Charles Dickens: A Life (37 page)

In January 1848, thanking Thackeray for a letter of generous praise about
Dombey
, still unfinished, he told him, ‘I am saving up the perusal of Vanity Fair until I shall have done Dombey,’ and invited him to a dinner at the end of the month, to be followed by ‘a prodigious country dance at about the small hours’.
³⁴
One more distraction must be mentioned here. The letter he had written to Miss Coutts before leaving for Switzerland, with his scheme for helping prostitutes, led to the most absorbing and time-consuming project of the year, pushed forward with unflagging commitment and determination. Before the end of 1847, a year during which he wrote twelve episodes of
Dombey
, he had succeeded in establishing the Home for Homeless Women, funded by Miss Coutts and directed by himself. It required from him many visits, much interviewing of possible staff and assessing of possible inmates, many committee meetings and a very large amount of letter-writing. The next chapter will describe how he set about it.

The sales of each of the last three numbers of
Dombey
, in January, February and March 1848, were around 34,000, and people continued to buy back numbers for months afterwards. In 1847 he earned £3,800, and for the first time ever he had enough money in the bank to be able to invest. From now on he had no more serious financial worries – as Forster put it, ‘from this date all embarrassments connected with money were brought to a close.’
³⁵
It was a turning point in his life, curiously brought to him by the book that took as a central theme the powerlessness of money, whether to save life, to give health or to win love.

With the public so pleased and the earnings so good, he was naturally jubilant. He celebrated with Forster, Mark Lemon and John Leech by allowing himself a few days in Wiltshire, taking a day’s gallop across Salisbury Plain and returning to London on the Great Western Railway. Then he gave a dinner for twelve men friends on the day before the last number appeared on 31 March. About this time he impregnated Catherine again: Sydney was one year old, and she had recovered from the miscarriage, but she must have felt weary of perpetual pregnancies and also fearful of the repeated ordeal of giving birth, without having any possibility of protecting herself. Between 1844 and January 1849 four sons were born, none of them desired by Dickens, although he warmed to each of them during their baby years, giving them absurd and affectionate pet names like Chickenstalker, Keeryleemoo, Skittles and Hoshen Peck or Ocean Spectre. The last of these sons of the forties would be Henry Fielding Dickens, and he would turn out to be the cleverest and ablest of all the children.

A Home

Dickens had been observing the women of the streets since he was a boy. They appear in
Sketches by Boz
and, however unrealistically, in Nancy in
Oliver Twist
, whose portrait was, he insisted, true, and based on what he had seen in actual life around him; also in
The Chimes
, and currently in
Dombey
, and there would be more.
¹
In 1840 he had also made sure that Eliza Burgess, the servant girl accused of killing her baby, got a fair trial, and had succeeded not only in that but in helping her back to a respectable job and a decent future: his first known rescue of a young woman who might otherwise have faced a wretched fate. He was compassionate but not simple-minded, and he could be strictly realistic about prostitutes and men’s experience of them and need for them: for example, he defended Samuel Rogers when he was publicly accused of corrupting girls who became prostitutes by saying they had certainly been willing partners, and commented in a letter, ‘good God if such sins were to be visited upon all of us and to hunt us down through life, what man would escape!’
²
He expressed admiration of the French for recognizing the existence of the social evils and vices that the English refused to talk about.
³
In 1848 he told Emerson, in the course of frank masculine conversation among friends, that ‘incontinence is so much the rule in England that if his own son were particularly chaste, he should be alarmed on his account, as if he could not be in good health.’ Dickens was responding to Emerson’s statement that educated young male Americans went virgin to their marriage beds, and agreeing with Carlyle that in Europe chastity in the male sex was ‘as good as gone in our times’. Charley was still eleven years old when this exchange took place, but there is no reason to doubt Emerson’s account of it, and Dickens was surely expressing his view that a healthy man needed sex and that there would be something odd about a young man who did not look for it where it was easily available.
⁴

We have already seen how, in 1841, Dickens suggested to Maclise that they might inspect the prostitutes in Broadstairs, telling him he knew where they were to be found. He accepted that it was normal for men to make use of them; but at the same time he felt a huge pity for the women as the lowest and most helpless members of society, with no prospect other than deepening misery before them, and seemingly without any power to save themselves. If there was some inconsistency between his tolerance of the practice and his wish to rescue the practitioners, it may be that he reckoned he was unlikely to end prostitution single-handed, and that men would always find what they wanted in one way or another. The double standard troubled many thoughtful Victorians of both sexes, with its unjust loading of all the blame for prostitution on to the women, and its decree that any young woman who became pregnant outside marriage could never redeem herself from the disgrace. Mrs Gaskell, Gladstone and Thomas Hardy all said or did their bit at various times to combat such hypocrisy, and there were many private initiatives to help women who were its victims; but none was as bold, as original and as imaginative as Dickens’s Home, which he insisted from the start must be a real home to the young women he set out to help, run on homely principles, and not a place where they had to expiate their sins.

Miss Coutts, good and generous and ready to follow where Dickens led, was prepared to fund the project, which would cost over £700 a year (more like £50,000 in the money of 2011), and she gave him almost free rein in setting it up. He needed to find a house large enough to take up to a dozen or so young women, sharing bedrooms, plus a matron and her assistant – his early plan to take thirty was given up as impractical. He decided that central London was unsuitable, but that it should not be too far out either, and in May 1847 he came upon a small, solid brick house near Shepherd’s Bush, then still in the country, but well connected with central London by the Acton omnibus. The house was already named Urania Cottage but from the first he called it simply the Home, the idea that it should feel like a home rather than an institution being so important to him. He liked the fact that it stood in a country lane, with its own garden, and saw at once that the women could have their own small flowerbeds to cultivate. There was also a coach house and stables which could be made into a laundry, and it was surrounded by fields, which he presently persuaded Miss Coutts to buy, to be let out to the local milkman as grazing for his cows – and he could supply the girls in the Home with milk.

The lease was agreed in June and soon afterwards he started interviewing possible matrons, set builders to work putting the fabric of the house into good order, decorating and equipping it with shelves and fencing round the garden. Bedsteads and linen had to be bought, kitchen and laundry equipment, crockery and cutlery, books and a piano, all from good suppliers: Dickens paid for everything and sent the receipts to Miss Coutts. He loved planning, purchasing and fitting up rooms, his imagination was engrossed, and he gave his time and energy happily.

He does not seem to have discussed the project with Forster, who was aware of it but has little to say about it in his account of Dickens’s life: there is one allusion to the plan and a promise that ‘future mention will be made’, but it is not.
⁵
Dickens’s chief allies and helpers were Augustus Tracey and George Chesterton, the governors of Tothill Fields and Coldbath Fields prisons respectively, both good friends already. He put them on to the committee alongside two clergymen who were prison chaplains and an archdeacon interested in emigration, to satisfy Miss Coutts’s wish that the Home should be run on strict Church of England principles. Her personal physician, Dr Brown, was another committee member, and she also appointed Dr Kay-Shuttleworth, an educationalist with sound religious principles whom Dickens found a bore. He was happy with Christian prayers and precepts but did not care about denominations and was determined to avoid preaching, heavy moralizing and calls for penitence, taking the view that they would only alienate the inmates; but he had to give way when Miss Coutts dismissed a good young under-matron, Mrs Fisher, on discovering she was a Dissenter. He himself concentrated on finding sensible, tough, unshockable and kindly women to work with the inmates. He had to turn down applicants who were too innocent, and one who talked of the work at the Home as a ‘horrible task’, and on the whole his appointments were successful, the most remarkable of the matrons being Mrs Morson, the courageous young widow of a doctor, who was able to take on the job because she had parents who could look after her three small children while she worked. She stayed for five years, teaching, providing excellent food and cooking with her charges, mothering them so well that they wept when they parted from her; she worked closely with Dickens, sometimes visiting him at home, corresponded with Miss Coutts and referred to her charges as ‘the family’. She was an outstanding woman, an unsung Victorian heroine, and she left only when she was snapped up by a second husband. She remained proud of the work she had done with Dickens.

His aim was to rescue two categories of young women: those who were already known to be prostitutes, and those likely to drift into it because they lacked family support, had fallen into bad company, could not get work, become thieves and pickpockets, or were simply starving and in some cases suicidal. They were to be offered places in the Home, with good food, an orderly life, training in reading, writing, sewing, domestic work, cooking and laundering, and prepared to emigrate to new lives in the colonies, Australia, Canada or South Africa. His plan was to interview each young woman recommended to him – mostly by prison governors, magistrates or the police, although there were also private recommendations – to question her about her life and form an opinion of her suitability. Once accepted she would be told that no one would ever mention her past to her and that even the matrons would not be informed about it, although he sometimes disclosed details to his favourite, Mrs Morson. Each young woman was advised not to talk further about her own history to anyone else, and there would be nothing punitive or penitential in her treatment. He had a horror of the ‘almost insupportable extent’ to which religion was pressed on women in refuges and asylums, and knew how the women dreaded it; and he insisted that the chaplain at the Home should be discreet and gentle, ‘the least exacting of his order’, who would understand that the inmates needed to be ‘tempted to virtue’, not frightened, dragged or driven.
⁶

The words he wrote to be read to young women considering taking up a place offered at the Home were easy, direct and unabashedly intimate in their tone:

If you have ever wished (I know you must have done so, sometimes) for a chance of rising out of your sad life, and having friends, a quiet home, means of being useful to yourself and others, peace of mind, self-respect, everything you have lost, pray read … attentively … I am going to offer you, not the chance but the certainty of all these blessings, if you will exert yourself to deserve them. And do not think that I write to you as if I felt myself very much above you, or wished to hurt your feelings by reminding you of the situation in which you are placed. God forbid! I mean nothing but kindness to you, and I write as if you were my sister.
⁷

It would be hard to improve on this, and it is not surprising that many young women were moved to put themselves into his care.

It was expected that each of them would live at the Home for about a year before being given a supervised place on an emigrant ship, by which time she would be well nourished, healthy, better educated – able to read and write, for instance – and better able to manage her life. Dickens hoped they would find husbands, which is indeed what happened to many of them, although Miss Coutts had doubts about the morality of a fallen woman marrying. He and she also disagreed about the clothing supplied to the inmates, Miss Coutts favouring sober tints, Dickens insisting that they should have dresses in cheerful colours they would enjoy wearing. He prevailed, and he also encouraged some lightening of the reading matter provided, which he thought in danger of being grim and gloomy. In one of his many striking letters to Miss Coutts, who was as innocent as she was well intentioned, he suggested that ‘All people who have led hazardous and forbidden lives are, in a certain sense, imaginative; and if their imaginations are not filled with good things, they will choke them, for themselves, with bad ones.’
⁸
Believing in the power of music, he arranged for his old friend John Hullah, now a distinguished teacher, to provide lessons in part singing; he was surely right about this, but Miss Coutts found it too expensive a luxury and ended the arrangement.

The conditions in which the women lived were not harsh but simple. They slept three or four to a bedroom, each with her own bed: one young woman cried at the sight of a good bed all to herself when she first saw it. They got up at six in the morning, and they made each other’s beds, to discourage everyone from secreting alcohol. They had short prayers twice daily, before breakfast and in the evening. They were well fed, with breakfast, dinner at one and tea at six as their last meal of the day. There was schooling for two hours every morning, mostly reading, writing and simple arithmetic – not all of them could read or write – and free time before and after dinner and tea. There was reading aloud while they did their needlework, making and mending their own clothes. They had their own plots in the garden, which was otherwise maintained by Mr Bagster, the gardener. They did all the household tasks, which were rotated weekly: laundry, house cleaning, cooking, breadmaking and so on (and it is worth noting that the pupils in the early teacher-training colleges for women were also required to do the housework). They made soup for the poor, to give them the satisfaction of helping others. On Saturdays there was a grand house tidying and cleaning and everyone had a bath. On Sundays they went to church with the matrons, who would also take them out individually or in small groups on other days. None was allowed out on her own, or to have unsupervised visits, or private correspondence, for fear that old associates might try to draw her back to the life she had left behind her. A doctor came if anyone was ill, and they were taken to hospital for treatment if necessary. No one was accepted who was pregnant or had a child. They were given marks for good behaviour – punctuality, cleanliness – and could lose marks for bad behaviour; and the marks were worth money, so that they were able to accumulate some to use when they left. A Mr Duffy came to talk to them about emigration, what to expect and what problems they might face. The first three inmates left for Australia in January 1849, and twenty-seven more crossed the seas over the next five years.