by Simon Heffer
He wrote Hard Times, he told Carlyle, to ‘shake some people’.4 Its successor, Little Dorrit, while widely seen as an attack on the notion of imprisonment for debt, is as much an assault on the unreconstructed institutions of the State, in the incarnation of the Circumlocution Office, that pertained before the Northcote–Trevelyan reforms; and on the dangers of capitalism, depicted not just in the unscrupulous and posturing Merdle, but also in the greedy idiots who are his clients. Trollope trod this path twenty years later in The Way We Live Now, less originally and less pungently.
Dickens includes philanthropic characters in many of his novels, not merely to win the affections of his readers but to set an example: Mr Brownlow, the saviour of Oliver Twist; the Cheerybles, who by employing Nicholas Nickleby allow him to provide for his family; Mr Garland in The Old Curiosity Shop; and the Boffins in Our Mutual Friend, whom Dickens seems to depict almost as an ideal of human kindness and decency, whose values had survived the harsh employer to whom they had devoted their lives. They were ‘a hopelessly Unfashionable pair’ but ‘these two ignorant and unpolished people had guided themselves so far on in their journey of life, by a religious sense of duty and desire to do right. Ten thousand weaknesses and absurdities might have been detected in the breasts of both; ten thousand vanities additional, possibly, in the breast of the woman. But the hard wrathful and sordid nature that had wrung as much work out of them as could be got in their best days, for as little money as could be paid to hurry on their worst, had never been so warped but that it knew their moral straightness and respected it.’5
III
It took a partnership with the richest woman in Britain for Dickens to achieve his greatest successes in the field of helping the poor. At twenty-three, in 1837, Angela Burdett inherited £1.8 million from the widow of her maternal grandfather, Thomas Coutts, who had with his elder brother been a partner in the bank bearing their name. The newspapers observed that to lay out a line of sovereigns equivalent to this amount would occupy 24 miles. She also had an income of £50,000 a year, the proceeds from her half-share in the bank. Under the conditions of her step-grandmother’s will she took her grandfather’s name by Royal Licence, becoming Angela Burdett-Coutts. The will also forbade her from marrying a foreigner and from interfering in the running of the bank. Her father, Sir Francis Burdett, had been a Radical MP, and in her parents’ house she had met most of the great men of the day, including Gladstone, Disraeli and Charles Dickens.
She had been brought up a devout evangelical, and her faith informed her life. Her main purpose became philanthropy. Despite being bombarded by gold-digging suitors, she did not marry until 1881 – to her twenty-nine-year-old American secretary – partly because to have done so would until the law changed have made her fortune her husband’s; and partly because of her devotion to Mrs Brown, her companion and former governess, who lived until 1878. She ignored the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury that she might adopt her fiancé instead of marrying him; because he was foreign she forfeited a substantial part of her fortune to her sister, but over the preceding forty-four years had already disbursed enough to change the lives of thousands of people. She shocked the Queen, who felt – with justification – that Burdett-Coutts had become unbalanced since the death of Mrs Brown, and risked ‘an unsuitable marriage’.6 The bride was unmoved by the warning. The marriage seemed straight out of a Dickens novel.
The Church was her first priority. By 1840 she knew London now had 1.7 million souls, but church accommodation for only 101,000 of them, and few resources for clergy and volunteers to undertake social work. So she built and endowed churches: the first of which was St Stephen’s in her father’s old constituency of Westminster, a parish that housed some of the most depressed and dangerous slums in London, despite the presence of Parliament and the Abbey. She funded schools, notably one under the auspices of St Stephen’s. She realised there was no point trying to teach poor children anything until they had been taught the practicalities of survival – especially that girls should learn the basics of cookery, laundry and hygiene. She founded the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and was a supporter of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She became president of its Ladies Committee in 1870, where she advanced her principle that all life, whether human or animal, was sacred; and that ‘inhuman treatment of animals should be held to be a wrong and a sin.’7 She frequently wrote to The Times expressing outrage at any act of cruelty she witnessed towards dogs or horses, the main objects of her concern.
Burdett-Coutts was committed to the idea of improvement, and not just in Britain: she gave money for humanitarian causes and education all over the world, notably in Africa, where (as in other parts of the Empire) she funded missionary work. She endowed bishoprics in South Africa, Australia and Canada for the benefit of emigrants from England, whose new life she hoped would be a Christian one. She also helped pay for those who wished to work, but could find none, to emigrate: the export of surplus labour was one of Victorian Britain’s leading commercial activities. She was concerned about children going hungry, and thereby rendering themselves unfit for work: so she founded the Destitute Children’s Dinner Society in 1866. She built drinking fountains for dogs, and for people: one, in Victoria Park in Hackney, by her favourite architect H. A. Darbishire, is spectacular, if ridiculously ostentatious. She helped Shaftesbury’s Ragged School Union. She paid for hundreds of destitute boys to join Royal and Merchant Navy training ships. She funded the Temperance Society. She also set up the first residential home for art students, in Brunswick Square, in 1879: she was a great patron of struggling artists.
Like her friend Gladstone she was concerned by the descent of women into prostitution, and affected by their ubiquity even in the salubrious part of Piccadilly where she lived. This is where her friendship with Dickens would bear the most philanthropic fruit. In 1847 she put up the money for a hostel for women who wished to escape from vice, called Urania Cottage, at Shepherd’s Bush in west London. Her main collaborator was Dickens, who had become her principal adviser in philanthropic matters, diverting more of her largesse away from the Church and its educational work. Dickens had had the idea of saving fallen women, and had written Burdett-Coutts a fourteen-page letter outlining the plan for a ‘home’ for them, a halfway-house to their full rehabilitation. He was keen to take a strong hand in running it himself. He told her: ‘I need not say that I should enter on such a task with my whole heart and soul.’8 Through two friends who were governors of London prisons – Coldbath Fields and the Middlesex House of Correction in Tothill Fields – he had met some likely candidates for admission, and his urge to help these women drove him to press her to fund the scheme.
Burdett-Coutts had met Dickens at around the time of her inheritance: he had been much admired in the Burdett household, one where Oliver Twist, with its philippic against the Poor Law, had had the effect the author desired. In 1839 and 1840 she had frequently asked him to dine with her, and he had frequently refused; he was not especially enchanted by high society. However, he soon warmed to her, so much so that when in May 1841 he decided to kill off Little Nell, she was one of only half a dozen friends alerted before that number of The Old Curiosity Shop was published.9
By 1843 Dickens and Burdett-Coutts had become exceptionally close. She paid for his son Charley to go to Eton, and it illustrates the dynamic of her relationship with the great author that his wishes for the boy to go to Harrow were overridden by his benefactress. Dickens had been attracted by the Ragged School movement, and mentioned to John Forster that his wealthy friend would be amenable to helping fund such institutions. He had sent her ‘a sledge-hammer account of the Ragged Schools’, having seen her name high on the list of subscribers to the clergy education fund.10 He ‘took pains to show her that religious mysteries and difficult creeds wouldn’t do for such pupils. I told her, too, that it was of immense importance they should be washed.’ Dickens used his literary skills to outline what
he saw on his visits to these schools, where he found masters struggling to make any impact on their charges, and the charges almost beyond help. Burdett-Coutts’s first contribution, to a school Dickens told her was roughly in the area of Fagin’s den, was to provide public baths and a larger schoolroom. Dickens had had no doubt she would supply whatever he had asked her for, and she did not disappoint. ‘She is a most excellent creature, I protest to God, and I have a most perfect affection and respect for her.’ Dickens marked the next stage in their relationship by dedicating Martin Chuzzlewit to her.
For the moment, their main project would be Urania. Existing refuges for prostitutes came in two forms: they were places of temporary respite that gave women basic board and lodging before putting them back on the streets; or they were nunneries. This would be different. Women would be taught basic skills, such as knitting and sewing, that would help them resist returning to prostitution. They would have some elementary schooling. They would be given a plot of garden to tend – Shepherd’s Bush, where Dickens located the ideal house, was still rural. They shared the household chores. They would make soup for distribution to the poor, to make them understand the benefits of service to others. There were prayers morning and night, and church on Sundays. They could either seek work in London, or be equipped to start a new life in one of the colonies. Once the house was secured, on a lease for £60 a year, and with stables that could be converted into a wash house, Dickens romantically imagined the inmates sitting in the garden, singing or tending flowers.
He would later describe the home’s purpose as ‘replacing young women who had lapsed into guilt in a situation of hope and secondly to save young women who are in danger of falling into like condition.’11 He had told the benefactress, in his proposal on 26 May 1846: ‘I would put it in the power of any Governor of a London Prison to send an unhappy creature of this kind (by her own choice, of course) straight from his prison, when her term expired, to the Asylum. I would put it in the power of any penitent creature to knock at the door, and say For God’s sake, take me in.’12 He envisaged a two-stage process, first of probation, then of entering into ‘the Society of the house’.13
During the probationary stage, a girl would be told she was there for repentance and reform; and that for all the harm she had done, the most destructive effect had been on herself. She might be degraded and fallen, but was not lost. She would be told that ‘the means of Return to Happiness are now about to be put into her own hands, and trusted to her own keeping.’14 Rather than her being kept on probation for a fixed time, there would be a marks system, and when she had earned sufficient marks by good conduct she could become a full member of the home. Marks could be deducted for bad behaviour – ‘ill-temper, disrespect, bad language, any outbreak of any sort or kind’. The object was to prove a woman could be responsible for herself, and could understand that her progress (or lack of it) was entirely within her control. What Dickens admired about this system was that it was a ‘preparation . . . for the right performance of duty outside, and for the formation of habits of firmness and self-restraint.’15
Dickens said he understood the regime must be ‘grounded in religion, most unquestionably’.16 Yet this must be complemented by a system of training, ‘which, while it is steady and firm, is cheerful and hopeful. Order, punctuality, cleanliness, the whole routine of household duties—as washing, mending, cooking—the establishment itself would supply the means of teaching practically, to every one. But then I would have it understood by all—I would have it written up in every room—that they were not going through a monotonous round of occupation and self-denial which began and ended there, but which began, or was resumed, under that roof, and would end, by God’s blessing, in happy homes of their own.’
He told Burdett-Coutts:
Such gentlemen as Mr. Chesterton of the Middlesex House of Correction, and Lieutenant Tracey of Cold Bath Fields, Bridewell, (both of whom I know very well) are well acquainted with the good that is in the bottom of the hearts, of many of these poor creatures, and with the whole history of their past lives; and frequently have deplored to me the not having any such place as the proposed establishment, to which to send them—when they are set free from Prison. It is necessary to observe that very many of these unfortunate women are constantly in and out of the Prisons, for no other fault or crime than their original one of having fallen from virtue. Policemen can take them up, almost when they choose, for being of that class, and being in the streets; and the Magistrates commit them to Jail for short terms. When they come out, they can but return to their old occupation, and so come in again . . . Very many of them are good, excellent, steady characters when under restraint—even without the advantage of systematic training, which they would have in this Institution—and are tender nurses to the sick, and are as kind and gentle as the best of women.17
Dickens knew exactly how to play Burdett-Coutts, by emphasising the virtuous qualities of women presumed singularly lacking in virtue. He argued that women who absconded should be allowed readmission, subject to the managers of the home feeling they were still capable of reforming, and would not prove a corrupting influence on other inmates. Moral exhortation would be an important part of the regime, and the act of philanthropy would be represented as having consequences for more than just the immediate recipient: ‘I would have it impressed upon them, from day to day, that the success of the experiment rested with them, and that on their conduct depended the rescue and salvation, of hundreds and thousands of women yet unborn. In what proportion this experiment would be successful, it is very difficult to predict; but I think that if the Establishment were founded on a well-considered system, and were well managed, one half of the Inmates would be reclaimed from the very beginning, and that after a time the proportion would be very much larger. I believe this estimate to be within very reasonable bounds.’ In that, he would be justified.18
Burdett-Coutts chose an appropriate chaplain and devised religious instruction for the women. Dickens, having found the house, also found the matron, a Mrs Holdsworth. He found the first inmates in the Middlesex House of Correction. He had read them a mission statement, in which he said that ‘there is a lady in this town who from the window of her house has seen such as you going past at night, and has felt her heart bleed at the sight . . . the thought of such fallen women has troubled her in her bed.’19 Later, he would find girls at Ragged Schools, resident in workhouses, who were suitable candidates. Burdett-Coutts paid around £720 a year for all the outgoings connected with the home, including the costs of emigration for those who stayed the course.20 Some girls, such was their ignorance, were appalled by the prospect of emigration, which they thought was the same as transportation. ‘It is astonishing’, Dickens told Burdett-Coutts, ‘and horrible to find how little education (worthy of the name in any respect) there has been among the common people.’21
Dickens visited the house almost daily during the autumn of 1847, in preparation for its opening. As well as overseeing the alterations to the house he bought, wholesale from a shop in the Tottenham Court Road, the women’s uniform dresses, which were ‘very neat and modest’, and the linen. He also found a piano. He regarded music as part of the civilising process, and an adjunct to the religious life in the home. ‘I think it extremely important that the assistant should at least be able to play simple tunes on the Piano; and I am looking about, high and low, for a cheap second-hand one, to stand in Mrs. Holdsworth’s room. The fondness for music among these people generally, is most remarkable; and I can imagine nothing more likely to impress or soften a new comer, than finding them with this art among them, and hearing them sing their Evening Hymn before they go to bed.’22
His only worry was that Burdett-Coutts’s religious aspirations for the home would alienate the inmates. He feared the average cleric would not know where to start with the average prostitute: a problem exemplified by Butler in The Way of All Flesh, when Ernest Pontifex comes unstuck with such a woman. However, a chaplain
was found who was to everyone’s taste. Dickens told Burdett-Coutts:
In proportion as the details of any one of these young lives would be strange and difficult to a good man who had kept away from such knowledge, so the best man in the world could never make his way to the truth of these people, unless he were content to win it very slowly, and with the nicest perception, always present to him, of the results engendered in them by what they have gone through. Wrongly addressed, they are certain to deceive. The greatest anxiety I feel, in connexion with this scheme—it is a greater one than any that arises out of my sense of responsibility to you, though that is not slight—is, that the clergyman with whom I hope I am to act as one confiding in him and perfectly confided in, should be not only a well-intentioned man, as I believe most clergymen would be, but one of the kindest, most considerate, most judicious, and least exacting of his order.23
