Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

The house that Charles built
Claire Tomalin enjoys a vivid account of Dickens's efforts to help destitute women
By Claire Tomalin
* The Guardian, Saturday 20 December 2008

Jenny Hartley's brilliant book fills a gap in Dickens studies. Vivid, intelligent and enthralling, it is about his setting up in Shepherd's Bush - this is 1847, when Shepherd's Bush was farming land outside London - a house in which girls from the streets, the prisons and the workhouses, girls who stole and prostituted themselves, wrecking their own lives and seemingly helpless to save themselves, might be changed through kindness and discipline, and so prepared for new lives in the colonies.

The money came from the millionaire Miss Coutts, but the idea and organisation was all Dickens's, and for 12 years he effectively managed the Home for Homeless Women, installed in Urania Cottage (the name, bestowed by a previous owner, was particularly inappropriate, since Urania is another name for Aphrodite, goddess of love). Dickens's will to do good drove him to take on what any normal person would have found impossible, and Hartley shows him in action, passionate to help the half-crushed victims of Victorian society, despotic in putting his benevolent plans into practice, demonic in his energy. From the spring of 1846, when he first proposed the plan, until 1858, when it became impossible for him to remain connected with it, it was at the centre of his thoughts.

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.

His idea was to prepare each inmate for emigration, and his hope was that they would marry and have families. Coutts needed some persuading of this, since she believed that a woman once fallen could not expect to return to such happiness. Hartley makes a fascinating point that a survey made in Paris in the 1830s showed that many French women succeeded very well in moving out of prostitution and returning to mainstream life, whereas the English believed a woman, once "corrupted", could never be uncorrupted.

Dickens took the French view. He disagreed with Coutts on other points: for instance he favoured brightly coloured dresses for the girls, while she did not. He wanted to keep religious preaching to the minimum, she thought it essential. He even arranged for his friend John Hullah, a fine musician, to come to instruct the girls in singing; but it was expensive, and here Coutts balked. She had bought the house, had it put in order to his specifications and was already paying something like £500 a year - a large sum then, even for a very rich woman - to keep it running.

Hartley draws a lively picture of the home, and the characters of many of the inmates, including the matrons over whose appointment Dickens agonised. Women who had worked in prisons were likely to be too harsh. One who applied for what she called the "horrible task" clearly ruled herself out. But he struck gold with Mrs Morson, who was in charge for five years. As Hartley says: "She is a new variant of Victorian womanhood: a middle-class single parent supporting her family by means of a satisfying career." She came of good parentage and married a doctor working as chief medical officer for the Brazilian Mining Association, going out with him to live in the rainforest; and there he died, leaving her with two small daughters and pregnant. She had to make her own way back to England with them, by mule and then man-of-war, and when she arrived home she found the money her husband had left for her had been embezzled. Luckily she knew Coutts, and so heard of the job. Luckily again, her parents were able to care for her children, including the baby son.

Dickens took to her at once, finding her warm-hearted and intelligent. She taught the girls to read, write and cook well, and made mealtimes enjoyable occasions. She was tough with any who stole, drank or caused trouble. Above all, she was motherly, and the girls wept with her when they left, and again when she left. Not surprisingly, she was wooed and won by a second husband; but she was always proud of the work she had done, and of her association with Dickens. Her story alone could make a film.

So would the stories of the girls, although tracing them is hard, because they came from poverty and either disappeared back into poverty or departed for the colonies. In 1853 Dickens reported to Coutts that out of the first 54 inmates, 30 had emigrated and sent back good reports of themselves, 14 had left of their own accord and 10 had been expelled. Pretty good. Some could not bear the quietness and not being allowed out. Some decided that emigration was too like transportation, some were drawn back into their old lives. Isabella Gordon, cheeky and charming, boasted of her power over the staff (and Dickens), and recruited a gang of girls who stirred up trouble. Dickens conducted a trial at the home and finally put her out, crying, on a dark afternoon, with only an old shawl and half a crown. She leant against the house for a minute and then went out of the gate and slowly up the lane, wiping her wet face with her shawl, forlorn and hopeless. We know these details from Dickens, who watched her.

Hartley's impressive research has stretched to the other side of the world, and she has made contact with several descendants of Urania girls. She has tracked their stories in Australia, and even found a photograph of Rhena Pollard, a Sussex girl who moved from workhouse to prison to the home, and went on to Canada, making a decent marriage, bringing up seven children on an Ontario homestead and joining the Salvation Army. Dickens would have enjoyed the sight of her as a decorously dressed matriarch with intense eyes and a formidable jutting jaw.

Hartley sees Pollard as a model for Tattycoram in Little Dorrit. She draws other parallels between girls at the home and figures in Dickens's novels, such as the prostitute Martha in David Copperfield, and she suggests that the girls acted as models and muses for Dickens. But although she argues this through carefully, it is the one part of the book that worries me, because the voices he gives to Martha, and to Tattycoram, and indeed to Nancy in Oliver Twist and Alice in Dombey and Son, are not the voices of real women. Their high-flown speeches make them into stage representations of fallen women. "Oh, the river!" cries Martha, "I know it's like me, defiled and miserable - and it goes away, like my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled - and I feel that I must go with it!"

The few real words Dickens reports in his letters are not like this. A girl called Goldsborough answers his question about what sort of work she might do in the colonies with, "that she didn't suppose, Mr Dickerson, as she were a goin to set with her ands erfore her". Another complaining girl says, "Which blessed will be the day when justice is a-done in this ouse." A third, who has had her marks for good behaviour taken away, and is told she must earn them back, tells Dickens: "Ho! But if she didn't have em giv up at once, she could wish fur to go." These sound like real girls, not dramatic constructions. Dickens created character almost entirely through voice, so why was he unable to give convincing voices to the street women in his fiction? There is a question still hanging there.

Never mind. Hartley has written a book that every Dickens-lover, and everyone with an interest in social history, will want to read. It is packed with good stories, as its cast of forgotten women move through it - a tiny band amid all the wretchedness of 19th-century London. It also throws new light on a great episode in Dickens's life - an episode that ended abruptly when he fell in love, after which the whole enterprise slowly collapsed. You might see it as the revenge of Urania Aphrodite.