Dickens' Women by Miriam Margolyes Page B

Fairies have a nightly engagement to come out of a Pumpkin as French soldiers; but, its advantage to the housekeeping is rendered nominal, by that dreadful old Mr Fairy’s making it a legal formality to draw the money himself every Saturday – and never coming home until his stomach is warmed, and the money gone…
    A hard life this for Miss Fairy, I say, and a dangerous! And it is good to see her, in the midst of it, so watchful of Miss Rosina Fairy, who otherwise might come to harm one day.
    Always at his superb best when writing about theatre people, it is Dickens the compassionate philanthropist whom we encounter and admire, in that article from Household Words . Here, he is the articulate advocate for the understanding of the plight of the ‘small people’.
    His philanthropy was intensely personal and it brought into his life one of his most successful relationships with a woman, Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906). Her life was as vivid as his, though in contrast to the poverty of his childhood, she came from a world of extreme wealth. At the age of twenty-three she inherited a fortune from her grandfather. It was around three million pounds, a vast sum in the currency of the time, and it made her the richest heiress in England. She devoted herself generously and imaginatively to a wide range of charitable ventures. She was instrumental in the establishment of the NSPCC; was President of the ladies’ committee of the RSPCA; she established several social housing schemes, including Columbia Market; set up church schools; supported the Arts; and, rather charmingly, was responsible for setting up a scheme to provide drinking fountains for dogs, and was President of the Beekeepers Association (1878–1906). Her private life was colourful. She had a loving relationship with a female companion for fifty-two years; is said to have proposed to the Duke of Wellington; and she outraged Society when, at the age of sixty-six, she married her secretary, the twenty- nine-year-old, magnificently named, William Lehman Ashmead Bartlett. He changed his name to Burdett-Coutts, and became MP for Westminster in 1881.
    Together she and Dickens created Urania Cottage, an Asylum for Fallen Women, later to be called A Home.
    Dickens tirelessly involved himself organising the daily schedule, interviewing the girls and taking their case histories, appointing staff, dealing with practicalities like blocked drains, overseeing all accounts and answering frequent summons to administer discipline on the premises to erring young women who were drunk and disorderly.
    This letter was handed to the fallen women who were chosen as likely candidates for a stay at Urania Cottage:
    An extract from Dickens’ Appeal to Fallen Women
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    You will see, on beginning to read this letter that it is not addressed to you by name. But I address it to a woman – a very young woman still – who was born to be happy, and has lived miserably, who has no prospect before her but sorrow, or behind her but a wasted youth who, if she has ever been a mother, has felt shame, instead of pride, in her own unhappy child.
    You are such a person or this letter would not be put into your hands. 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 it attentively and reflect upon it afterwards. 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.
    Dickens was rare among those concerned with the ‘working girls’ of