The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “The witches, the riches, and the wenches. How poetic.” I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  “We’re the wenches because we’re younger and we seem the only ones still interested in men.”

  “Aha.” I counterfeited interest to humor her.

  “We’re really not three separate mobs,” she assured me, “except maybe the witches. They really are different.” She raised her eyebrows to see if I had gotten her drift, and then went right on with her lecture. “But us wenches are mostly there to listen and learn. Some of us sometimes put in our tuppence of truth though, especially Barbara Smith and Flory and Elizabeth Siddal when she is not full of medicine. Nellie and I hardly ever say anythin’. We’re really the only ones from the streets, though Flory Nightingale sure talks like she’s been there.”

  “But what do you do at these meetings which makes all of this talk come out? What occasions this talk of free love and dislike of men in general?”

  “When we talk, we just talk about ourselves and how we’re cheated and enslaved by this society.”

  “‘Enslaved’? Really, isn’t that overstating it a bit?”

  “In the mind, Wilkie. In the mind, but sometimes in our bodies, too. Really, it sounds barbaric, but it’s true. We read some woman name of Wollstonecraft, or somethin’ like, out loud at one meetin’. Most of the women in the society clapped their hands at that one.”*

  “I have heard of this Wollstonecraft treatise. It is notorious for its hatred of men and its attacks upon the institution of marriage.”

  “Everybody says that you are tryin’ to make us slaves.”

  “Yet you discuss ‘free love’ there.” I tried to give the argument a lighthearted turn. “Not all of these women must hate men as their enslavers. Is it not hypocritical to denounce men while at the same time plotting new ways to make love to men?”

  “Or to women?” Irish Meg said it almost defiantly.

  “No! Women? No?” I was stunned at the unthinkable turn this discussion had taken. “You truly discuss such things there, in the presence of respectable women like Angela Burdett-Coutts?”

  “Oh, Wilkie,” and Irish Meg smiled coyly, “she listens quite intently, she does. And she’s not as sheltered as you might think. None of us is. After all, she runs a home for whores.”

  “Yes, but really…”

  “We talk about everything.”

  “And what do you talk about?”

  “They are very interested in me, they are, about wot my life wos like on the streets, why I sold myself to men.”

  “They know that you were a…a…?”

  “Oh, Wilkie, don’t be such a Mrs. Grundy, really.* They know that you are keepin’ me, too.”

  “They do? Miss Burdett-Coutts does?” Meggy caught the note of alarm that crept into my voice, and she mocked me.

  “Everybody in London does. We talk openly at our meetin’s. There’s some carries it too far though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After one meetin’, when the tea and cakes wos served, two of the witches, the one who scowls all the time and really does hate men I think, Eliza Lane, and the Frenchwoman who dresses like a man, got me aside and wanted to know everything men made me do when they bought me. They asked questions that nobody would ask.”

  “What questions did they ask?” I could not disguise the curiosity in my own voice.

  “Strange questions, like did men make you do them on your knees, or did men make you put on shows, make love to other women.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “Oh, Wilkie, stop it, you are as bad as they are, pressin’ a girl. They wanted to know how doin’ those things for pay for men made me feel, wot I thought when I wos doin’ them.”

  “And how did you answer that?” For a moment, she seemed to wander off into some quiet, thoughtful place of her own, as if her mind had left her body.

  “The truth is that I didn’t feel nothin’ at all. It wos as if I wos dead, some kind of ghost wanderin’ the streets. I wos there, but I didn’t feel a thing, and it wos horrible.”

  And then she came back from her other world, and her tenderness caught me by surprise. Meg was the most surprising person of all those I knew, even more so than Dickens. For all of the brutality of her past, she could surprise you with her loving gentleness.

  “Oh, Wilkie”—she put her arms around me and clasped me tight—“I couldn’t feel a thing until you took a fancy to me. You seem to love me, don’t you, Wilkie, don’t you?”

  There was almost a note of desperation in her voice. Like a small miracle, I received a momentary gift of tongues. Memory is a priceless thing and gave me the words to work the miracle.

  “Meggy, I have loved you from the first moment I saw you, my fire woman, drinking gin at the Bow Street station. I could not take my eyes off you, and I still can’t.”

  “Oh, I remember that night, by the river.” Her voice was happy and she cradled her head in the safe hollow of my shoulder. “You gave me your scarf against the chill. No one had ever done nothin’ like that for me. I still have it,” she said, and started up to get it to show me, but I pulled her back. I was caught up in the honesty of the moment and wanted to say more…and that was my downfall.

  “Meggy, I truly love you”—I was entering into uncharted waters, heedless of the hidden reefs—“and you make me happy. I fell in love with you when you were a whore and I love you now that we are lovers, more fully, more comfortably.”

  “Love me, or love fuckin’ me?” Her voice was doleful, as if she had asked a question that she did not really want answered.

  “It’s not that way at all, Meggy, and you know it. Good God, I love you. What must I do to convince you? You and my writing are my whole life. Except for Dickens and my work, all of my time is spent with you.”

  “That’s it, you have your work. Wot do I have?”

  “You help me with my work, we talk.”

  “About wot? About your work, wot you did all day. I don’t have nothin’ to talk about, Wilkie.”

  Meg never cried, but I could feel on my neck the tears that had run down her cheeks. I had never seen her like this before. I held her closer, rocked her in my arms. “I love you, Meggy. Isn’t that enough? I love you, and if there is any slavery between us, I am your slave.”

  I was exhausted. This truth telling was more tiresome than trying to keep up with Dickens on one of his night walks.

  “I’m sorry, Wilkie.” Meg was no longer argumentative. “But these women are makin’ me think. Oh, I knows you loves me, and I knows you fell in love with me when I wos nothin’ but a street whore, but they’re makin’ me see myself like I never seen myself before. They make me want you to see me different, see me as somethin’ more than just your lover.”

  It was a strange quiet that had come over the room as she spoke, as if we were suspended in time.

  I had expended all my words. But you are my lover, I thought, and I love only you. But I couldn’t say it again.

  I have always felt uncomfortable at the confluence of philosophy and the lives of real people. Too many wars have been waged and lovers torn asunder in the name of philosophy and religion and politics. Here was I talking of our love and there was she, feeling all that I was saying, yet captured by philosophy for the first time.

  “But we are not only lovers,” I finally broke the silence which had closed over us like the sea over two exhausted swimmers, “we are friends, too, aren’t we?”

  It must have been some divine intervention that had brought those words to my mouth because, for one of the few times in my life, I had said the right thing.

  She turned to me and smiled a radiant smile, her dark red hair burning around her face and her bright green eyes flashing. “Oh, I hope so, Wilkie. I hope so. You’re the only one I can talk to like this.”

  The sound of her voice jarred me out of my reverie. We were back at the Bow Street station, and all the cups had been filled with gin, and my Ir
ish Meg was about to begin her story.

  * * *

  *Bedford College for Women was founded in 1849 by Elizabeth Jesser Reid, and was the second such establishment. Queen’s College, founded in 1848 by Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice, was the first such women’s educational institution, but it focused almost exclusively on the education of governesses. Many of the meetings of feminist groups in London throughout the second half of the nineteenth century were held at Bedford College.

  *The reference to this “other Frenchwoman” is probably to the poet, novelist, and bisexual advocate of free love, George Sand.

  *Marian Evans, later George Eliot, translated David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu from the German to English. Harriet Taylor’s “The Enfranchisement of Women,” published without attribution, appeared in The Westminster Review in July 1851. This article was later credited to Harriet Taylor by her husband, John Stuart Mill, as the basis for his feminist work The Subjection of Women, published in 1869.

  *Florence Nightingale had to be reading from the manuscript of her fictional story “Cassandra,” published soon after in 1852.

  *Most probably Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. Wollstonecraft was the wife of the philosopher-novelist William Godwin and the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of the novel Frankenstein.

  *“Mrs. Grundy” and “Mrs. Grundyism” were the slang phrases denoting those Victorians who were intent upon censoring all things sexual.

  Whores and Sodomites

  August 11, 1852—Afternoon

  “It wos beezarre, it wos!” Meg began.

  “Yes, it was a truly strange outburst,” Angela Burdett-Coutts seconded my Meggy’s assessment.

  “She wos absolutely crazed, she wos,” Irish Meg (with the help of the gin) plunged into her narrative. “Her eyes were wide as saucers. Mad, mad she wos, like she didn’t know where she wos, but screamin’ like a madwoman.”

  “What was she screaming?” Field broke in.

  “Calling us terrible names, accusing us of terrible things.” Meg paused to draw deeply upon her mug of gin. “And sayin’ we deserved to die for our sins, that we were all whores and saddamites, wotever that is.”

  At that, Dickens suddenly straightened up like a hunting dog on point. “Whores and sodomites, did you say?” He leapt to her prompt.

  “Yes, whores and saddamites, that’s wot she said.”

  Dickens’s eyes were alive with his discovery: “Those are the very words.”

  “Wot words?” Meg’s voice made no attempt to conceal her impatience with Dickens’s interruption of her narrative.

  Field stared for a long moment, then, suddenly, made the connection. “The letters…,” he remembered, “…the threats to Miss Coutts contained those words.”

  “Yes,” Dickens countered, “those exact words,” and he smiled as if he had just solved the case.

  “Eliza Lane wos as wild as some Bedlam bitch.” Irish Meg pulled back on the narrative as if she and Dickens were involved in some verbal tug-of-war.

  As she sat there telling her tale, I could not help but recall that winter night eighteen months before, the fire sending out tongues of flame from her luxuriant red hair. That was when I had first set eyes on my “fire woman.” I think I must have fallen in love with her at that first sight. But this was a different woman, no longer the Irish Meg of eighteen months before, no longer a creature of the streets. She was a “new woman” in every sense of that phrase.

  “We were all settled at the meetin’—in one of our usual rooms at Coutts Bank,” Meg went on. “Most of us wos there, me and Nellie and Miss Burdett-Coutts and Marian Evans and Barbara Smith and poor crippled Elizabeth Browning who arrived late and Flory Nightingale and Marie who dresses like a man. We wos all settled in and ready to listen to some poems of Elizabeth’s and a story of Marian’s when she just comes bustin’ in like she’s mad.”

  “Miss Lane, this is?” Dickens was her questioner.

  “Yes, Eliza, Eliza Lynn Lane. She’s one of the regular women in the group. I mean, she comes regular to the meetin’s.”

  “And what did she say?” Dickens prompted his star witness as if he were some bewigged and powdered barrister at the Queen’s Bench.

  Inspector Field just sat there quietly, listening, with a somewhat bemused look on his face.

  “She burst in screamin’ at all of us, screechin’ that we’re all a pack of hypocrites. And then she starts in railin’ at each one of us, startin’ with Angela.” Meggy paused for gin.

  “What did she say to Miss Burdett-Coutts?” Field closed in like one of that rapacious pack of lawyers Dickens was at that very time so skillfully skewering in Bleak House.

  “She called her a pander, one who harbors whores and saddamites.”

  “There, that is the phrase from the letters,” Dickens interrupted, “the exact phrase.”

  “She said it to all of us,” Irish Meg seconded Dickens. “‘All whores and saddamites.’ She said it more than once she did, then she started pointin’ fingers. ‘I knows all your secrets,’ she’s screechin’, circlin’ that table like some hungry animal in the zoo.”

  “Now that sounds like blackmail.” Field broke his silence in a tone which signaled that finally his interest was fully engaged. “Wot secrets?” Field leaned forward in his chair and took a quick swipe at the side of his eye with his forefinger.

  “Like I said, first she cursed Miss Angela, then she turned on Flory Nightingale and called her no more than a common street whore despite all her nursey airs, and next wos Nellie—” Irish Meg stopped dead as if she suddenly realized that she didn’t want to tell what that screaming harridan had said.

  “Go on,” Field prompted her.

  “Well”—Meg regrouped—“she called Nellie no more than a rich man’s whore, a kept woman, and a guilty murderess.”

  I glanced surreptitiously at Dickens, who colored perceptibly and bit into his lower lip. I am sure Field also caught Dickens’s tick of discomfort because he hastened Irish Meg on with her story.

  “Did she attack anyone else?” he ordered Meg to proceed.

  “All of us,” Meg spat back, “pacin’ the room and pointin’ her finger. She called me a street whore puttin’ on airs, and a kept woman to boot, the bitch. She went absolutely crazy at Marie de Brevecoeur.”

  “More than at the others?” Field interrupted, noting a quizzical change of intensity in Meg’s voice.

  “She wos screamin’ at all of us. It all happened so fast. She said Marie wos false and a liar and would burn in hell for her unnatural ways. And she turned on Miss Evans and called her a wife stealer and hairytick.* ‘You’ll burn in hell!’ she cursed Miss Evans. The only one she didn’t curse individual wos poor Mrs. Browning.”

  Meg stopped for breath, and we all just stared at her.

  “How did it end?” Dickens finally broke the shocked silence.

  “It wos like she just ran out of steam,” Meg said, more quietly. “She’d gone all around the room, pointin’ fingers at all of us. It wos like she’d lost her voice, like she’d been given a speech and she’d said it all by rote. She just stood there like she wos in some kind of trance. Then in a real quiet voice she says, ‘You’re all a pack of hypocrites.’ And she looked right at Angela, who wos sittin’ there like she’d been stunned by a blow, and then she pointed right at Miss Angela. ‘And you are the worst one of all!’ she shrieks, and with that runs out of the room.”

  “Wot did you do?” Rogers, who had been hanging on her every word, leapt to the question.

  “Nothin’, we just sat there.” Meg shrugged and held out her hands helplessly as if she still didn’t understand the story she had just told.

  “It was all so strange,” Meg said softly after thinking for a moment. “It was as if she wanted to hurt all of us for no reason.” Meg stopped again to take a drink of gin and get a firmer hold on her emotions and her narrative.

  “Then I lost my
temper, Wilkie.” Meg turned to me as if apologizing. “I don’t know why I did it, but I jumped up and ran out after her. I didn’t think it wos right, her yellin’ at Miss Angela like that.”

  “And then?” Dickens spurred her story on.

  “And then I ran head-on into Tally Ho outside in the hallway.”

  “Thompson?” Field’s forefinger flicked familiarly at the side of his eye. “Where wos he while all this wos happening?”

  “He wos on the stair outside the meetin’ room. When she ran out, she ran right past him, and he ran to the room to see wot wos happenin’. That’s when we clapped each other in the doorway. He toppled me but caught me as I wos fallin’. By the time we got untangled, she wos down the stair and runnin’ for the front doors. I chased after her, but she got out into the street. When I got out through the doors, a closed carriage wos pullin’ up and she wos gettin’ in. I ran up behind her and caught her by the hair, but someone pulled her into the coach and pushed me off, then the horses wos whipped. The guard at the door saw it all.”

  “Wot did Thompson do?” Field pressed, glancing over his shoulder at that worthy.

  “I took Miss Angela home,” Thompson answered for himself.

  “And the others?” Field turned back to Irish Meg.

  “They just went home, too,” Meg answered wearily.