DICKENS really wrote about what he knew

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”.

TLS

You have only to look at his collected letters to marvel that a man who was already writing novels, running a weekly magazine, conducting a splendid social life, bringing up nine children, and raising money for other charitable causes, should find time to visit the house in Shepherd's Bush, often several times a week, to supervise it, select inmates, consult with prison governors, hire and fire matrons, deal with the drains and the gardener, report to Coutts in detail several times a week on whatever was happening there, handle the money, keep careful written accounts of the backgrounds of the girls, and arrange their emigration to Australia, South Africa or Canada.

Hartley reminds us how women were dealt with in Victorian institutions in London: the harsh, silent prisons, and the Magdalen Hospitals for penitent prostitutes, where they were constantly reminded of their shame as they worked under strict rules at sewing and laundering. The plan Dickens sold to Coutts was to make the home like a real home, with a matron who would never ask about the pasts of the young women, with comfortable bedrooms and good food, a garden where they could grow flowers, books to read - even a piano.

Claire Tomalin for The Guardian