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JENNY HARTLEY, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women. Methuen, 2008, pp.287. ISBN 13: 9780413776433. f 17.99.
Jenny Hartley has given us a fine history of the extraordinary project devised by Dickens and Angela Burdett Coutts to offer shelter and moral and domestic rehabilitation to girls thrown on to the streets and inured to crime and prostitution. In 1847 they leased a recently built house, Urania Cottage, in Shepherd's Bush, with its own ample garden and surrounded by fields. It was to be a Home, a world away from life on the city streets or in prison or some grim reformatory institution. The girls would learn housekeeping skills and absorb the disciplines derived from Victorian domestic ideology. Once rehabilitated, they were launched off to the colonies to find husbands: as Hartley observes, Dickens began to 'look like a one-man transportation scheme' (25). The Home ran from 1847 to 1862. Dickens's intense interest in it subsided in 1858, the year of the collapse of his marriage and the start of his professional public readings. Over those fifteen years about a hundred girls passed through Urania Cottage and on to distant countries. The whole enterprise cost Miss Coutts at least £720 a year.
Jenny Hartley tells the story in a...