| Dickens' Home for Women in Shepherd's Bush 13:36 - Oct 16 with 975 views | TacticalR |
Last year I read Claire Tomalin's 2011 biography of Dickens, and came across this passage:
'We have already seen how, in 1841, Dickens suggested to Maclise that they might inspect the prostitutes in Broadstairs, telling him he knew where they were to be found. He accepted that it was normal for men to make use of them; but at the same time he felt a huge pity for the women as the lowest and most helpless members of society, with no prospect other than deepening misery before them, and seemingly without any power to save themselves. If there was some inconsistency between his tolerance of the practice and his wish to rescue the practitioners, it may be that he reckoned he was unlikely to end prostitution single-handed, and that men would always find what they wanted in one way or another. The double standard troubled many thoughtful Victorians of both sexes, with its unjust loading of all the blame for prostitution on to the women, and its decree that any young woman who became pregnant outside marriage could never redeem herself from the disgrace. Mrs Gaskell, Gladstone and Thomas Hardy all said or did their bit at various times to combat such hypocrisy, and there were many private initiatives to help women who were its victims; but none was as bold, as original and as imaginative as Dickens’s Home, which he insisted from the start must be a real home to the young women he set out to help, run on homely principles, and not a place where they had to expiate their sins.
Miss Coutts, good and generous and ready to follow where Dickens led, was prepared to fund the project, which would cost over £700 a year (more like £50,000 in the money of 2011), and she gave him almost free rein in setting it up. He needed to find a house large enough to take up to a dozen or so young women, sharing bedrooms, plus a matron and her assistant – his early plan to take thirty was given up as impractical. He decided that central London was unsuitable, but that it should not be too far out either, and in May 1847 he came upon a small, solid brick house near Shepherd’s Bush, then still in the country, but well connected with central London by the Acton omnibus. The house was already named Urania Cottage but from the first he called it simply the Home, the idea that it should feel like a home rather than an institution being so important to him. He liked the fact that it stood in a country lane, with its own garden, and saw at once that the women could have their own small flowerbeds to cultivate. There was also a coach house and stables which could be made into a laundry, and it was surrounded by fields, which he presently persuaded Miss Coutts to buy, to be let out to the local milkman as grazing for his cows – and he could supply the girls in the Home with milk.'
The house was in Lime Grove, just west of Shepherd's Bush Green.
The goal was to send the 're-educated' women to the colonies.
Angela Coutts owned Coutts Bank. The house closed after Dickens separated from his wife in 1858, as Angela Coutts didn't approve of the separation.
Urania Cottage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urania_Cottage
The house that Charles built
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/dec/20/charles-dickens-fallen-women-revie [Post edited 16 Oct 13:41]
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| Dickens' Home for Women in Shepherd's Bush on 22:08 - Oct 16 with 628 views | NewBee |
Dickens was an odd character whose personal conduct didn't always live up to the standards he championed in public life.
He certainly treated his wife abominably, trying to get her committed to a mental home when she should have been able to manage independently, all so he could spend more time with his mistress of many years.
As it happens, the secret of his mistress nearly became public when they, and his mistress's mother, were all involved in a terrible train crash as they returned from a holiday in France, however I believe they managed to keep a lid on it:
https://voyagerofhistory.wordpress.com/2024/02/24/charles-dickens-and-the-staple |  | | |
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