by Simon Heffer
Religion was to cause an immediate problem, but not in the way Dickens had feared. The deputy matron, a Mrs Fisher, of whom he thought highly, was dismissed by Burdett-Coutts for being a dissenter. It was not on that account that she was sacked, but because she had not admitted the fact to Dickens when he interviewed her. He strongly disagreed with her dismissal. The women, at least, were mostly happy: one cried with joy when she saw her bed.24 Having put up the money, Burdett-Coutts kept at arm’s length, visiting from time to time and occasionally attending the monthly meetings of the committee she and Dickens had appointed to oversee it. The day-to-day superintendence fell to Dickens, to whom the matron went when a problem with either the house or the women had to be addressed, and it became his main charitable work for the next decade. There were ups and downs. It was hard to find a matron who took what Dickens and Burdett-Coutts regarded as the right approach to their charges, though it did not help matters that the two principals could not always agree on the purpose of what they were doing. Dickens, who understood the minds of lower-class women better than the benefactress, thought the best aim would be for them to marry. Burdett-Coutts saw no reason why they could not be saved and remain unmarried, apparently disturbed by the prospect that they might seek a husband.
Dickens told Burdett-Coutts on 3 November 1847, as the home opened, ‘that their past lives should never be referred to, at the Home, there can be no doubt. I should say that any such reference on the part of the Superintendent would be an instance of blind mistake that in itself would render her dismissal necessary.’25 The past was no longer relevant: all Dickens cared about was that the girls and those looking after them should concentrate upon capitalising on the fresh start. Dickens remained a firm believer in exhortation:
In their living room I have put up two little inscriptions selected from the sermons of Jeremy Taylor and Barrow—both very simple and beautiful in themselves, and remarkably appropriate (as I hope you will think) to the purpose. Also a little inscription of my own, referring to the advantages of order, punctuality, and good temper; and another setting forth the Saviour’s exposition of our duty towards God, and our duty towards our neighbour. In each bedroom is another Inscription, admonishing them against ever lying down to rest, without being affectionate and reconciled among themselves. And I am now writing a little address which Mrs Holdsworth shall read to each, alone, when she comes in.26
Not all the girls conformed. One, Jemima Hiscock, broke into the beer cellar with knives ‘and drank until she was dead drunk’, Dickens reported to Burdett-Coutts on 17 April 1850.27 At that point, ‘she used the most horrible language and made a very repulsive exhibition of herself’. She tempted another woman to drink with her. Hiscock was to be expelled: her accomplice kept in disgrace until Dickens had a chance to enquire into the matter. Hiscock was so drunk that Dickens doubted the beer alone could have done it; he suspected she had smuggled spirits in from outside. Two women absconded with the linen, adding insult to injury by taking it after it had been washed and ironed.
Another, Sesina Bollard – herself sounding like a character from a Dickens novel – was so amoral that, in his view, she would ‘corrupt a nunnery in a fortnight’.28 The women expelled from the home often went back to prostitution, to prison and, in some cases, to an early death. One expelled in 1850, Hannah Myers, committed a felony almost immediately, and was back in the Middlesex House of Correction for a year. Two other girls, both aged seventeen, robbed the matron of goods to the value of £7 10s, but gave themselves up: they were sent to jail for six months, having pleaded guilty. However, the redemption of other women offset these failures. Many were launched on new lives in the colonies, where the support networks in the dioceses founded by Burdett-Coutts in Adelaide or Cape Town ensured they stayed on the straight and narrow. Her emigration project had ramifications beyond the home: Mrs Gaskell, through her association with Dickens, managed to place a fallen girl from Manchester in Cape Town in 1850. However, colonial society was in some respects more moralistic and unforgiving than British. ‘Let me caution you about the Cape,’ Dickens told Mrs Gaskell, with a view to the intelligence being passed on to the girl. ‘She must be profoundly silent there, as to her past history, and so must those who take her out. Miss Coutts and I are just now in the receipt of reliable intelligence from that quarter (we have sent three girls there) which assures me that this caution is imperative, or she will either be miserable or flung back into the gulf whence you have raised her.’29
The rehabilitative process, based on compassion and strict discipline, seemed to work: later, other such homes and refuges would emulate it. Dickens told Burdett-Coutts, in 1851, ‘imagining backward to what these women were and might have been, and forward to what their children may be, it is impossible to estimate the amount of good you are doing.’30 All went well until 1858, when Dickens’s marriage broke down because of his affair with Ellen Ternan, an actress. In the scandal that followed he felt able no longer to take a role at the home; whether because he felt compromised by the exposure of his own sexual morality, or because he did not wish to bring shame on Burdett-Coutts among the few who knew her role in the enterprise, is a matter for conjecture. It soon became apparent how much Dickens had been the power behind the home: not just in terms of his administrative work and superintendence, but also as a procurer of inmates. By 1862, without him, the home was no more.
Dickens began to perform a role for Burdett-Coutts that echoed what Arthur Hugh Clough was doing for Nightingale. From time to time, with his other responsibilities – his novel-writing, his journalism, and his editorship of Household Words and, later, All the Year Round, he became exhausted by it, as Clough did. He acted as the conduit through which any private appeal went to Burdett-Coutts; he undertook administration for her; and he made suggestions about where her resources might be targeted next. Dickens was at heart a journalist: and his journalistic instincts told him that what Burdett-Coutts was doing was a good story, and ought to be more widely known. She, though, disliked publicity: she did not engage in philanthropy for commercial reasons, or to enhance her reputation or position. Eventually, Dickens persuaded her to allow him to write about Urania in Household Words, but only on the express condition that he concealed the identity of the benefactress.
The article, published in 1853, did, however, reveal the relative success of the undertaking: of fifty-six women who had been through the home since 1847, thirty were deemed to have graduated with honours. They had included ‘starving women, poor needlewomen who had robbed . . . violent girls imprisoned for committing disturbances in ill-conducted workhouses, poor girls from Ragged Schools, destitute girls who have applied at Police offices for relief, young women from the streets – young women of the same class taken from the prisons after undergoing punishment there as disorderly characters, or for shoplifting, or for thefts from the person: domestic servants who have been seduced, and two young women held to bail for attempting suicide.’31
The Urania project had introduced Burdett-Coutts to the realities of poverty, ‘the poor’ having been an abstract concept to her until then. It prompted her to want to do more to treat the causes of the disease rather than just its symptoms. Dickens encouraged her to become a shareholder in the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, where she and others invested in new housing for the deserving poor. Its purpose was to ‘provide the labouring man with an increase of the comforts and conveniences of life, with full compensation to the capitalist’: a definitive Victorian project.32 It had completed its first apartment block, for 110 families, in Old St Pancras Road in London in December 1847. The block was regarded as a huge advance in sanitary living. Dickens endorsed the society as ‘sensible and really useful’, feeling it a cut above Shaftesbury’s evangelical Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, with which it appeared to be in unofficial competition.
Burdett-Coutts wanted to do more, however, and chose to concentrate on one of th
e most sordid areas of London’s East End, Bethnal Green. Again, Dickens was the influence: Bethnal Green was where Nancy, the prostitute in Oliver Twist, had lived. Burdett-Coutts had already put up money for church schools in Stepney, in 1856, in an area described by The Times as ‘in the centre of the wretched district of St Peter’s, Stepney, one of the vilest in the vicinity, and in a hot bed of vice where they are greatly needed.’33 She wanted to build model dwellings there. Dickens suggested that before she did she should visit some already built to get an idea of what worked, and what was required. Dickens reconnoitred such places for her, and introduced her to his brother-in-law, Henry Austin, an architect and sanitary engineer, who became an adviser. Darbishire was soon engaged as the architect: he would later work for George Peabody, the housing philanthropist.
Dickens argued for mansion blocks rather than streets of conventional housing, to try to contain the sprawl of London. He said it would be easier to provide services such as water, gas and drainage. Columbia Square, as the development was called, was opened in 1862. It was built on the site of one of the worst slums in London. It had also been the setting, in the 1830s, for some of the most notorious body-snatching, so was a place of more than average infamy. Each of the development’s four blocks contained forty-five flats, mostly two-room family sets: even in these comparatively luxurious dwellings, whole families would have to sleep together in one room and live together in the other, the bedroom being merely 12 by 8 feet. They were, at least, light and well ventilated, warm and free from damp. Each block had its own laundry with a massive spin-dryer, and rubbish chutes were on every floor. At Burdett-Coutts’s insistence, each block had its own reading room. Her example was followed elsewhere in the metropolis, notably by the Corporation of London, which set aside land in Clerkenwell and £120,000 for apartment buildings for the working classes. It was when he saw what she had done that the American philanthropist George Peabody, who had set up a business in London and had become enraptured by his new homeland, ordered similar buildings for Spitalfields and Islington.
Later in the 1860s, and to encourage a commercial life among the tenants of Columbia Square, she funded and built the Columbia Road market, an astonishingly fine High Victorian building by Darbishire where local traders could sell their wares and local people could more easily buy fresh and healthy food at reasonable prices, and especially have access to fresh milk, when the poor were vulnerable to adulterated and in some cases toxic food. She had also been concerned about the hygiene implications of refuse from barrows left to rot in the streets, and believed a market building would be easier to keep clean. However, when costermongers were harried by the authorities over their street-trading, she paid for her own solicitor to represent them and secure their right to earn a living: she became known as Queen of the Costermongers. Her love of animals made her acutely aware, too, of the importance to traders of animals. She had stables built near Columbia Square, and put up drinking troughs there and in other towns around England to water the beasts.
However, the building, a masterpiece demolished after the Second World War, was impossibly grand and impracticable. No swearing was allowed in it, which challenged the habits of a lifetime; nor could it open on a Sunday, a traditional trading day, not least because of the number of Jews in the area. The traders preferred to revert to street barrows and forsake the great Gothic hall: this happened within six months of its opening by the Prince of Wales in April 1869. Burdett-Coutts hatched a new plan: she would have the hall used to trade fish, to break the monopoly of Billingsgate and to provide a source of cheap fish for the locals. This, too, came to nothing, not least because of the restrictive practices of Billingsgate. She gave the building to the City of London, but they could do nothing with it, and returned it to her after a couple of years. She tried various other schemes over the next decade – a meat market, then another attempt to sell fish – but neither succeeded. Eventually, she had it turned into a tobacco factory to provide jobs for local women.
In another declining part of the East End, Spitalfields, she set up a sewing school for women put out of work when the local silk industry contracted, establishing the notion of re-skilling but also, she hoped, deterring them from prostitution. She funded night schools at which working people could acquire new skills or develop existing ones. The schools became centres for the distribution of clothes, food and medical supplies to the destitute, and coordinated nurses to visit those seriously ill at home. She hired an accountant, John Sapsford, as bursar for her relief work in the East End, with a budget that began at £6,000 a year but that rose, in the cholera epidemic of 1867, to £20,000, because of the food parcels sent to the families of the sick, and the nursing staff and sanitary workers deployed at her expense.
Her market building drew attention to all she was doing, and had done for some years, in the East End and elsewhere. Gladstone sent a note to Granville, the Leader of the House of Lords, on 4 May 1871 noting that Burdett-Coutts ‘has handed over in trust to the Corporation of London, Columbia Market, which will save expenditure on Billingsgate. Is there any way in which the remarkable services of Miss BC to the public cd be acknd?’34 Granville agreed there was and, given her three decades of generosity and service to the poor, a peerage would be in order. Gladstone agreed. Although peerages awarded to women were not unprecedented, they were highly unusual, and a woman peer could not sit in the Lords.35 Burdett-Coutts was touched by the offer, but took days to consider it before a correspondence ensued with Gladstone about her title. Her companion, Mrs Brown, urged her to accept. To the public, however, she acquired another title, and a new realm to add to that of the costermongers: she became known as ‘Queen of the Poor’.36
She stimulated cancer research by helping fund the Brompton Hospital. She gave an interest-free loan to its founder, William Marsden, so he could build the hospital that now, as the Royal Marsden, bears his name. She laid its foundation stone in 1859 and continued to subscribe £50 a year. Hospital funding was especially precarious, with the sick poor nursed almost entirely at home. Hospitals were treated as businesses rather than charities, which reduced their income because of taxation – something about which Shaftesbury complained bitterly to Gladstone in 1863. He urged on 2 May that year ‘the necessity, nay the duty, of withdrawing your proposed tax on the incomes of hospitals for the relief of the sick poor. You will inflict an amount of suffering on the labouring classes that it is fearful to contemplate.’37 He was worried that, if the proposal went ahead, there would not be sufficient money to pay doctors. His appeal succeeded.
Burdett-Coutts was particularly keen to advance scientific education, and in 1861 endowed scholarships at Oxford in geology and natural science, also donating to the university a rare collection of fossils from Devon. She recognised the importance of vocational education, to equip the working classes with the skills to earn a living and improve themselves. She founded the Westminster Technical College, her greatest success in this respect. Burdett-Coutts also funded a brigade of ‘shoeblack boys’, uniformed youths who went about London to polish the shoes of gentlemen as they passed. Critics argued that all this did was put out of work boys who had blacked shoes for years, but had had no one to set them up in the business. For the destitute and unemployed she set up soup kitchens; but she also encouraged enterprise among the lower orders. She extended her protection to flower-girls, who were often accosted by men who treated them as prostitutes, providing the money and support to organise them into a brigade like the shoeblacks. Not all her domestic philanthropy was centred upon the metropolis: she also funded a programme of ‘ambulatory schoolmasters’ in rural Devon – she wintered in Torquay – to try to raise the standards of the dame schools by having a salaried visiting schoolmaster take them under his wing.38 Later, she would repeat the process in rural Scotland.
When she died in 1906, aged ninety-two, it was estimated that she had given away between £3 and £4 million. The amount had decreased since her marriage, because of her reduction in
income through marrying a foreigner. She never sought recognition, but for the last half-century of her life the public, and especially that section of it that benefited directly from her largesse, paid her tribute and displayed their gratitude. During one of the marches of December 1866 en route to one of the great reform demonstrations, those walking under her window in Piccadilly cheered her for two hours, aware that some in the privileged classes had their interests at heart.
IV
Those with high ideals have an unusual power to shock when they compromise their standards. Gladstone’s keen interest in pornography had such an effect, and Dickens was no exception either, falling prey to the sexual hypocrisy that so blighted the age, and leaving his private life at odds with his public persona. His marriage, which had produced ten children, had been in trouble since the early 1850s. In a very frank passage in his biography – he was writing before Froude had revolutionised the genre in his life of Carlyle – Forster observed that by the mid-1850s ‘the satisfactions which home should have supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of his nature, he had failed to find at home.’39 He had indeed written to Forster to obtain ‘the relief of saying a word of what has long been pent up in my mind. Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too – and much more so . . . God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if she had married another kind of man, and that her avoidance of this destiny would have been at least equally good for us both. I am often cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her own sake, that I ever fell in her way.’40