BOOK OF THE DAY:Rebecca Pelan reviews Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen WomenBy Jenny Hartley, Methuen 288pp, £17.99
JENNY HARTLEY’S study is the first to offer a sustained historical analysis of Urania Cottage (1847-1862), a home for “fallen women” founded and managed by Charles Dickens.
The project was financed by banking heiress and philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, and the concept was simple: to rehabilitate the women and prepare them for a new life in the New World.
Urania Cottage residents came from the same prisons, workhouses and courts that already provided a steady flow of women to various reform institutions, but it was the nature of the rehabilitation that made Urania Cottage different: Dickens was convinced that reformatories and penitentiaries simply did not work for girls and young women.
Rather, “these unfortunate creatures are to be tempted into virtue” through gentleness and encouragement. Hartley’s study details the day-to-day running of the “home”, including the strict daily routine that Dickens insisted upon, and which satisfied his compulsion to control everything according to his own set of rules.
But she also conveys the humanitarian aims of the man and his institution, as well as the individuality and feistiness of the “Uranians” themselves.
Hartley's study not only locates Dickens's involvement in Urania Cottage precisely during the years of his writing David Copperfield(1849) – identifying a long-acknowledged "grist and mill" connection between Dickens as social reformer and Dickens as novelist – but also reveals Australia as the preferred destination for the young inhabitants.
Though he never acted upon it, Dickens retained a lifelong interest in visiting Australia and actually insisted that several of his sons move there for the purpose of improving their lives: the country clearly had, in his mind, extraordinarily redemptive potential.
Sadly, none of Dickens's sons succeeded in Australia in the way their father's fictional emigrants did. In David Copperfield, for example, Dickens created several characters that not only thrive in Australia, but become different people: Emily, Martha, Mr Peggotty, Mrs Gummidge and Mr Micawber all prosper.
Mr Micawber, in fact, once profligate and debt-ridden, escapes from a world of insolvency and imprisonment to become a magistrate and model citizen.
Considered to be his most autobiographical work, David Copperfieldincorporates many of the beliefs Dickens, in true Victorian style, held to be true concerning Britain's providential role in the world, including that its empire existed for high moral purposes.
Hartley shows that it was the opening up of Britain’s colonies for emigration – as opposed to transportation – together with Dickens’s belief that anyone was capable of improving themselves if given the chance, that acted as the catalyst for the founding of Urania Cottage, the first of its kind to treat “fallenness” as a reversible process.
It was to Adelaide in south Australia that the majority of the women were sent, into the care of the Rev August Short. But Adelaide was a suitable destination for other reasons, not least because, since its foundation in 1836, it was a convict-free zone, a fact usefully exploited by Dickens to distinguish the women as respectable emigrants rather than transportees.
The story of Urania Cottage will be familiar to those already aware of Dickens’s life. However, despite the relatively small number of women involved – about 100 over the 15 years of its existence – Hartley’s provision of names and, albeit piecemeal, histories of these women reverses an existing critical tendency to see Urania Cottage as little more than an interesting component in the life story of this famous author.
In putting flesh on the bare bones of those women who progressed through the institution and journeyed to Australia, Canada and South Africa, Hartley places them at the centre of their own life stories. In doing so, she performs an important shift, one that lifts the Uranian women from the category of “story” into one of “history”.
Rebecca Pelan is currently visiting scholar in the Centre for Research on Women, Gender, Culture and Social Change at the University of Queensland, Brisbane