Mrs Jellyby is introduced in Chapter Four of Bleak House, headed ‘Telescopic Philanthropy’. When Esther, Amy and Richard arrive at Mrs Jellyby’s house,
There was a confused little crowd of people, principally children, gathered about the house at which we stopped, which had a tarnished brass plate upon the door, with the inscription, JELLYBY.
‘Don’t be frightened!’ said Mr Guppy, looking in at the coach window, ‘One of the young Jellybys gone and got his head through the area railings.’
Numerous other little Jellybys, dirty and neglected, tumble down stairs and meet with multitudinous accidents, ‘notched on their arms and legs’, and are gently ignored by their mother, who is calm and pretty ‘with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if – I am quoting Richard again – they could see nothing nearer than Africa!’
Mrs Jellyby had very good hair, but was too much occupied with her African duties to brush it. The shawl in which she had been loosely muffled, dropped onto her chair when she advanced to us; and as she turned to resume her seat, we could not help noticing that her dress didn’t nearly meet up across the back, and that the open space was railed across with a lattice work of stay-lace – like a summer-house…
‘You find me, my dears, as usual very busy; but that you will excuse. The African project at present employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondence with public bodies, and with private individuals anxious for the welfare of their species all over the country. I am happy to say it is advancing. We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger.’
As if she were not joy enough Mrs Jellyby is joined in the story by Mrs Pardiggle. In a brilliant commentary on charity ladies, Dickens gives to Mr Jarndyce the observation that ‘there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a good deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal, and made no noise at all.’
Mrs Pardiggle, it is made clear, belongs to the first category.
She was a formidable style of lady, with spectacles, a prominent nose, and a loud voice, who had the effect of wanting a great deal of room. And she really did, for she knocked down little chairs with her skirts that were quite a great way off. As only Ada and I were at home, we received her timidly; for she seemed to come in like cold weather, and so make the little Pardiggles blue as they followed.
‘These, young ladies,’ said Mrs Pardiggle, ‘are my five boys. You may have seen their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in the possession of our esteemed friend, Mr Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket money, to the amount of five-and-threepence, to the Tockahoopo Indians, Gerald my second (ten-and-a-half) is the child who contributed two-and-ninepence to The Great Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one-and-sixpence-halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never, through life, to use tobacco, in any form.’
We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weakened and shrivelled – though they were certainly that too – but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could really have supposed Egbert to be one of the most baleful members of the tribe, he gave me such a savage frown. The face of each child, as the amount of his contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly, and evenly, miserable.
In the final chapter of Bleak House, ‘The Close of Esther’s Narrative’, when all loose ends are tied up, and all virtue is rewarded, reference is made to Mrs Jellyby:
She has been disappointed in Borrioboola-Gha, which turned out a failure, in consequence of the king of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody who survived the climate, for Rum; but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more correspondence than the old one.
Even Mrs Pankhurst would forgive a man who compared stay-lacing to a summer-house.
Urania Cottage
‘Gaslight Fairies’ from Household Words
Nothing is easier than for any one of us to get into a pulpit, or upon a tub, or a stump, or a platform, and blight (so far as with our bilious and complacent breath we can) any class of small people we may choose to select. But, it by no means follows that because it is easy and safe it is right. Even these very gaslight Fairies, now! Why should I be bitter on them because they are shabby personages, tawdrily dressed for the passing hour, and then to be shabby again?
… Poor, good humoured, patient, fond of a little self display perhaps (sometimes but far from always), they will come trudging through the mud, leading brother and sister lesser Fairies by the hand, and will hover about in the dark stage-entrances, shivering and chattering in their shrill way, and earning their little money hard…
Let me [ … ] take a single fairy [ … ] and sketch the Family Picture. I select Miss Fairy, aged three-and-twenty, lodging within cannon range of Waterloo Bridge, London – not alone, but with her mother, Mrs Fairy, disabled by chronic rheumatism, in the knees; and with her father, Mr Fairy, principally employed in lurking about a public-house, and waylaying the theatrical profession for twopence wherewith to purchase a glass of old ale, that he may have something warming on his stomach (which has been cold for fifteen years); and with Miss Rosina Fairy, Miss Angelica Fairy, and Master Edmund Fairy, aged respectively, fourteen, ten and eight. Miss Fairy has an engagement of twelve shillings a week – sole means of preventing the Fairy family from coming to a deadlock. To be sure, at this time of year the three young Fairies have a nightly engagement to come out of a Pumpkin as French soldiers; but, its advantage to the housekeeping is rendered nominal, by that dreadful old Mr Fairy’s making it a legal formality to draw the money himself every Saturday – and never coming home until his stomach is warmed, and the money gone…
A hard life this for Miss Fairy, I say, and a dangerous! And it is good to see her, in the midst of it, so watchful of Miss Rosina Fairy, who otherwise might come to harm one day.
Always at his superb best when writing about theatre people, it is Dickens the compassionate philanthropist whom we encounter and admire, in that article from Household Words. Here, he is the articulate advocate for the understanding of the plight of the ‘small people’.
His philanthropy was intensely personal and it brought into his life one of his most successful relationships with a woman, Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906). Her life was as vivid as his, though in contrast to the poverty of his childhood, she came from a world of extreme wealth. At the age of twenty-three she inherited a fortune from her grandfather. It was around three million pounds, a vast sum in the currency of the time, and it made her the richest heiress in England. She devoted herself generously and imaginatively to a wide range of charitable ventures. She was instrumental in the establishment of the NSPCC; was President of the ladies’ committee of the RSPCA; she established several social housing schemes, including Columbia Market; set up church schools; supported the Arts; and, rather charmingly, was responsible for setting up a scheme to provide drinking fountains for dogs, and was President of the Beekeepers Association (1878–1906). Her private life was colourful. She had a loving relationship with a female companion for fifty-two years; is said to have proposed to the Duke of Wellington; and she outraged Society when, at the age of sixty-six, she married her secretary, the twenty-nine-year-old, magnificently named, William Lehman Ashmead Bartlett. He changed his name to Burdett-Coutts, and became MP for Westminster in 1881.
Together she and Dickens created Urania Cottage, an Asylum for Fallen Women, later to be called A Home.
Dickens ti
relessly involved himself organising the daily schedule, interviewing the girls and taking their case histories, appointing staff, dealing with practicalities like blocked drains, overseeing all accounts and answering frequent summons to administer discipline on the premises to erring young women who were drunk and disorderly.
This letter was handed to the fallen women who were chosen as likely candidates for a stay at Urania Cottage:
An extract from Dickens’ Appeal to Fallen Women
You will see, on beginning to read this letter that it is not addressed to you by name. But I address it to a woman – a very young woman still – who was born to be happy, and has lived miserably, who has no prospect before her but sorrow, or behind her but a wasted youth who, if she has ever been a mother, has felt shame, instead of pride, in her own unhappy child.
You are such a person or this letter would not be put into your hands. If you have ever wished (I know you must have done so sometimes) for a chance of rising out of your sad life, and having friends, a quiet home, means of being useful to yourself and others, peace of mind, self-respect, everything you have lost, pray read it attentively and reflect upon it afterwards. I am going to offer you not the chance but the certainty of all these blessings, if you will exert yourself to deserve them. And do not think that I write to you as if I felt myself very much above you, or wished to hurt your feelings by reminding you of the situation in which you are placed. GOD forbid! I mean nothing but kindness to you and I write as if you were my sister.
Dickens was rare among those concerned with the ‘working girls’ of the time. He was compassionate towards them. He believed in their reformation. His home offered the young women kindness, friendship and hope. It is true that his ultimate hope for the dozen or so young women occupying Urania Cottage, at any one time, was that they would emigrate to Australia and marry, and it was for this purpose that they were being trained. They often had difficulty in appreciating the difference between voluntary emigration and transportation. In the story of Martha Endell, the very fallen woman in David Copperfield, this fate was the happy ending that Dickens presented to his readers. This romantically satisfactory conclusion may have been more for their pleasure than from any practical understanding that he gained from the lively occupants of Urania Cottage. Mr Peggotty returns from Australia with this story of Martha’s happy ending.
‘Mr Peggotty drew his hand from across his face, and with a half suppressed sigh looked up from the fire.
‘Is Martha with you yet?’ I asked.
‘Martha,’ he replied, ‘got married, Mas’r Davy, in the second year. A young man, a farm-labourer, as come by us on his way to market with his masr’s drays – a journey of over five hundred miles theer and back – made offers fur to take her fur his wife (wives is very scarce theer), and then to set up for their two selves in the Bush. She spoke fur me to tell him her trew story. I did. They was married, and they live fower hundred miles away from any voices but their own and the singing birds.’
In his second novel Oliver Twist, written eleven years before the opening of Urania Cottage, Dickens writes of Nancy and Bet,
They wore a great deal of hair, not very neatly turned up behind, and were rather untidy about the shoes and stockings. They were not exactly pretty perhaps; but they had a great deal of colour in their faces, and looked quite stout and healthy. Being remarkably free and easy with their manners, Oliver thought them very nice girls indeed. Which there is no doubt they were.
Dickens saw such women every night, as he walked back from the Marshalsea prison, where he visited his parents after working at the blacking factory, walking through Seven Dials, the most notorious part of London, to his lodgings with Mrs Roylance (Mrs Pipchin) in Little College Street, Camden Town. He was twelve years old, he looked with the eye of a child at the vicious, the violent, the drunken, the desperate. He never forgot what he saw and his gaze at the world continued childlike and unfiltered, until he died.
I can’t exactly make a case for Mrs Bardell as based on a real personage in Dickens’ life, but her blend of silliness and sexual desperation seems to recur very often in his females. The giggling, the glances, the carefully chosen hints at a forthcoming nuptial are frequent characteristics of his women; from whom such portraits were drawn is never quite clear. I think Dickens just saw women as intrinsically foolish and possibly sexually rapacious, with a few exceptions like Mrs Gaskell, George Eliot and Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Here’s one such creature.
‘Mrs Bardell,’ said Mr Pickwick, at last, as that amiable female approached the termination of a prolonged dusting of the apartment.
‘Sir,’ said Mrs Bardell.
‘Your little boy is a very long time gone.’
‘Why it’s a good long way to the Borough, sir,’ remonstrated Mrs Bardell.
‘Ah,’ said Mr Pickwick, ‘very true; so it is.’
Mr Pickwick relapsed into silence, and Mrs Bardell resumed her dusting.
‘Mrs Bardell,’ said Mr Pickwick, at the expiration of a few minutes.
‘Sir,’ said Mrs Bardell again.
‘Do you think it a much greater expense to keep two people, than to keep one?’
‘La, Mr Pickwick,’ said Mrs Bardell, colouring up to the very border of her cap, as she fancied she observed a species of matrimonial twinkle in the eyes of her lodger; ‘La, Mr Pickwick, what a question!’
‘Well, but do you?’ inquired Mr Pickwick.
‘That depends,’ said Mrs Bardell, approaching the duster very near to Mr Pickwick’s elbow which was planted on the table, ‘that depends a good deal upon the person, you know, Mr Pickwick; and whether it’s a saving and careful person, sir.
‘That’s very true,’ said Mr Pickwick, ‘but the person I have in my eye (here he looked very hard at Mrs Bardell) I think possesses these qualities; and has, moreover, a considerable knowledge of the world, and a great deal of sharpness, Mrs Bardell, which may be of material use to me.’
‘La, Mr Pickwick,’ said Mrs Bardell, the crimson rising to her cap-border again.
‘I do,’ said Mr Pickwick, growing energetic, as was his wont in speaking of a subject which interested him – ‘I do, indeed; and to tell you the truth, Mrs Bardell, I have made up my mind.’
‘Dear me, sir,’ exclaimed Mrs Bardell.
‘You’ll think it very strange now,’ said the amiable Mr Pickwick, with a good-humoured glance at his companion, ‘that I never consulted you about this matter, and never even mentioned it, till I sent your little boy out this morning – eh?’
Mrs Bardell could only reply by a look. She had long worshipped Mr Pickwick at a distance, but here she was, all at once, raised to a pinnacle to which her wildest and most extravagant hopes had never dared to aspire. Mr Pickwick was going to propose – a deliberate plan, too – sent her little boy to the Borough, to get him out of the way – how thoughtful – how considerate!
‘Well,’ said Mr Pickwick, ‘what do you think?’
‘Oh, Mr Pickwick,’ said Mrs Bardell, trembling with agitation, ‘you’re very kind, sir.’
‘It’ll save you a good deal of trouble, won’t it?’ said Mr Pickwick.
‘Oh, I never thought anything of the trouble, sir,’ replied Mrs Bardell; ‘and, of course, I should take more trouble to please you then, than ever; but it is so kind of you, Mr Pickwick, to have so much consideration for my loneliness.’
‘Ah, to be sure,’ said Mr Pickwick; ‘I never thought of that. When I am in town, you’ll always have somebody to sit with you. To be sure, so you will.’
‘I am sure I ought to be a very happy woman,’ said Mrs Bardell.
‘And your little boy –’ said Mr Pickwick.
‘Bless his heart!’ interposed Mrs Bardell, with a maternal sob.
‘He, too, will have a companion,’ resumed Mr Pickwick, ‘a lively one, who’ll teach him, I’ll be bound, more tricks in a week than he would ever learn in a year.’ And Mr Pickwick smiled placidly.
‘Oh, you dear –’ sai
d Mrs Bardell.
Mr Pickwick started.
‘Oh, you kind, good, playful dear,’ said Mrs Bardell; and without more ado, she rose from her chair, and flung her arms round Mr Pickwick’s neck, with a cataract of tears and a chorus of sobs.
‘Bless my soul,’ cried the astonished Mr Pickwick; ‘Mrs Bardell, my good woman – dear me, what a situation – pray consider. – Mrs Bardell, don’t – if anybody should come –’
‘Oh, let them come,’ exclaimed Mrs Bardell frantically; ‘I’ll never leave you – dear, kind, good soul;’ and, with these words, Mrs Bardell clung the tighter.
‘Mercy upon me,’ said Mr Pickwick, struggling violently, ‘I hear somebody coming up the stairs. Don’t, don’t, there’s a good creature, don’t.’
But entreaty and remonstrance were alike unavailing; for Mrs Bardell had fainted in Mr Pickwick’s arms; and before he could gain time to deposit her on a chair, Master Bardell entered the room, ushering in Mr Tupman, Mr Winkle, and Mr Snodgrass.
Mr Pickwick was struck motionless and speechless. He stood with his lovely burden in his arms, gazing vacantly on the countenances of his friends, without the slightest attempt at recognition or explanation. They, in their turn, stared at him; and Master Bardell, in his turn, stared at everybody …
‘Now help me, lead this woman downstairs.’
‘Oh, I am better now,’ said Mrs Bardell faintly.
‘Let me lead you downstairs,’ said the ever-gallant Mr Tupman.
‘Thank you, sir – thank you;’ exclaimed Mrs Bardell hysterically.
And downstairs she was led accordingly, accompanied by her affectionate son.
‘I cannot conceive,’ said Mr Pickwick when his friend returned – ‘I cannot conceive what has been the matter with that woman. I had merely announced to her my intention of keeping a man-servant, when she fell into the extraordinary paroxysm in which you found her. Very extraordinary thing.’
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