What do you think?
Rate this book
Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women
An account of Charles Dickens's work with destitute girls and young women in mid-nineteenth century London. With support from the millionairess Angela Burdett Coutts, he established a 'safe' house for young women in Shepherd's Bush where they were taken from lives of prostitution and crime and trained for useful employment.
287 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
7 people are currently reading
180 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 20, 2018
Jenny Hartley has done a great service to those of us who know the edges of Dickens’s involvement with Urania Cottage but have never been able to find an in depth and well researched analysis of it and its women. What a fascinating relationship between Dickens and Burdett Coutts. Further, what an amazing story of the woman who passed through the doors of the cottage.
With great skill, insight, and compassion Hartley recounts the many and varied back stories of the women who were chosen to live at Urania Cottage. She also reveals to the reader the amazing energy and time Dickens poured into this enterprise. Dickens is revealed (as he was with everything he did) to be a perfect organizer, a compulsive micro-manager, and a force to be reckoned with in all his dealings with both the women and the employees at Shepherd’s Bush.
To me, one of the great strengths of the book were the insights into how Dickens’s involvement with the women at Urania House found their way into his novels from Dombey and Son onward. The text has several photos and illustrations and even the names of the women who were part of the house.
Jenny Hartley is to be congratulated on this book. It deserves a place on every shelf of every lover of Dickens.
With great skill, insight, and compassion Hartley recounts the many and varied back stories of the women who were chosen to live at Urania Cottage. She also reveals to the reader the amazing energy and time Dickens poured into this enterprise. Dickens is revealed (as he was with everything he did) to be a perfect organizer, a compulsive micro-manager, and a force to be reckoned with in all his dealings with both the women and the employees at Shepherd’s Bush.
To me, one of the great strengths of the book were the insights into how Dickens’s involvement with the women at Urania House found their way into his novels from Dombey and Son onward. The text has several photos and illustrations and even the names of the women who were part of the house.
Jenny Hartley is to be congratulated on this book. It deserves a place on every shelf of every lover of Dickens.
October 8, 2018
Anyone who is reading Dickens should read this book. I do believe that a work of art should be enjoyed as itself, not as part of the artist's biography, but this deeply and widely researched book gave me a far better appreciation of Dickens's fictional (??) Fallen Women. In Dickens' day, there were 10,000 homeless girls and women in London, and those he rescued were a very tiny number. There is no question he plundered and appropriated their stories. But he listened to them! He thought they were important and interesting. He believed that, with care, fallen women could be helped up. And they became integral parts of his amazing novels.
Jenny Hartley has taken reams of research into the lives of the fallen women of the 19th century in general, and into Dickens's girls in particular, and has synthesized them into a very accessible, entertaining book.
Jenny Hartley has taken reams of research into the lives of the fallen women of the 19th century in general, and into Dickens's girls in particular, and has synthesized them into a very accessible, entertaining book.
January 26, 2019
‘Urania was a house of unspoken stories.’
I picked up this book after reading a novel by J.C. Briggs (The Murder of Patience Brooke) in which both Charles Dickens and Urania Cottage were featured. Yes, I was peripherally aware of this aspect of Dickens’s life, but I’d not explored it in any detail.
So, what is the story of Urania Cottage? In 1846, Charles Dickens wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts (a wealthy woman, an heiress whom he’d first met in 1839) about a plan he had for establishing an asylum for women and girls working as prostitutes in London. Angela Burdett-Coutts was aware of this problem (she frequently saw prostitutes parading outside her home in Piccadilly). And, as she had already decided to give a large percentage of her fortune to good causes, she was very interested in Charles Dickens’s plan.
In 1847, Charles Dickens found Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush (then still in the country but connected to the city by omnibus). In June 1847, the lease was agreed. Angela Burdett-Coutts funded the establishment but gave Charles Dickens almost a free hand in setting it up. While Charles Dickens had originally hoped to establish a home for thirty young women, this was impractical, and Urania Cottage was large enough to take around a dozen young women, sharing bedrooms.
The purpose of Urania Cottage was to train these young women for useful employment. He hoped
that after about a year, each woman would be ready to emigrate (to Australia, Canada or South Africa) fully equipped to lead a life free of crime.
In this book, Ms Hartley writes of the time and effort Dickens invested in Urania Cottage. The book includes the names of the women who passed through Urania Cottage. Not all the women settled in, and some were sent away for bad behaviour. Ms Hartley details some of their stories. I wonder just how much Dickens drew on the women at Urania Cottage in developing some of the characters who appear in his fiction.
I wonder how many of the women who passed through Urania Cottage were able to forge new lives for themselves? As one of the purposes of the Urania Cottage experiment was to remove all evidence of the past and associated shame for the women involved, we’ll probably never know. We know more about the failures than the successes.
I found this an interesting book about an aspect of Charles Dickens’s life about which I knew very little.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
I picked up this book after reading a novel by J.C. Briggs (The Murder of Patience Brooke) in which both Charles Dickens and Urania Cottage were featured. Yes, I was peripherally aware of this aspect of Dickens’s life, but I’d not explored it in any detail.
So, what is the story of Urania Cottage? In 1846, Charles Dickens wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts (a wealthy woman, an heiress whom he’d first met in 1839) about a plan he had for establishing an asylum for women and girls working as prostitutes in London. Angela Burdett-Coutts was aware of this problem (she frequently saw prostitutes parading outside her home in Piccadilly). And, as she had already decided to give a large percentage of her fortune to good causes, she was very interested in Charles Dickens’s plan.
In 1847, Charles Dickens found Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush (then still in the country but connected to the city by omnibus). In June 1847, the lease was agreed. Angela Burdett-Coutts funded the establishment but gave Charles Dickens almost a free hand in setting it up. While Charles Dickens had originally hoped to establish a home for thirty young women, this was impractical, and Urania Cottage was large enough to take around a dozen young women, sharing bedrooms.
The purpose of Urania Cottage was to train these young women for useful employment. He hoped
that after about a year, each woman would be ready to emigrate (to Australia, Canada or South Africa) fully equipped to lead a life free of crime.
In this book, Ms Hartley writes of the time and effort Dickens invested in Urania Cottage. The book includes the names of the women who passed through Urania Cottage. Not all the women settled in, and some were sent away for bad behaviour. Ms Hartley details some of their stories. I wonder just how much Dickens drew on the women at Urania Cottage in developing some of the characters who appear in his fiction.
I wonder how many of the women who passed through Urania Cottage were able to forge new lives for themselves? As one of the purposes of the Urania Cottage experiment was to remove all evidence of the past and associated shame for the women involved, we’ll probably never know. We know more about the failures than the successes.
I found this an interesting book about an aspect of Charles Dickens’s life about which I knew very little.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
February 5, 2017
As well as writing all those novels, Charles Dickens took a keen interest in social reform. With money provided by philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, he set up Urania Cottage, a home for women who had been in prison or had 'fallen' in other ways. This was such an interesting book and added another dimension to Dickens the great writer. I liked how the author went to Australia to track descendants of women helped by Dickens' scheme.
February 13, 2013
Jenny Hartley explores this interesting aspect to the busy life and times of Charles Dickens. At a time when physical abuse was a widely accepted teaching methodology, Dickens in cooperation with philanthropist Angela Coutts, designed a program focusing on building trust, self-esteem and personal responsibility to help young incarcerated women create a better life for themselves.
In 1847, Ms. Coutts purchased a home they called Urania Cottage, hired a staff and provided expenses for inmates. After an initial interview with Dickens, the women pledged to abandon their pasts. In exchange, they were released from prison and trained to be domestic servants for eventual immigration to Australia, Canada or Cape Town. This is a forerunner of a halfway house or Jobs Corps program. It was done with style; the inmates were transported from the prison in a carriage and given clean, bright clothing. All evidence of the past and shame were to be removed.
The author shows Dickens to be very involved in the project. Hartley is clearly a fan of Dickens' literature and draws parallels between the inmates and his characters. Did Dickens use this charity as fodder for his fiction? Did he burn the case book to hide the evidence? Or did Dickens do this from empathy? He, himself, knew the life of the streets firsthand and his work shows he understood the plight of both men and women in the vicious circle of poverty.
Sparse information on the outcome gives this a less than satisfactory ending. Page 238 suggests that there is more info to be had. In Australia, the author gets 10 leads and plans to write to them upon returning to England. She happens to call one which turns out to be a good lead. For a researcher, calling should have been a priority while she was in Australia, not after the trip. What information she received was serendipitous, which suggests there are other unturned stones.
Hartley has tackled an important segment of Dickens' life. The notes show the extent of her original research. I took a star away due to the need for more follow up on the outcomes, which hopefully this author, or someone else will provide in the future.
In 1847, Ms. Coutts purchased a home they called Urania Cottage, hired a staff and provided expenses for inmates. After an initial interview with Dickens, the women pledged to abandon their pasts. In exchange, they were released from prison and trained to be domestic servants for eventual immigration to Australia, Canada or Cape Town. This is a forerunner of a halfway house or Jobs Corps program. It was done with style; the inmates were transported from the prison in a carriage and given clean, bright clothing. All evidence of the past and shame were to be removed.
The author shows Dickens to be very involved in the project. Hartley is clearly a fan of Dickens' literature and draws parallels between the inmates and his characters. Did Dickens use this charity as fodder for his fiction? Did he burn the case book to hide the evidence? Or did Dickens do this from empathy? He, himself, knew the life of the streets firsthand and his work shows he understood the plight of both men and women in the vicious circle of poverty.
Sparse information on the outcome gives this a less than satisfactory ending. Page 238 suggests that there is more info to be had. In Australia, the author gets 10 leads and plans to write to them upon returning to England. She happens to call one which turns out to be a good lead. For a researcher, calling should have been a priority while she was in Australia, not after the trip. What information she received was serendipitous, which suggests there are other unturned stones.
Hartley has tackled an important segment of Dickens' life. The notes show the extent of her original research. I took a star away due to the need for more follow up on the outcomes, which hopefully this author, or someone else will provide in the future.
September 17, 2012
A well-written look at Dickens' involvement in Urania House - a project funded by Angela Burdett-Coutts that "reformed" poor and fallen women with the promise of a new life and fresh start in Australia - and the impact of that project on its participants. Hartley's tone is energetic and balanced - she interjects her own opinions and travails as a researcher and reader of Dickens in a way that is never intrusive or distracting from the work at hand. I particularly liked how she drew parallels between Dickens very hands-on work with this project and the novels he wrote at the same time. Hartley keeps her sights on the real women and avoids overly identifying them with Dickens' creations. The novels are supporting evidence only. Most of the evidence she uses comes from the correspondence between Dickens and interested parties and the one piece of journalism (carefully edited by Burdett-Coutts) that he published before his interest in the program ceased.
January 2, 2014
Love this book. Some years ago I wrote some articles for Victoria Web on Dickens and falleness. I think I am referred to in this book? Unless it is another Jane Rogers?
Jenny Hartley if you do read this, I'd love to know?
Jane Rogers, author of Dickens and Urania Cottage, Victoria Web.
Jenny Hartley if you do read this, I'd love to know?
Jane Rogers, author of Dickens and Urania Cottage, Victoria Web.
May 3, 2023
I am addicted to Dickens and to biographies of Dickens. Its something about his hyperactivity as well as his genius as a writer, while acknowledging that he was a hugely flawed character.
This is a really splendid addition to Dickens studies and something that it by no means fully explored in the standard biographies despite the fact it was a considerable part of his life for over ten years. Indeed he threw himself into every aspect of the running of Urania Cottage in a thoroughly control freak way.
One of the most interesting parts of the book, which I am surprised is so little discussed elsewhere is the degree that the young women housed there then find themselves fictionalized throughout his work. And Dicken's is fascinated by emigration in his novels, especially to Australia, as ' the clean start' which he even contemplates for himself and is the trajectory that he determines for women housed in Urania.
Professor Hartley writes extremely well in an engaging and non-academic way. It becomes a work of investigative journalism as she travels Down Under to find what happens to the women and their descendants. This is the area she finds most difficult to document as Dicken's ' case book' and his doubtless extensive notes of interviews of the residents has been lost.
A fascinating book that also casts a light on the lives of thousands of 'fallen women' and Victorian philanthropy.
This is a really splendid addition to Dickens studies and something that it by no means fully explored in the standard biographies despite the fact it was a considerable part of his life for over ten years. Indeed he threw himself into every aspect of the running of Urania Cottage in a thoroughly control freak way.
One of the most interesting parts of the book, which I am surprised is so little discussed elsewhere is the degree that the young women housed there then find themselves fictionalized throughout his work. And Dicken's is fascinated by emigration in his novels, especially to Australia, as ' the clean start' which he even contemplates for himself and is the trajectory that he determines for women housed in Urania.
Professor Hartley writes extremely well in an engaging and non-academic way. It becomes a work of investigative journalism as she travels Down Under to find what happens to the women and their descendants. This is the area she finds most difficult to document as Dicken's ' case book' and his doubtless extensive notes of interviews of the residents has been lost.
A fascinating book that also casts a light on the lives of thousands of 'fallen women' and Victorian philanthropy.
July 31, 2018
Unfortunately I am not able at this time to read this book. I was greatly looking forward to it after recently reading a novel on DICKEN'S life, and wanted to know about this relatively unknown factor of his life.
Preliminary reading gives me an indication it might be hard going. It doesn't flow and is rather statistical and refer-ency (if that's a proper word to describe the way it is written.)
I hope to get back to it sometime in the future, no not in the near future.
Preliminary reading gives me an indication it might be hard going. It doesn't flow and is rather statistical and refer-ency (if that's a proper word to describe the way it is written.)
I hope to get back to it sometime in the future, no not in the near future.
February 12, 2023
This book is definitely one of a kind and goes into great detail over something that most people don't know about in regards to Charles Dickens--his great interest in helping "fallen women" of Victorian times. I personally love Charles Dickens ever since taking a class in college last year covering many of his works--many of which are also mentioned and discussed in Hartley's book: David Copperfield, Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, etc. The span of this book covers the opening of Urania Cottage, a home for homeless women, that was managed by Dickens and financed by Angela Burdett-Coutts. It encapsulates as many Uranian women's stories as possible and gives credit to their names and future offspring. Since Urania Cottage was run in the 1850s, a lot of the documents and facts are long gone, but Hartley does a great job delving into multiple facets and exposes truths never before seen. One small criticism is the wordiness of the last few chapters when explaining what else was going on in the same year(s) of Urania's running--long lists of random Victorian names with no explanation and random tangents of slightly related happenings with other authors of the time. I never skip passages in books *EVER* but I had to skip a few paragraphs in the last two chapters because of how boring the content was and unrelated to Dickens. Otherwise, this book was great and gave me an awesome comprehensive overview of Dickens' involvement with Urania Cottage.
May 5, 2010
Generally interesting, but there doesn't seem to be enough hard information to fill a whole book and there's a fair amount of padding. The author writes rather like an earnest 'A' level student - 'I' crops up too often in the book, and a paragraph is devoted to covering what Dickens meant by 'interesting', summing up with 'it seems to mean "worthy of having an interest taken in them"'. Wow.
June 19, 2012
A very interesting book which quickly gave me an insight into the life and focus of this famous author.
Inspired me to read quite a bit more Dickens.
Inspired me to read quite a bit more Dickens.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews