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"Charles Dickens adn The House of Fallen Women"- an account of Dickens' efforts to help destitute women

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

The house that Charles built Claire Tomalin enjoys a vivid account of Dickens's efforts to help destitute women By Claire Tomalin * The Guardian, Saturday 20 December 2008 Jenny Hartley's brilliant book fills a gap in Dickens studies. Vivid, intelligent and enthralling, it is about his setting up in Shepherd's Bush - this is 1847, when Shepherd's Bush was farming land outside London - a house in which girls from the streets, the prisons and the workhouses, girls who stole and prostituted themselves, wrecking their own lives and seemingly helpless to save themselves, might be changed through kindness and discipline, and so prepared for new lives in the colonies. The money came from the millionaire Miss Coutts, but the idea and organisation was all Dickens's, and for 12 years he effectively managed the Home for Homeless Women, installed in Urania Cottage (the name, bestowed by a previous owner, was particularly inappropriate, since Urania is another name for Aphrodite, goddess of love)...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on February 22, 2009 (boomark / email).