a cottage in her bedroom – besides a small guitar in the washhouse.”

Jenny Hartley
CHARLES DICKENS AND THE HOUSE OF FALLEN WOMEN
287pp. Methuen. £17.99.
978 0 4713 77643 3