Now she was speaking to him, earnest, fired with her passion, her commitment to the struggling underclass of British society and its certain resurrection on the other side of the world: “These letters, you see, Mr Dickens, they tell . . . they show . . . how the merest person here can transform into a man or, indeed, a woman of worth, of substance. The British Isles are too full, but New South Wales is too empty. If the people will but emigrate, they will find good wages, good food and more than enough good land.”
She spoke, he noted, almost with a classical rhythm as one used to commanding an audience. Her words then flowed almost without stop, for more than thirty minutes. Surprised by her knowledge, he caught something of her fervour. Eventually, he asked her to pause; he wanted to consider the letters from her immigrants without distraction. Picking up a quill, she became absorbed in some other matter, giving him the peace he desired to read and consider.
The letters all told much the same tale, of a realm of milk and honey, a halcyon, fair-weathered land of possibilities. He might find Mrs Chisholm a little too bourgeois — she was no Lady Herbert, even less a Lady Burdett-Coutts — but he liked her ideas. They matched many of his own thoughts and, yes, he could use some of these letters to illustrate them.
“Mrs Chisholm,” he said. “You may know that I am about to publish my own weekly journal. I expect the first edition of my Household Words to be ready within less than a month. I would like to include some of these letters within the journal. Do I have your permission to do so?”
“Mr Dickens,” she said, “what you suggest is an excellent idea. However . . . before I agree, could you tell me how you would use the letters. Will there be an explanation? Might it be useful if I were to provide that elucidation. I am, you may know, in the habit of expressing myself as an author, with some success.”
He had not expected such self-presumption. Was quite discomposed by it. Yet the notion took his fancy. It would be something different and provocative maybe, something from the source of immigration itself. Still, he was not about to let her dictate terms to him.
“A very kind offer, Mrs Chisholm. Very kind indeed; however, not quite what I had in mind for these letters,” he said, holding them up as though their weight was worth the same in banknotes. He talked slowly, developing his ideas even as he spoke. “I shall title the article . . . ‘A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’ . . . and, yes, I will present them with a full explanation of where they came from, as well as detailing your admirable plans for helping British emigrants discover the delights of Australia.”
Mrs Chisholm opened her mouth, but he held up his hand to forestall her. “Maybe you would do me the honour to write short, colourful pieces about the colony for use in a later edition of Words? Something from your own experiences. That, I believe, would be the greatest use of your talents and of immense interest to our readers. ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’,” he murmured. “Yes, that’s what I’ll call your piece, Mrs Chisholm.”
She looked uncertain, but he didn’t give her time to argue, passing swiftly onto another topic that he felt sure would catch her curiosity: Urania Cottage, the home for fallen women at Shepherd’s Bush that he helped support. He wanted her opinion on whether such females, once reformed, would be able to start a new life on the other side of the world.
The promising exchange was interrupted. The mother, tottering under the weight of a hefty tea tray, struggled into the room, barely audible words, possibly some form of apology, dribbling from her lips. Her progress was impeded by two filthy-faced urchins, each attached by grimy little fingers to the back of her skirt. They let go to tumble together in a repulsive concoction on the floor. Serenely ignoring the children, Mrs Chisholm rose from her chair and offered him tea.
Pulling out his watch, he shook his head, black curled locks bobbing above his ears, high forehead slightly creased by raised eyebrows. “Unfortunately, ma’am, time is my enemy. I have already stayed longer than I had expected.”
As he followed her along the narrow corridor towards the door, a feeble cry came from a room further up the hall. “A baby, Mrs Chisholm?” he inquired, mildly bemused.
“My youngest, Sarah, born about three weeks ago,” she said. “I have been thinking, Mr Dickens, I could write about a bush dinner I was once invited to attend in New South Wales. It was cooked sir, by the son of the house! An interesting concept, don’t you think?”
“Definitely, Mrs Chisholm,” he said, putting on his thick great coat and depositing the bundle of letters into its large pockets. He shook hands with his hostess, hoping that she had not been touching any of her ill-kept, grubby children.
Stepping out into the darkening afternoon, his nose twitched again: there was snow in the air, cold but clean. The talk on immigration had been enlightening. The letters and Mrs Chisholm’s written contribution would be useful. Mostly, however, he was thinking on the lady herself. His fingers itched for a quill.
The last frosty touch of winter’s hoary hand was just beginning to retreat when Charles Dickens visited Caroline at her home in Islington, North London.2 By then, Caroline had become a person of some notice. In the four years since she had returned to Britain, and despite giving birth twice, she had appeared before two government committees, advised hundreds of would-be emigrants about the Australian colonies, organised for families of convicts and left-behind children of settlers to be reunited in New South Wales, published details of life in the colonies, and now, not long before meeting Charles Dickens, had established the Family Colonization Loan Society to help emigrants fund their journeys to the Antipodes. This mostly high profile work had brought her notice in the press, and familiarity with members of the liberal intelligentsia, as well as powerful humanitarian politicians.
The meeting between Dickens and Caroline had been organised by Elizabeth Herbert, a friend of both Dickens and Florence Nightingale. Her husband, Sidney Herbert, later the first Baron Herbert of Lea, was, apart from his government duties — he became Secretary of State for War during the Crimean conflict — one of the founding committee members (and later chairman) of Caroline’s Family Colonization Loan Society.3 Grabbing the opportunity to bring Caroline and Dickens together, Lady Herbert wrote urgently to Caroline on 24 February 1850:
I saw Mr Dickens to-day and he has commissioned me to say that if you will allow him, and unless he hears to the contrary from you, he will call upon you at 2 o’clock on Tuesday next, the 26th. I told him about your emigrants’ letters, and he seemed to think that the giving them publicity would be an important engine towards helping on our work, and he has so completely the confidence of the lower classes (who all read his Books if they can read at all), that I think if you can persuade him to bring them out in his new work it will be an immense step gained. He is so singularly clever and agreeable that I hope you forgive me for having made this appointment without your direct sanction, and for having also told him that I knew you wished to make his acquaintance.4
Following the meeting, Dickens reprinted a number of Caroline’s immigrants’ letters in what was basically a promotional piece that he wrote about the Family Colonization Loans Society, in the very first issue of Household Words, published on Saturday, 30 March 1850. The journal was sold at the low price of 2d. Never one to stint on words, Dickens devoted almost five pages to the letters and Caroline’s plans for the society. Three months later, Caroline co-authored, with the Household Words editor Richard H. Horne, another longish piece on her firsthand experience of life in New South Wales, including an extract about a settler’s son cooking dinner. Horne’s influence can be seen in the lighter, more casual prose of the pieces. (Probably as a result of working with the Chisholms, Horne eventually emigrated to Melbourne, where Archibald helped him find employment.)
A photographic portrait of Charles Dickens, from around the time he met Caroline Chisholm (Alamy)
Short, inexpensive publications about emigration and Australia were something of a fashion in the late 1840s and early 1850s in Brita
in. Samuel Sidney published at least three titles: Sidney’s Australian Handbook (reprinted nine times), Sidney’s Emigrant’s Journal and The Three Colonies of Australia; John Capper brought out The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia; Douglas Jerrold covered emigration in his Weekly Newspaper; and, of course, Dickens was writing about emigration in his Household Words. Dickens’s interest in New South Wales, emigration and philanthropy was not just commercial; his enthusiasm for sending the poor to a land of opportunity appears to have been genuine. When he met Caroline, David Copperfield, one of his best-known works, was being serialised. Near the end of that story a number of the characters join together to emigrate to Australia, including Emily, who after an illicit affair has been on the verge of turning to prostitution to survive.
In a perfect example of art mimicking real life, Dickens was turning fact into fiction. During the 1840s, along with Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, he had helped established Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush as a home for “fallen women”, mostly former prostitutes. The women were encouraged to reform their way of life and seek a fresh start in the Australian colonies. The Baroness, also a notable humanitarian, had become one of the wealthiest women in England after inheriting her grandfather’s banking empire. Staying single until her late sixties, and thereby maintaining control of her wealth, she devoted much of her time and fortune to good causes.5 Only days after meeting Caroline, Dickens wrote a note to the baroness displaying his caustic wit, at Caroline’s expense: “I dream of Mrs Chisholm, and her housekeeping. The dirty faces of her children are my continual companions. I forgot to tell you that she asked me if it were true that the girls at Shepherd’s Bush ‘had Pianos’. I shall always regret that I didn’t answer yes — each girl a grand, down stair — and a cottage in her bedroom — besides a small guitar in the wash-house.”6
Dickens went on to immortalise Caroline in Bleak House as the domestically myopic philanthropist Mrs Jellyby, a woman who spends her time writing letters on behalf of a new settlement and an obscure African tribe on the banks of the Niger River, to the detriment of her ill-kept and neglected children. The humorous caricature first made its appearance in the fourth instalment of the serialisation in June 1852, just over two years after Dickens and Caroline were introduced.
There is no evidence that Dickens had any further meetings with Caroline, although, considering that she wrote for Household Words, it seems likely that they would have encountered each other again. Nor is there any record of Dickens having met Archibald, though, reading Bleak House, one can imagine his opinion of Caroline’s consort: “I never, to my knowledge, had the pleasure of seeing Mr Jellyby. He may be a very superior man, but he is, so to speak, merged — merged — in the more shining qualities of his wife.”7 Caroline’s three older boys would also probably have been absent when Dickens met her, away at school. At home in Charlton Crescent then would have been four-year-old Sydney, born at sea, and his two younger sisters: two-year-old Caroline (named for both her mother and the baby that had died nineteen years previously) and the new baby, Sarah, who was then only a few weeks old and who would die within six months from a throat infection.8 These were the dirty-faced children that so revolted Dickens and led him to parody Caroline.
For all Dickens’s charitable concerns, particularly for females forced by poverty into prostitution, he had very little sympathy with women, like Caroline, who put their public work ahead of what he considered a female’s first duty, the care and organisation of her own domestic sphere. In that, he was very much a man of his era, still subscribing to the rigidly restricted view of a woman’s role in the world. In reality, though, the main difference between Caroline and the women Dickens admired, such as Lady Herbert, who had seven children, was that Caroline could not afford servants to take care of her offspring and run her home. Other female activists, such as Baroness Burdett-Coutts and Florence Nightingale, were, apart from being very wealthy, without husbands, let alone a dependent family.
In a society where class structure was paramount, it would have been difficult to pigeonhole Caroline. Her working-class origins were well hidden; she sat firmly in the upper middle class, occasionally frequenting the higher echelons of society. One of her truly impressive qualities was that, for the most part, people, whether they were poverty-stricken labourers or powerful ministers of state, appeared to take her at her own valuation. Charles Dickens was one of the exceptions.
*
Caroline’s meeting with Charles Dickens came just as her Family Colonization Loan Society was actively seeking emigrants to send to Australia. Her objectives were simple. She believed that poor but hardworking families should be lent funds to help pay for their passage aboard safe and well-regulated ships. Once in the colonies, she expected the new settlers to start repaying the loans. Finding that the Colonial Office was prepared to listen and take cautious steps towards improving conditions on board emigrant ships, but was otherwise ignoring her schemes, Caroline had taken up the cudgel herself.9 As always, she knew that her greatest chance of success was to excite the interest of the rich and powerful. In 1848, she had sought the support of one of the best-known peers of the realm, a parliamentarian, moreover, who was known for addressing a myriad of humanitarian ills and had earned the sobriquet of “the Poor Man’s Earl”, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Lord Ashley, soon to be the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury.10 He had already done much to improve Britain’s appalling lunatic asylums (as they were then called); attempted to reform working conditions, especially for children and women in factories and mines; helped outlaw the use of chimneysweeps, or climbing boys; and sponsored the Ragged School system for underprivileged children. He was a man who could not turn his back on a good cause. Caroline’s appeal to him was a stroke of genius: he was influential, knew the system, and where he led others would follow. It said much for William Jones’s daughter that she had not just the confidence but now also the status that would allow her to consort with members of the social elite.
Establishing the society had been a slow process. She had initially approached Lord Shaftesbury in 1848 with her plan. In August the following year, she wrote him a letter about the need for such a society; in another, longer open letter in 1850 she clarified the proposal and set out the rules of the scheme. The second letter was published under the title: The A.B.C. of Colonization. In a Series of Letters by Mrs Chisholm. Lord Shaftesbury agreed to become the first chairman of the society’s London committee, which included other eminent gentlemen such as Sidney Herbert and Vernon Smith, the Member of Parliament for Caroline’s home town, Northampton, who, disliking his common surname, retitled himself Robert Vernon when he became the first Baron Lyveden. Along with monetary contributions, their involvement gave the society the integrity and respectability it needed if it was to gain further sponsorship from the wealthy and, just as importantly, the trust of the poor. Amongst the donations subsequently received was a substantial £250 from the Countess of Pembroke; a similar amount came in from other sources, the total making the society financially viable and able to begin operations by early 1850.
A flyer advertising an early meeting of the Family Colonization Loan Society (Museums Victoria)
Caroline realised that only better-off working-class and middle-class people would be able to save even part of the cost of their fare. Accepting these new criteria, she modified her scheme to suit. People wishing to emigrate, who had references proving them to be of good character, were encouraged to join the society at the cost of one shilling, then deposit further small amounts, from as little as one shilling at a time, until they had saved at least half the cost of their fare. The society set a full fare at £12, so it expected each adult to contribute at least £6; the discounted fare for children under fourteen years of age was £3, while infants travelled free. These were still not insubstantial amounts for some families; for example, a couple with two children older than seven years and two younger than seven years would still need to save up about £30 before boarding a boat. (Putting that in
to context, even more than a decade later — 1866 — the average annual earnings of agricultural workers in England was only £33 16s.11)
By saving half of their fare, Caroline believed, the prospective emigrants would prove that they were both industrious and frugal. On that basis, the society would lend them, interest-free, the remainder of the fare, on the condition that it would be repaid within two years of them arriving in Australia. Indeed, the society’s Rule No. 16 is one which twenty-first-century banking establishments could well take note of, stipulating “that no sums be advanced to parties beyond what they can easily repay within two years from the date of their arrival in the colony”.12 Not only was Caroline trying to ensure that the society incurred no bad debts, but she also wanted to make certain that the repayments were not too onerous for her clients. Continuing her reunion programme, she encouraged emigrants who had already settled in Australia to send money to the London committee as payment towards other family members being given passage on the society’s ships.
Amongst the major differences between this and earlier schemes was that families were not to be limited in size, Caroline insisting that babies, young children and the elderly were all welcome, “for the eye of age is at times of more service than the strong arm of youth . . . No exception is to be made on account of age; the only voucher required will be a good character.”13 She was determined, too, that families should not be split up. She had, after all, spent much of the previous two years attempting to rectify this problem and had excellent knowledge of the damage done to both children and parents when they were separated for years. Nor was she thinking only of the youngsters: she noted that, too often, elderly parents left behind without immediate family ended their days in sad loneliness, either in front of an empty hearth or in the workhouse. She wholeheartedly believed that emigration should not destroy the natural cohesion of the domestic unit. That said, she did allow some family members, for example husbands or older children in their late teens or early twenties, to emigrate first so that they could contribute to the cost of bringing out the rest of the family, usually within the next twelve months.
Caroline Chisholm Page 17