There is a lost book by Dickens, one that recorded some of the most remarkable encounters of his life. Within it, he catalogued the stories told him by the women – prostitutes, confidence tricksters, thieves and attempted suicides – whom he interviewed before they were admitted to Urania Cottage, the refuge for fallen women he established in Shepherd’s Bush in the 1840s and effectively directed for a decade or more. The money – substantial sums, for this was “high-end philanthropy” – came from the immensely wealthy Angela Burdett-Coutts, but the initial scheme and much of its everyday direction was Dickens’s alone, his most important and most characteristic charitable venture.
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He was the greatest novelist of the age, Burdett-Coutts its richest heiress, and they were determined to offer a chance to people who had none, or only bad ones. They could only help a tiny proportion of the great tide of vulnerable young women who washed up in the prisons and workhouses of mid-Victorian England, but they did so with determination, energy and imagination.
Dickens's Refuge for Fallen Women
But overall, it is striking how clear-minded the Urania project was and how realistic and thorough in execution. Dickens and Burdett-Coutts were simply unwilling to be indifferent to the suffering that surrounded them, and unfailingly energetic in pursuing the chances of change for the better. Urania gave those who entered its doors decent food and clothing, some education, a library, a garden and even music lessons from Dickens’s old friend John Hullah, Professor at King’s College London.
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"Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women" (Jenny Hartley)