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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral Angela Burdett-Coutts, the female champion of charities in England and Overseas Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts: promoting social reform among the working classes through charity The scheme of Urania Cottage, Dickens and Coutts’ involvement in “social control” A very patronizing programme to reform “deserving” prostitutes Dickens’ master plan to attract inmates: self-reformation, discipline and promises of a married life in the colonies Dickens’ patriarcal views on bourgeois values, marriage and female emigration Removing their reformed women to the colonies: the less well-planned emigration process Their ultimate success: the “brideship” to British Columbia (1862) Reception of the “problematic subjects” from Urania Cottage in Canada Conclusion Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Les circulations européennes à l’âge des Empires coloniaux au xixe siècle

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    Charity, social control and female emigration in the “white empire”, Angela Burdett-Coutts’ and Charles Dickens’ Urania Cottage: reforming prostitutes for the colonial market

    Discours britannique sur l’émigration de prostituées vers les colonies blanches: le projet d’Urania Cottage d’Angela Burdett-Coutts et de Charles Dickens, au milieu du xixe siècle

    Françoise Le Jeune

    p. 39-64

    Résumés

    Françoise Le Jeune analyses the case of a well-known British charity in the 1850s, whose mission was to save undeserving underclass girls from prostitution, sometimes against their will, and to offer them a new life opportunity in the colonies in marriage. Coated in discourses of benevolence and humanitarianism, the charity funded and presided by two prominent Victorians, Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts, was in fact quite revealing of Dickens’patronizing and patriarcal outlook on prostitutes who could be saved by adopting some bourgeois mindset and manners, after some years spent in a new milieu and whose only fate would be married life in the colonies. As for Ms Coutts, who was still a single heiress in the 1860s, she placed in Urania Cottage her Anglican and Evangelical beliefs that young prostitutes once exposed to kindness and the comfort of cottage life could become Christian women ready to start a new life in the colonies whom she saw as the extension overseas of the mother country. Françoise Le Jeune shows that Coutts and Dickens saw their charitable scheme as rendering great services to British society by removing some prostitutes from the streets of London. They were also convinced they would solve the sex imbalance in the white colonies in Australia or Canada, conceiving their social activism as a moral mission to make up for the absence of commitment, on the part of the British State, to the relief of distress among the working classes.

    Françoise Le Jeune s’intéresse à une association caritative britannique, fondée dès les années1840, par une riche philanthrope Angela Burdett-Coutts et le romancier Charles Dickens, qui préparait de jeunes prostituées « sauvées » de la rue à leur émigration vers les colonies. L’auteure s’intéresse à une catégorie de la population féminine jugée tout aussi problématique que les jeunes bourgeoises désargentées et sans emploi. Le projet apparemment caritatif révèle en réalité un discours utilitariste et une perspective expansionniste dont les futures émigrantes sont victimes. Les deux philanthropes visent à réformer une catégorie de femmes généralement jugée indésirables en Grande-Bretagne, pour leur proposer une nouvelle vie dans les colonies après leur avoir dispensé une éducation religieuse et domestique pendant plusieurs mois dans un cottage financé par Angela Burdett-Coutts. L’association caritative et son projet d’émigration d’anciennes prostituées vers les colonies, ayant donné lieu à plusieurs débats dans la presse de l’époque, et à un premier voyage groupé vers le Canada en mai 1862, Françoise Le Jeune se penche sur les discours genrés et impérialistes qui ont encouragé l’émigration des femmes célibataires au milieu du xixe siècle en Grande-Bretagne.

    Texte intégral Angela Burdett-Coutts, the female champion of charities in England and Overseas Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts: promoting social reform among the working classes through charity The scheme of Urania Cottage, Dickens and Coutts’ involvement in “social control” A very patronizing programme to reform “deserving” prostitutes Dickens’ master plan to attract inmates: self-reformation, discipline and promises of a married life in the colonies Dickens’ patriarcal views on bourgeois values, marriage and female emigration Removing their reformed women to the colonies: the less well-planned emigration process Their ultimate success: the “brideship” to British Columbia (1862) Reception of the “problematic subjects” from Urania Cottage in Canada Conclusion Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    1In the 1850s, national newspapers in England began to report on the fact that the settlers’colonies of Australia, Canada and The Cape were suffering from a dearth of white women. The population equation should be easy to solve by shifting people around, since Britain suffered from a dearth of young marriageable men leading to an excess in unmarried young women, while in the Canadian colonies for instance, like in British Columbia, there was “but one woman to every 200 men”.1 This piece of disquietening information was sent by the newly appointed Anglican bishop of British Columbia, George Hill, to his English benefactor, Baronness Angela Burdett-Coutts known as the “richest heiress in England”2 who had recently endowed his See in the colony, to extend Anglicanism in the most Western parts of Canada.

    2On the other hand, the 1851 population census for England, as well as early social inquiries led by Poor Unions or by journalist Henry Mayhew3 in the late 1850s were equally alarming. They reported that the streets of London counted numerous unemployed young women asking for charity, crowding workhouses or working as prostitutes. In his London Labour and the London Poor Henry Mayhew recorded that 8.000 or so prostitutes walked the streets of London.4 He listed them under the category of “those who will not work”, i.e. the undeserving poor, the “street folks”. But there were also a large number of educated single women from destitute middle-class families for whom there was no working opportunities in Britain. All these women, prostitutes or destitute gentlewomen, were seen as “problematic subjects” at home where they were often described as in “surplus” of in “excess”.5

    3As the national press often brought up the alarming topic of sex imbalance in Britain and the colonies, Bishop Hill reminded his Anglican female friend-cum-philanthropist about the danger of such an unnatural state of things which might lead the colonies to fall into depravation for lack of decent women, and might cause “the ruin of Religion and morals” there, as well as at home. He wrote to Ms Coutts: “Think of the 600,000 more women at home than there are men, and then think what society must be here… I need say no more to induce you to use your efforts to promote the emigration to this Colony of some good respectable young women”.6 When Bishop Hill addressed those pressing remarks to Angela Burdett-Coutts in 1859, he well knew she would be concerned right away as she had been engaged in some charity for the past decade in which she tried to reclaim prostitutes from the streets to place them in her Urania Cottage, a Home designed to reform prostitutes into decent young girls, before sending them to the colonies to start a new life as married women.

    4Hence, for the purpose of controlling the balance of sexes in Britain and particularly of limiting the growth of the unemployed single female population in the cities, some social Christian reformers like Caroline Chisholm, Maria Rye or Ms Burdett-Coutts planned to gently redirect these women towards the British colonies where they would find new opportunities. In 1853, Caroline Chisholm set up an emigration scheme for unemployed governesses going to Australia.7 In 1861 Maria Rye targeted destitute middle-class women whom she sent to Australia and Canada,8 while Ms Coutts, with the help of her friend, novelist Charles Dickens, began to “reclaim” young prostitutes from the streets, as early as 1846, with the hope of transforming them into “good respectable young women” before sending them off to Australia or Canada.9

    5In the course of this article, I will therefore discuss Coutts’and Dickens’emigration project for prostitutes, for those who were generally described by British society as social outcasts, unfit to become wives and mothers, in England or in the colonies. Why focus on that social category which had acquired such a poor reputation in the colonies? Indeed prostitutes had often been deported as convicts to Australia in the first decades of the 19th century. But this had become a very contested practice in the Australian colonies by 1846, as local legislatures refused to become the dumping place for depraved female individuals who contributed to contaminate the colonial streets with their vices upon landing.10

    6Over the years, from 1846 until 1862, we will see that Dickens and Coutts reclaimed a number of prostitutes from their life of moral misery, and set them on a new improved track in the Empire. What motivated the team of philanthropists to believe these poor girls could be reformed in manners and character at a time when most Victorians believed vice was ingrained? Coutts and Dickens were convinced these young women would be able to start a new life as married women in the colonies. Was their project genuinely humanitarian or did they see the girls as mere marriageable material sent to a colonial market? What does it reveal about Dickens and Coutts’outlook on working-class women in general and on their future on the colonies? Our discussion will clearly address the idea of gendered circulation from the metropole to the British Empire organised here by two members of the social elite who never seemed to take into consideration the prostitutes’ view on or their agency in their reformation process or in the emigration project. Did the girls simply serve a utilitarian domestic project or/and a colonial one serving the interests of the class-minded masterminds?

    7First, we will examine the starting point of this original project established at Urania Cottage, a Home for destitute women designed by Charles Dickens and financed by Angela Burdett-Coutts in London, in 1846. Dickens the social reformer and Ms Burdett-Coutts, the Conservative Anglican, both joined forces and minds between 1846 and 1862 to create this “Rescue Home for Women” where some “fallen women” could be taught how to redeem themselves thanks to lectures on religion and home economics.11 Dickens and Coutts’ultimate plan was to send these girls, thus metamorphosed into decent marriageable women, to the white colonies, where they would marry some working-class British settlers in Australia or Canada. If the future life of these “deported” women in the colonies, remained quite vague for the team of reformers, Dickens’plans for the working of the Home were very grounded and based on his own observations of the London underworld. In examining the scheme of the private charity, we will take into account the founders’reforming principles at stake in the “Rescue Home” scheme, as well as the social control that they necessarily exercised on the women they planned to “ship” abroad to unknown destinations. The study of Dickens and Coutts’private correspondence will lead us to analyse the role of these two very influential social reformers in mid-Victorian Britain, as well as their involvement in private charity and emigration schemes which they combined to solve the excess of pauper female population in England.

    8In a last part, we will examine the fate of a handful of the “surplus” women rescued by Coutts and Dickens and transported to colonial British Columbia with the help of the Columbia Mission, an Anglican charity founded in 1859 and financed by Angela Burdett-Coutts. The first “Brideship” which left England for the city of Victoria (British Columbia) in 1862 with a number of reformed prostitutes on board, was the last convoy of “problematic subjects”, though the most organized one ever looked over by Coutts and Dickens. The examination of this emigration plan for a number of single women from the Rescue Home and other workhouses in London, will illustrate the utilitarian plan developed by the team of philanthropists over a decade, and will provide some insight on the fate of the female emigrants thus transported as commodities overseas, for Britain’s better good. The “Brideship” also marked the end of Urania Cottage and the collaboration between the novelist and the heiress. First their emigration scheme of undesirable female emigrants was contested in the press and denounced by early feminists. Second Dickens’dubious moral choices over matrimony led Angela Burdett-Coutts to choose to side with abandoned Mrs Dickens and to end her friendship with the novelist.

    Angela Burdett-Coutts, the female champion of charities in England and Overseas

    9Angela Burdett-Coutts was probably the most well-known female philanthropist of her times for she spent her life and her wealth in the practice of philanthropy, investing in small projects almost anonymously, as well as in bigger charities of various sorts. Her involvement in charity began with endowments made to the Ragged School system in the 1840s, then she financed the building of Columbia Hall and Columbia Market in London to replace derelict tenements. She then carried on another rehabilitation scheme with the building of the first “model village” in Bethnal Green. She also opened St Stephen’s Anglican school for boys and built St Stephen’s church in London. Her commitment to Tractarianism, then her understanding of the principles of Evangelicalism under Dickens’ influence, led her to endow the London Bishopric, as well as various Colonial Sees and some Anglican missions in several colonies in Australia, South Africa and Canada.

    10The female philanthropist’s main purpose was to improve society morally both in England and in the white colonies, according to the doctrine of the Anglican church. She wished newly founded bishoprics in the colonies could spread Anglican values to the settlers. Hence the generous endowments of the Church of England’s missions among the natives or of a few bishoprics overseas in the 1850s, which she gave upon the conditions that the colonial bishoprics she funded in South Australia, The Cape or British Columbia, should remain under the control of the Anglican church at home. Her life-long moral project aimed at saving and uplifting the “great Christian nation” and its colonial offshoots, from social and moral disruption. For that purpose, she created several religious-oriented charities to support her numerous causes at home (from poor children’s education to destitute women’s employment opportunities), as well as in the Empire (from supporting female emigration to financing Livingstone’s exploration of Africa to christianize the natives for instance).12

    11Her nickname among the working-classes, according to one of her biographers,13 was “The Queen of the Poor”. Ms Coutts, later Baroness Coutts, became involved in charity works in 1837 when she inherited her staggering wealth at age 23. Her close friendship with Charles Dickens, reflected in long letters exchanged over two decades, began in the 1840s. For many years Dickens became her adviser in the charitable works to which she dedicated her life and a very large part of her wealth. Their first important collaboration gave birth to Urania Cottage in 1846. In her almsgiving Ms Coutts was also encouraged by her close Tory friend the ageing Duke of Wellington who suggested she should turn to social control via religious instruction instead of providing financial aid only. Wellington supported Ms Coutts’ purpose: “You are right and manifest your good and just sense in your religious notions […] Christianity was intended to regulate the social life of human creatures!”14 Reforming groups of rescued fellow men and women by promoting their spiritual and material well-being, a Christian practice inspired by Reverend Malthus, agreed with her Anglican views, and soon it became her mission.

    12With the help of Charles Dickens, Angela Burdett-Coutts thus invested sums in the refurbishing of Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush, which she turned into an institution to reclaim “fallen women” from the streets, before removing them to the colonies. The charitable scheme had a utilitarian purpose for England. Miss Coutts planned to transform those unwanted and often depraved women into deserving emigrants for the English colonies, thanks to domestic training and religious teaching provided by a clergyman and some matrons. The Duke of Wellington was greatly supportive of the project because Angela’s charitable work aimed at removing the burden of prostitution from the streets of England via emigration. He saw that the nation at large would benefit from this charitable project and her full-on investment. The Duke did not even seem to think the idea of “reformation” necessary prior to their “removal” as sending the girls overseas would give them a new start in life as long as no one knew they used to be prostitutes and it would hopefully prevent them from lapsing into their former sick habit:

    “The only chance for them (the female residents of Urania Cottage), is that which it is your object if possible to attain: the removal of them to another scene in which their early derangements will be unknown and in which they may be placed each in a situation in which she (sic) will not know want! And will not be exposed and tempted by her (sic) former practice for relief!”15

    13However in 1835, a first emigration scheme for single women travelling to New South Wales (Australia) had brought bad press to the London Emigration Committee which had set up the emigration plan. It had been the talk of the town for several months. The Committee which worked with the Colonial Office did not reiterate the scheme as the women who left Britain for the colony were described as “unfit” or of “disputable virtue” by the New South Wales’ colonial administrators. The “ladies” were either governesses who refused to marry or worse former prostitutes who returned to their “former practice for relief” soon after landing.16 Thus reforming the morals and manners of prostitutes selected by Coutts and Dickens, before sending them off to the colonies, was therefore central to the rehabilitation programme at Urania Cottage.

    14In the 1850s Coutts’inclination towards Evangelical works and social reform stood out among the number of charities founded at the time. It was directed towards a category of the population whom upper-class society members rarely acknowledged: fallen women, pauper families, flower girls, shoe shine boys, chimney sweepers, i.e. those in whom poverty was seen as ingrained by the wealthy. Dickens greatly influenced her in directing her sympathy and support towards the poorer quarters of London.

    Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts: promoting social reform among the working classes through charity

    15Her deep and lasting friendship with Liberal-minded Charles Dickens, in spite of their different political views, also goes to show that they were both concerned and interested in reforms, in the mid-Victorian period, when the social evils caused by rapid industrialization, clearly became impossible to ignore for humanitarian reasons. Dickens rallied Carlyle’s criticism of the industrial middle-classes who were blinded by Mammonism, and he encouraged the reformation of the Victorian frame of mind which he believed was too tainted by strong utilitarianism, individualism and Conservatism.17

    16Coutt’s Christian and social aspiration thus brought them together in setting up charitable projects for the discarded and unwanted populations of the nation. Ms Coutts wanted to reform the groups of people she helped by bringing them spiritual comforts through conversion or redemption, while Dickens believed in improving their material conditions in order to enable them to lift themselves to a better stratum of society at home or abroad. Dickens the reformer used his pen to awaken the minds of well-to-do Victorians who could provide financial relief to the poor through charities, at a time when the State failed or refused to take care of their relief. Angela Burdett-Coutts initiated the friendship with the novelist after reading the first instalments of Oliver Twist. Their correspondence of which we only have Dickens’ letters, betray Angela’s regular questioning and desire to understand the “real” living conditions of the poorer classes and to solve the “Condition of England” issue which the novelist aimed at exposing to his readers.

    17For instance, following Angela Burdett-Coutts’s request to read the other instalments of Oliver Twist, Dickens took her to Bethnal Green to observe the living conditions of the paupers. Following this visit, she invested her money in the building of the first “model dwellings” in Bethnal Green. Similarly, during the elaboration of David Copperfield, Angela Burdett-Coutts became further involved with Dickens in the “Ragged Schools” project. The novelist led her to look beyond the need for religious teachings she believed these schools needed,18 to understand the living and working conditions of the families in which the poor pupils were growing. In one of his letters, Dickens convinced Angela Burdett-Coutts that the Church principles did not always bring out the best in lower class students when other needs were not fulfilled. He suggested better ways, outside the Anglican church, to “direct her generosity”19 in providing school buildings, dormitories or food on the table for young students. With this first piece of advice on how to spend her money wisely and practically, Dickens sealed a partnership which led to the development of many charitable schemes throughout London in which Dickens seemed to be the mastermind and Coutts the financier.: “I sent Miss Coutts a sledge-hammer account of the Ragged Schools […] I have no doubt she will do whatever I ask her in the matter. She is a most excellent creature.”20

    The scheme of Urania Cottage, Dickens and Coutts’ involvement in “social control”

    18It is through Dickens’ influence that Ms Coutts directed her sympathies towards the cause of the “fallen women” in the streets of London, whom she had observed from her windows at night in Piccadilly. But considering the sort of population they were dealing with, Dickens and Coutts both devised Urania Cottage as an “institution” designed to “rescue” prostitutes who wished to be “saved” from themselves and their “sinful” occupation, thanks to the administration of religious principles, as well as moral and domestic teachings. In accordance with her new principles in charity works, Ms Coutts was hoping to resort “to means best calculated to enable those in need to help themselves and to become again self-reliant and independent.”21 The plan for this new “charity”, Urania Cottage, began to be discussed by the two partners in the spring of 1846 with an outline devised, from the start, to control this unusual female population. The pair aimed to morally rescue them from their milieu before transforming them in “good helpmeets” or in “eligible wives” for the colonial market. The purpose was to convince a large number of these women to submit to this new life by moving in a cottage with its bourgeois domestic rules, away from their old districts, i.e. their native milieu, where they would undergo a successful social and moral transformation. This would in turn lead these young women to integrate, what Dickens and Coutts considered as, a normal life according to patriarcal standards: that of wife and mother. However, these women would not be safe in Britain or was it Britain which was not safe enough in keeping its “problematic subjects” on the island? In order for them not to fall back to prostitution, Dickens considered removal to the colonies as a safer alternative for the female individuals he had saved.

    19To begin with these problematic females would need to be selected to enter Urania Cottage. Those who refused to submit to the social rules of the House, those who misbehaved, were sent back to the streets. Those who were sent abroad had to pass final muster before the acting director of the Home, Dickens himself. In the following letter, Dickens, reacting as any strict patronizing director of the charitable institutions he so often derided in his novels, recalled the basic principles of the Home to Mrs Morson, the governess. In January 1854 many cases of “misbehaviour” had occurred in the cottage, disrupting the programme and “infecting” the life of many young inmates who were already on the road to “progress”:

    “And let it be distinctly known among the rest that the object of the Home is, to save young women who wish to save themselves. That is NOT the place for those who are indifferent to their own misery and degradation and that I WILL NOT, nor will any of the gentlemen who assist Miss Coutts in its management, allow its benevolent purpose to be grossly trifled with for a moment.”22

    20Dickens and Coutts, as well as their team of chaperons, governesses and clergymen on the premises, clearly directed their efforts at social control. Those among the young inmates who wished to be “rescued” and transformed into decent housewives in preparation for their new life abroad, had to conform strictly to the rules of the Home. In “taming and civilizing” these fallen women “in moulds shaped to fit the needs of their bourgeois society”,23 to quote economic historian F.M.L Thompson, Coutts and Dickens confirmed that their so-called selfless benevolent efforts to provide material and moral support to those in need, necessarily went hand in hand with great measures of social control and conformity to bourgeois rules.

    21By choosing the word “Home”, by naming it Urania Cottage, Dickens wished to break away from these harsh prison-like workhouses or private Christian institutions like the Magdalene Institution for instance. He wished to attract around thirty “inmates” as he called them, to a more welcoming place, a sort of Arcadia, where under the supervision of selected matrons, one governess, one superintendent and a clergyman, fallen women directed to the House by magistrates, prison directors and himself, would be taught the basics in domestic training, how to read and write, as well as religious practice which they lacked, before being sent overseas. These “fallen women”, essentially young women, as they still possessed according to Dickens, “some youthful innocence”, belonged to the 8.000 or so prostitutes24 which Henry Mayhew recorded in his social inquiry carried in the London streets. In order to stop the spread of “vice and crime” throughout London, Mayhew suggested that his contemporaries should pay attention to those who suffered in this underworld, instead of blaming them for their actual state of misery.25

    A very patronizing programme to reform “deserving” prostitutes

    22At a time when prostitution was rampant in London, when women were blamed for their promiscuity and lasciviousness, or shunned for attracting so-called decent gentlemen into pits of inequity, Dickens and Miss Coutts held a hand to those who were blamed for spreading crime and vice. Apparently prompted by compassion and “pity for her own sex”, Miss Coutts tried to “remove or alleviate” this “insidious vice”26 by tackling what she thought were the roots of social evil, i.e. lack of tenderness, of domestic comfort, and according to her beliefs a lack of religious roots.

    23Dickens thus targeted the youngest among the prostitutes who according to Mayhew’s co-author (Bracebridge Hemyng) were often innocent victims of “inhuman designs”, dragged away from parental care, trapped into abodes of infamy and degradation. There they fell into a vicious circle of sex and crime.27

    24Dickens did not necessarily share Miss Coutt’s Christian and benevolent view towards all fallen women. For Dickens, those they would save would need to be selected first for the cottage experiment, as they were not all innocent victims. Dickens, whose knowledge of the streets and of “human nature” had already helped him establish his diagnosis, was busy devising a House to reform these women whom he seemed to know well. His fascination for the underworld of prostitution could be morally questioned, particularly when he evokes the way in which the females’past could be used to coerce them once in the Home. Dickens explains how he proceeded to select the girls to prevent some candidates from coming to the House with a past story and with many flaws and vices. He interviewed them thoroughly:

    “I have taken some pains to find out the dispositions and natures of any individual we take; and I think I know them pretty well, and may be able to give the Matron some useful foreknowledge of them, and to exercise some personal influence with them in case of need. A most extraordinary and mysterious study it is, but interesting and touching in the extreme.”28

    25First Dickens suggested to remove these young women from their degraded “milieu” and to take them to the countryside, or at least to one of the green suburbs of London, Shepherd’s Bush,29 away from their past life of debauchery and from the debased “society” they lived in, before being removed to another continent. Then Dickens and the cottage clergyman would give the girls a lecture on their past life, on the cruelty of society, as well as on the opportunity offered to them to repent and reform:

    “A woman or a girl coming to the asylum, it is explained to her that she has come there for useful repentance and reform, and it means her past way of life has been dreadful in its nature and consequence, and full of affliction, misery and despair to herself. Never mind society while she is at that pass. Society has used her ill and turned away from her and she cannot be expected to take much heed of its rights or wrongs.”30

    26To reform the poor girls’behaviour and manners, Miss Coutts refurbished and decorated a cosy cottage complete with a garden, into a bourgeois “Home” which she saw as an idyllic domestic environment, a new “milieu”, representing the domestic comfort which these fallen women had never felt or experienced. She also provided these young girls with motherly support which they lacked according to her, under the care of some matrons. She was easily convinced by Dickens that the simple fact of being exposed to this haven of middle-class domesticity, in the countryside, with “moral direction” and pastoral work would necessarily lead these girls to never look back to their life on the streets. With proper domestic training teaching them “order, cleanliness, the whole routine of household duties, as washing, mending, cooking” they would eventually lead a decent life as “virtuous wives” in “happy homes of their own.”31 While Coutts insisted on a Christian supervision, Dickens believed in “tender firmness” to break these women into a more gentle mould to “improve them by education and example.”32

    Dickens’ master plan to attract inmates: self-reformation, discipline and promises of a married life in the colonies

    27Were the young girls selected for the experiment aware of their fate down the road once in the colonies? To promote the Urania Cottage scheme, Dickens surprisingly wrote an anonymous letter inviting “fallen women” to come forward to seize that opportunity to change their life. How much did he reveal about his emigration scheme? The letter was printed in the form of a four-page quarto and distributed throughout the London quarters where these women would find the pamphlet or hear about it. The letter was also sent to magistrates and prison governors who could recommend some inmates to the “Rescue Home for Women”. Dickens made clear that Miss Coutt’s charity supported the work of the legal system by saving female inmates who could still be “rescued from their former lives.”33 Dickens deplored with some prison governors that no alternative to jail existed in the law for condemned prostitutes or female paupers who were arrested for selling their body and who, for some of them, had some good “in the bottom of their hearts.” However, reclaiming these women “having fallen from virtue” from the world of sin, could only be a success if these women were willing to enter the Home and to accept its strict rules and regulations. For that purpose, the letter could be read as a moral contract which young women had to accept.

    28Dickens tried to personalize his letter so that every woman who came across his “pamphlet” might feel singled out among the masses:

    “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 […] You are such a person, or this letter would not be put into your hands.”

    29Then promises of a better life were made by somebody who signed “Your friend”, providing that the moral contract which came with the promises be respected:

    “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 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 those blessings, if you will exert yourself to deserve them.”

    30In order to differentiate his scheme from other religious asylums or institutions where women would go to receive relief, only to find admonition and punishment, Dickens indicated that he was not placing himself “above” her, that he meant “nothing but kindness” to her, insisting he was writing to her “as a sister.” As for Miss Coutts, she was presented as “a great lady” but here again, Dickens warned his female reader that she was not judgmental like other “upper-class ladies.”

    “There is a lady in this town, who, from the windows of her house, has seen such as you going past at night, and has felt her heart bleed at the sight. She is what is called a great lady, but she has looked after you with compassion, as being of her own sex and nature, and the thought of such fallen women has troubled her in her bed.
    She has resolved to open, at her own expense, a place of refuge very near London, for a small number of females, who without such help, are lost for ever, and to make it a Home for them.”

    31In spite of Dickens’intentions to stay away from the use of old “tarnished images of God” promoted by Tractarians, i.e. Ms Coutts’ friends, his letter nonetheless evoked punishing images meant to scare prostitutes into redemption:

    “Imagine for yourself the bed on which you, then an object terrible to look at, will lie down and die. Imagine all the long, long years of shame, want, crime, and rain that will rise before you. And by that dreadful day, and by the Judgment that will follow it, and by the recollection that you are certain to have then, when it is too late, of the offer that is made to you, when it is NOT too late, I implore you to think of it, and weigh it well!”34

    32Images of a brighter future were necessarily included after the dark prospects which Dickens envisaged for the poor girl reading his letter. In the case of this new project, Dickens indicated that women would be returned to society after a while, thereby suggesting they would be locked up for some time, even though this was not clearly mentioned here. In order for them to acquire a “new name and a new character”, Dickens mentioned emigration (“to go abroad”) which he described as a domestic haven for the most deserving of these redeemed girls. Here, Dickens clearly dissociated deportation to the Australian colonies, a sentence dreaded by prostitutes, from emigration which he describes as the beginning of a new life for them as “faithful wives”:

    “And because it is not the lady’s wish that these young women should be shut out from the world, after they have repented and have learned how to do their duty there, and because it is her wish and object that they may be restored to society […] they will be supplied with every means, when some time shall have elapsed, and their conduct shall have fully proved their earnestness and reformation, to go abroad, where, in a distant country, they may become the faithful wives of honest men, and live and die in peace.”

    33In this venture, Dickens and Coutts’ abundant correspondence clearly shows that Miss Coutts had truly no idea of what to expect from her future inmates. Since no public inquiry had been released on prostitutes in 1846, Miss Coutts knew nothing about the underworld in which those girls lived before they came to the “asylum”. Besides Miss Coutts did not actually plan to get involved in the cottage which she apparently rarely visited. Dickens was to keep her informed. While discussing the original plan for the home, the novelist described at length the “character” of these “fallen women” to his upper-class friend. Based on his close and thorough knowledge of the streets of London, and following Miss Coutts’s requests, Dickens prepared theoretical plans for the “Home” in collaboration with some magistrates and prison officers prompted like him by what he described as “humanitarian principles” and compassion.

    34Miss Coutts turned to Dickens for advice and assistance in the manner in which the first women should be selected or recruited, as well as on the “domestic curriculum” he believed they should be taught, to save them from their depraved street life. Dickens drew the initial principles for this charity of a new type which combined relief, redemption, then emigration which was part of the plan to remove the girls from their corrupted milieu. In spite of the humanitarian mission he assigned to the Home, the reformative principles thus developed by him, were very strict and clearly repressive, since the “inmates” or “penitents” had to measure up to his own standards of “virtue” before being admitted into the programme:

    “I would put it in the power of any penitent creature to knock at the door, and say for God’s sake, take me in. But I would divide the interior (of the asylum) into two portions, and into the first portion I would put all new-comers without exception, as a place of probation, whence they should pass, by their own good conduct and self-denial alone, into what I may call the Society of the Home.”35

    35The initial plan—“a plan grounded in a knowledge of human nature”—aimed at reforming the manners and “character” of groups of thirty young women at a time, for several weeks. These women had to be young, some might have spent some time in prison for prostitution or minor offences. Reformation, in fact self-reformation according to Dickens, could only been achieved if these women were willing to change and were ready to accept the benevolence of Miss Coutts which came to them in the shape of this Home away from their infected quarters, and in the form of classes in home economics and religion. “It is explained to her that she is degraded and fallen, but not lost, having this shelter, and that the means of Return to Happiness are now about to be put into her hands, and trusted to her own keeping.” Central to the reformation process was the taming of the “character” of these street women, by appealing to their lost moral values and Christian virtues: “pride, emulation, sense of shame, her heart, her reason, her interest… her own self-respect.”36 There was a probation period before inmates were deemed reformed by her tutors and Dickens himself who had a meeting with each of them. Before being allowed to return to society or better to be sent abroad. Dickens indicates that:

    “It was expressly pointed out to her (the female inmate), that before she can be considered qualified to return to any kind of society—even to the society of the asylum—she must give proofs of her power of self-restraint and her sincerity and her determination to try to show that she deserves the confidence it is proposed to place in her.”

    Dickens’ patriarcal views on bourgeois values, marriage and female emigration

    36If Dickens believed that these women had “fallen from virtue” out of life circumstances, he also indicated to Miss Coutts, that their character was flawed either from the start or by exposure to vice and crime. Some of these girls “of evil nature” were even gone beyond the point of rescue. Here Dickens, the social novelist adopts a traditional patriarcal bourgeois discourse to qualify these street women. According to him their volatile character can be attributed to their nature and their original environment.37

    37For Dickens the only source of stability for these “characters”, for their bouts of “madness”, for their “disease” would come through their removal from their London environment, from England even, and even better through marriage. Emigration would then serve both purposes. Dickens believed that these bouts of passion, which turned these young women into hysterics, would be assuaged by domestic life in some “distant parts of the world”, where these “women could be sent for marriage with the greatest hope for their future families, and with the greatest service to the existing male population whether expatriated from England or born there.”38

    38He insisted on the fact that emigration would enable them to be removed from their English milieu where their background or former life would always prevent them from being hired as maid or servant. Dickens knew that hardly any “good people would be glad to take them into situations”. However, emigration would give them “the power of beginning life anew, in a world perfectly untried by them.” Emigration, according to Dickens would also place them away from their former associates while giving them “chances of recognition and challenge.”39 Dickens seemed to have a naïve representation of the colonies as free of crime, though it was difficult to ignore the accounts circulating in English newspapers about the state of depravation of colonial society in Australian cities, where the British government continued to deport prisoners, including prostitutes, well into the 1840s. Dickens repeatedly indicated that emigration would render service to their “redeemed” inmates, oblivious of the fate reserved to them once they left the shores of England.

    39Inmates should thus be well-armed to return to normal society after being taught domestic habits, in preparation “for the right performance of duty outside, and for the formation of habits of firmness and self-restraint”. The domestic comfort they were offered in the middle-class environment provided at the cottage (with a flower garden, their own bed, a bathing room, a parlour and sitting room, a piano as well as fresh linen and fresh undergarments) was clearly meant for the girls to “feel the dream” of returning to society. These domestic training and teaching should not be based on menial monotonous tasks, Dickens recalled, but on the idea that what they learnt “under that roof, would end, by God’s blessing, in happy homes of their own.”40

    40Besides, in the so-called “Society of the Home” for those who managed to go through the probation period, Ms Coutts agreed that they would be taught sisterly and family affection where they had none before. She wished to entrust them with some independence, though limited in the first weeks for fear of escape. Their self-restraint and their progress towards the path of virtue would have to be tested, according to Dickens, who did not trust the “inmates” as easily as Ms Coutts. One of the final tests before sending them to Australia, consisted in giving them the keys to the Home where they were “trapped” in the first weeks, while allowing them to go for walks outside the cottage. Indeed, in order to preserve them from any contamination from their old world, Dickens suggested they should be allowed to leave the cottage but only to take some short walks in the countryside behind it, under the supervision of a matron. For those who disobeyed and returned to their old quarters, the Committee was asked to dismiss them immediately. In most cases, Dickens reports to Ms Coutts having had a good (patronizing) conversation with the “offender” before taking the final decision.41

    41But the Rescue Home gradually failed to reform many girls, because the female inmates often refused to be controlled morally, physically and socially. Dickens blamed it on their ingrained “fits of madness” which like any other observer of “those women”, he and Miss Coutts “must contemplate with astonishment and pity.” Jenny Hartley, a Dickens scholar, tried to track down the journey of Urania Cottage’s former inmates. She uncovered the case of the first three young prostitutes who left for Australia in January 1849. Dickens had arranged for their six-months’trip on The Calcutta destined to Adelaide where they would be met by Reverend Augustus Short. None showed up upon arrival. Short wrote to Dickens about the possible fate of the three apparently redeemed women who according to the ship captain had relapsed into their former occupation, “their old ways”, during the trip.42 It is hard to keep track of the other inmates sent to Australia as only two of them seemed to have definitely settled as married wives over the years. Could Dickens’word on the charity’s positive emigration record be taken for granted?

    Removing their reformed women to the colonies: the less well-planned emigration process

    42Indeed, in an article published in his popular magazine Household Words in April 1853, Dickens gave a picture of the effectiveness of Urania Cottage. Six years after the beginning of the experiment, he described the fortunes of the women who had at this point had been “rescued” at Urania Cottage:

    “Of these fifty-six cases, seven went away by their own desire during their probation; ten were sent away for misconduct in the home; seven ran away; three emigrated and relapsed on the passage out; thirty (of whom seven are now married) on their arrival in Australia or elsewhere entered into good service, acquired a good character and have done so well ever since as to establish a strong prepossession in favour of others sent out from the same quarter.”43

    43In six years, 30 women out of 56 were sent successfully to the colonies, to “Australia or elsewhere ”, among whom 7 were married, indicated Dickens to his readers, thereby suggesting that Coutts and he did not have a clear idea of where their former inmates had gone to, or what their fate really was. The philanthropists’care for their inmates seemed to stop once the women had been rescued after several months in the cottage, where they acquired “a good character” and then were put on a boat. Dickens apparently cared little about their conditions of transportation on the colony-bound journey. His acquaintances with Caroline Chisholm leads us to believe that he might have directed some reformed inmates to her at first. Indeed in March 61850, Dickens mentioned his collaboration with Mrs Chishom whom he had just met, around his magazine Household Words in the writing of “a little article of my own […] introducing some five or six originals [A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters], which are extremely good.” As for Mrs. Chisholm’s contribution, in addition to furnishing some female emigrants’letters to Dickens, she provided some information on her experience with female emigrants in Sidney and on her emigration charity the “Family Colonization Loan Society”. In the article, Dickens paid tribute to Mrs. Chisholm’s work. He clearly supported the purpose of her Colonization Society which was to help set up working-class families in Australia, and explained her plan in detail, which he considered very sound. In the following years, several other articles were published in Household Words like “Safety for Female Emigrants” and “Official Emigration” which all mentioned Mrs. Chisholm’s work.44

    44Was association with Chishlom’s emigration schemes the only option for the benevolent pair? From the inception of the Home, Dickens had made clear that if the colonies were to be the final destination for some of their inmates, Dickens and Coutts would have to receive the support of the Colonial Office. Miss Coutts’s mission in opening this house should not be isolated but supported by some government’s help, at least in seeking decent abodes for these women in the colonies. Dickens made clear that she should approach the Colonial Office. She should beg them to vote regulations to protect the transportation of female emigrants on board ships to Australia, The Cape or Canada, all the more so as Dickens planned to send some of these “rescued women” in groups, “having hopefully formed attachments among themselves” in the Home, which would bring encouragement and support to each other “in a foreign country.” Dickens asked Ms Coutts to use her connections in the Colonial Office, or in political circles, through her dear friend and former PM Wellington, to take charge of the female emigrants: “The main question that arises is, if the cooperation of the Government, beginning at that point when they are supposed to be reclaimed, cannot be secured, how are they to be provided for permanently.”45

    45In other words, Dickens clearly criticized the lack of involvement of the State in poor relief or in emigration at that stage. If Ms Coutts was ready to invest large sums into the Home for destitute women for the benefit of Britain, her private action would have to be matched by some governmental support, either in promoting and financing emigration or in developing white colonies into decent settlements. In the same letter, Dickens insisted on the fact that there was “a very great probability of the whole Transportation System being shortly brought under the consideration of the legislature.” Official preliminary reports presented to Parliament in 1846, when the Home and the rescue plan were also elaborated by Dickens and Coutts, indicated that the government would probably soon “recognise the question of sending out women to the different settlements, as one of very great importance.”46

    46Dickens praised Ms Coutts’ private undertaking which he claimed would do “lasting honour to [her] name and country” as long as her charity could find some official support in the emigration process:

    “In reference to the Asylum, it seems to me very expedient that you should know, if possible, whether the government would assist you to the extent of informing you from time to time into what distant parts of the world, women could be sent for marriage, with the greatest hope for their future families, and with the greatest service to the existing male population, whether expatriated from England or born there.
    If these poor women could be sent abroad with the distinct recognition and aid of the government, it would be a service to the effort.”47

    47In spite of Dickens’ suggestion to lobby the Colonial Office in order to receive some political or financial support from the government in their emigration scheme, Ms Coutts ended up having to resort to private charities, like Chisholm’s, to send her rescued women abroad. Indeed in emigration, as in the relief of poverty, the government tended to rely on private initiative or on Church missions to solve “the Condition of England” question.48 Dickens was clear on the so-called “humanitarian” project the couple was launching at Shepherd’s Bush. Once reformed, women could be sent overseas for the sake of the nation, by bringing with them to the colonies, the domestic values and Christian virtues they had been inculcated to them in England. Dickens’representation of the Empire was not glorious. It lacked in concern for the development of the colonies in decent settlers’ colonies which was now the norm by mid-century. This is visible in the lack of investment on his part, in the preparation of his inmates’journey overseas or in the lack of care regarding their new milieu once in Australia or Canada. In that he stood at poles apart from Coutt’s religious ideal for the future of the colonial world, and the expansion of British settlers’ colonies in perfect examples of moral and religious societies. In fact, the last emigration scheme organised by the ill-assorted team was supported more by Angela Burdett-Coutts who for once saw her Anglican vision for the Empire served, than by Dickens whose enthusiasm in the reforming capacity of underclass girls had been dampened over the years.

    Their ultimate success: the “brideship” to British Columbia (1862)

    48Regardless of the conditions in which these rehabilitated women were transported or had to settle on the other side of the ocean, they were still considered in terms of valuable marriageable “goods” or “helpmeet” for the colonies. Dickens seemed to imagine the colonial world as some immaterial space, still in its early stage of development socially and politically, a mere product of imperial imagination. While in the 1850s, Australian and Canadian colonies were already well-advanced in self-government, already seeking some independence from the mother-country in the choice of settlers, Dickens still believed England could use these overseas settlements to become receptacles for its excess populations.

    49While asking Miss Coutts to resort to her political connections to publicize their ultimate plans for “rescued women”, Dickens knew that colonial policies regarding emigration to the colonies in 1846, like other regulations, were left up to individual projects under the new supervision of the Emigration and Land Committee. Public funds would not be provided to arm emigrants’ships since the government promoted laissez-faire over state-control. He wrote to Coutts: “I have (with reason) a doubt of all governments in England considering such a question in the light in which men undertaking that immense responsibility, are bound, before God, to consider it.”

    50Nonetheless, Dickens thought Miss Coutts’ project should be presented to the authorities in case it failed due to lack of colonial planning or political support: “I would suggest this appeal to you, merely as something which you owe to yourself and to the experiment, the failure of which, does not at all affect the innumerable goodness and happiness of the project itself.”49 In other words, for anything that happened on board the boats to the colonies or in the colonies to their inmates, the public should blame the government not Miss Coutts or Dickens.

    51While thirty of his inmates emigrated to Australia, according to Dickens’s report in 1853, the charity was not very successful. Besides, Urania Cottage came under the scrutiny of some feminist activists, partly because of Coutts’ and Dickens’ disposal of “surplus” women without any further investigation into their actual fate in the colonies where they were “disposed of”. Besides from the 1850s on, feminist activists, like Anna Jameson, claimed that transportation to the colonies was not always safe for women. Sending single women to the colonies to get married, particularly former prostitutes, was akin to a form of sex trade or sex trafficking. From 1857 onwards, the London Times regularly published disappointed letters written by governesses, returning from Australia. They complained about the poor conditions that awaited single women in the colonies. Alarming reports on women falling into prostitution for lack of decent jobs in Australia, prompted charities to reflect on the moral purpose of these emigration schemes. This had been Miss Coutts’ wish for over a decade when Reverend George Hill, who worked for the Columbia Mission financed by the heiress, sent her his report from the colony of British Columbia (Canada) in 1859, where white English women of all sorts and origins were desperately needed.50

    52At a time when Urania Cottage was about to close down, Bishop Hill gradually came to direct Coutt’s charitable venture towards a new assisted emigration programme organised by the Anglican colonial bishopric. The purpose was to transport “surplus” women from England, selected by the Church at home, to the Canadian colony where Bishop Hill would supervise their journey and their settlement. Anglicanism, missionary work and imperialism now worked hand in hand. Creating a so-called charitable programme which would aim at rescuing some unwanted female population from the streets of English cities and at redeeming them through emigration, appealed to the Columbia Mission followers, and to Ms Coutts and Dickens who could send a last group of rescued women to British Columbia. Their plan could not be criticized for lack of supervision.

    Reception of the “problematic subjects” from Urania Cottage in Canada

    53But transporting a group of thirty to forty white single women, essentially from the lower-classes, to British Columbia, became a popular affair in London. It was debated in newspapers, particularly in the London Times, in the National Review and the pages of the English Woman’s Journal and referred to in many other national papers. The purpose of the scheme brought about many conflicting discourses on “surplus” population, “surplus” women, undesirable subjects, on desirable colonists, and on colonial plans for the Empire.

    54The colonial promoters in England and in British Columbia, the Columbia Mission (now Columbia Emigration Society), whose patroness was Miss Coutts, and the white Anglican elite of colonial Victoria (in British Columbia), envisaged particular roles and functions for this group of thirty English white women. Their emigration would necessarily solve the imbalance between sexes which led white male, pioneers or miners, to lead a life of debauchery in remote villages, or to live with Native squaws. These female emigrants from the lower-classes could also be employed as domestic servants of whom there was a clear dearth in Victoria. Thirdly, according to Bishop Hill, English Anglican women’s natural propensity to piety would clearly bring back the miners and settlers who had strayed away from religion, on the right path of moral values and religious teaching. In short, white women from the labouring classes, either recently reclaimed from their life in prostitution by Miss Coutts, or selected in slums or workhouses by missionaries for their religious and domestic qualities, were seen as social panacea to bring order and to introduce some control in the remote settlements of the colony.

    55William Rathbone Greg, a famous English essayist, contributed to the debate on female emigration, by reporting in the National Review on the useful works of the Columbia Emigration Society, while selections of the first female emigrants were going on under the supervision of Reverend John Garrett. Greg in an essay entitled “Why are women redundant?”51 first published in 1862, underlined the necessity of such assisted emigration schemes for “surplus” women, particularly from the lower classes in order to preserve England’s gender balance, i.e. its “virtuous” balance. Greg goes as far as suggesting that prostitution would naturally be eradicated in Britain, if the number of “loose” women was controlled by emigration. Coutts and Dickens’utilitarian views were at last recognized:

    “When female emigration has done its work, and drained away the excess and the special obviousness of the redundance; when women have thus become far fewer in proportion, men will have to bid higher for the possession of them, and will find it necessary to make them wives instead of mistresses.”

    56The women who had been brought back to the right path by religious teaching in Ms Coutt’s Home, the former penitents “now aware of their duty” as future wives according to Dickens, would serve the double purpose of the two charities, at home and abroad: by being removed from their criminal milieu for good, transformed into decent women by being exposed to religion and a sense of home at Urania Cottage, they would now be bringing stability and foundation to a new English society abroad. They were at the same time the instruments of English society’s social control, while being the victims of it. According to imperialist W.R. Greg in the National Review, British Columbia was an ideal receptacle for surplus women, as “while ten thousand women could leave Britain weekly (!) without effect”, in British Columbia “such an accession would transform an unsettled multitude into an organized community and lay the foundation of a nation’s life.”52 Dicken’s views exactly.

    57On the first boat that left London for British Columbia in May 1862, under the supervision of two chaperons, one lady and one clergyman, at least twenty women out of sixty, came from Dickens and Coutts’s cottage. But this fact was not too publicized since no reference to the past life of the “rescued inmates” should be made, as a rule of the Home, but also in order to give them an opportunity to begin life anew without feeling any reprobation. Their past life and activity were never mentioned in the press before their arrival. Frederick Whymper, a British artist and explorer who happened to travel on the Tynemouth, provides a description of these mysterious female passengers travelling in a group under the supervision of some matrons and a clergyman who kept them isolated from the rest of the passengers. For him, they were all “commodities”. He ironically refers to them as “living freight”, “an invoice of sixty young ladies destined for the colonial and matrimonial market.”53 However, their appearance seems to be quite telling of their past activities in England.

    58Upon their landing, the local press in Victoria had some suspicion about their social origins too. Some girls were betrayed by their language, attitude or character. They could not always “pass for ladies.”54 Finally, and ironically, the hypocrisy of the whole assisted emigration charity was exposed upon the arrival of the first so-called “brideship”, the Tynemouth, in Victoria. The news of the coming of a boat full of English “lassies” caused great excitement among the single men of British Columbia. It was impossible to hide the fact that these women were imported on the colonial market as mere marrigeable goods. According to Whymper, some men travelled for several days from remote mining towns, when they heard the news. They all wanted to see “the lassies” and possibly find one they could take back to their mining quarters: “Sixty single ladies—think of it, ye single, bald-headed, and a-little-on-the-grey order, and build your habitation larger!” wrote the Victoria Press.55

    59These white female emigrants immediately became objects of fantasy and desire for these single men who each wanted to catch a glimpse of “the rosycheeked English beauties.” This became particularly clear upon disembarkation when many of the girls were too impressed by the sexual tension on the dock, to leave the boat. The two chaperons had to hire the local police force to keep these excited men at bay, while whooping and whistling were heard on all sides. They were removed to the Marine Barracks where they had to be kept away from men for a few days, like inmates, while according to one of the local journalists:

    “The young women were unable to enjoy a walk in the enclosure without being subjected to the gaze of a rabble of some forty persons, who hung about the premises, and leaning on the fence, scanned the inmates in a manner that was disgraceful.”56

    60In fact, they were kept in the military camp for a week, under close guard, during which a Ladies’ Committee working with Reverend Hill and the Columbia Mission, tried to place each woman in a house, where she would be employed as maid or servant for now. The watchful eye that these ladies kept on their female cargo was justified by the fact that men lurked “outside the wall” all week long, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of them, in order to take her to his house in the mountains. Propriety, prudishness, morality led the Ladies to take such measures. But most importantly their own class interest also prevailed as the human freight had come to them from England to fill up domestic positions. In fact, far from the Victorian ideal of colonial expansion spread with female virtues, these girls were not the emblems of the English nation, but more mundanely they were a cargo of help-meets ready to work in bourgeois homes in Victoria, or as mere mates for a number of uneducated men.

    61Frederic Whymper provides some comments on the fate of the sixty or so female emigrants upon landing: “Half of them married soon after arrival, or went into service; but a large proportion quickly went to the bad, and from appearances, had been there before.” He thus contributes to feeding the home debate on the surplus female population, and on the social category sent to the colonies to marry some rough settlers by some upper middle-class philanthropists, to serve the expansion of the British Empire or their own charitable aspirations: “Every benevolent effort deserves respect; but from personal observation, I cannot honestly recommend such a mode of supplying the demands of a colony.” His remarks clearly attacked Dickens and Coutt’s naïve experiment which turned these poor girls who were dragged into the colonies into targets for sex trade not for holy matrimony:

    “To speak ungallantly, but truly, many of these ladies were neither young nor beautiful […] Of course much might be said about giving the poor creatures a chance! But the fact is, that the market would in the course of affairs more naturally supply itself. The prosperous settler would send for his sweetheart, or come home in search of one […] whilst there is also a large proportion of “black sheep” who are quite ready to amuse themselves at the expense of the poor girls.”57

    62The so-called progressive and humanitarian plans of the Columbia Mission, and Coutt’s Urania Cottage, had served the unlofty imperial trade or barter between the mother country and one of its colonies, by removing some of its surplus population from the London streets to place them under the watchful eye and social control of Victorian matrons in Victoria, Canada.

    63The London Times and the English Woman’s Journal followed the progress of this much publicized assisted emigration scheme to BC, all the more so as it had seen the personal involvement of Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, as well that of the Anglican Church represented by its popular London Archbishop Samuel Wilberforce. In the pages of the English Woman’s Journal, Isa Craig commented on the success of the British Columbia scheme in those words: “Emigration offers at least a dual benefit. It opens a wide door of hope and of escape from crime, while it benefits those who remain behind; relieving the labour market at home and creating fresh markets abroad.”58

    64The reception of the first assisted female emigrants in BC, placed under surveillance, living in barracks before being placed in middle-class homes, did not exactly qualify as a “wide door of hope”. However, Isa Craig clearly underlined England’s, the nation’s benefits in such charitable schemes which were only beginning in 1862.

    Conclusion

    65In the course of this article, we analysed the case of a well-known British charity in the 1850s, whose mission was to save undeserving underclass girls from prostitution, sometimes against their will, and to offer them a new life opportunity in the colonies in the form of married life. Coated in discourses of benevolence and humanitarianism, the charity funded and presided by two prominent Victorians, Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts, was in fact quite revealing of Dickens’ patronizing and patriarcal outlook on prostitutes who could be saved by adopting some bourgeois mindset and manners, after some years spent in a new milieu and whose only fate would be married life in the colonies.

    66As for Ms Coutts, who was still a single heiress in the 1860s, she placed in Urania Cottage her Anglican and Evangelical beliefs that young prostitutes once exposed to kindness and the comfort of cottage life could become Christian women ready to start a new life in the colonies whom she saw as the extension overseas of the mother country. Coutts and Dickens saw their charitable scheme as rendering great services to British society by removing some prostitutes from the streets of London, while partly solving the sex imbalance in the white colonies in Australia or Canada. It was therefore quite utilitarian and Malthusian in its conception. They conceived their social activism as a moral mission to make up for the absence of commitment, on the part of the British State, to the relief of distress among the working classes.

    67The impact of their charity was quite limited as over a decade, only 30 young women found their way to Australia, and 30 others left for Canada. It also revealed that Coutts and Dickens seemed to be mostly interested by the experiment held at Urania Cottage, which consisted in encouraging some prostitutes to save themselves by becoming inmates in their Rescue Home. Dickens seemed more satisfied with his domestic reformation programme, than he actually cared about the fate of the girls the pair released into colonial life. They were commodities delivered to the colonial market where they would accomplish their dutiful life as wives and mothers, or fall back to their life of prostitution.

    Bibliographie

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    Strong Rowan, Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies c.1840-c.1914, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017.

    Notes de bas de page

    1George Hill to Bishop Garrett and Angela Burdett-Coutts, 17 November 1859, Columbia Mission Papers, C C 2 O 1: Original Papers – Correspondence with Bishops, Diocese of British Columbia, George Hills.

    2Anderson John Parker (1912), “Burdett-Coutts, Angela Georgina”, Dictionary of National Biography, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1912, p. 259-266.

    3Mayhew Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, London, 1862, volume 1-4.

    4Such is the basic figure Mayhew provides while announcing that some other censuses had claimed some 80.000 prostitutes in London, Henry Mayhew, ibid., p. 473-474.

    5Midgley Clare, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790-1865, London, Routledge, 2007, p. 138-139.

    6About the relationship between Ms Coutts and the FMCES, see Midgley, op. cit., 142. The present article is partly based on a version of an unpublished conference I gave at Université de Rennes II in January 2007 on Victorian charities and the Empire.

    7Chisholm Caroline, The ABC of Colonization, London, Rivington, 1854.

    8Diamond Marian, Emigration and Empire, The Life of Maria S. Rye, London, Routledge, 1999, chap. 3.

    9Strong Rowan, Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies c.1840-c.1914, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, chap. 2.

    10Damousi Joy, Depraved and Disorderly, Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

    11Jenny Hartley, a Dickens specialist contributed to edit Dickens’twelve volumes of correspondence, which include letters exchanged with Ms Coutts. She discusses Dicken’s writings on Urania Cottage in Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, London, Methuen, 2008.

    12Burdett-Patterson Clara, Angela Burdett-Coutts and the Victorians, London, John Murray, 1953, p. 118-120.

    13Ibid., p. 40.

    14Duke of Wellington to Angela Burdett-Coutts, April, 12, 1847, Coutts’ Letters and Papers (1845-1871), Lambeth Palace Library, MSS 1374-88

    15Duke of Wellington to Angela Burdett-Coutts, January 5, 1846, op. cit.

    16Damousi Joy, Depraved and Disorderly, Female Convicts, op. cit.

    17Letter to Charles Knight talking about Hard Times and the role of his “crusading” journal Household Words, December 30, 1854. “To shake some people in the terrible mistake of these days… those who see figures and averages, nothing else — the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time… to stimulate and rouse the public soul to a compassionate feeling that it must not be …” See The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.7, edited by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993.

    18Dickens wrote of her and her participation in some the Ragged Schools, in Household Words for October, 8, 1853, “The Ragged Schools, the institution of which began by a shoe-maker of Portsmouth, and a chimney sweeper of Windsor, and was carried on by a peer of the realm”, see Burdett-Patterson Clara, op. cit., p. 145.

    19Correspondence between Ms Coutts and Dickens published in Osborne Charles C. (ed.), Letters of Charles Dickens to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, New York, E. P. Putton and Co, Inc., 1932. Extract from a letter written in April 1845.

    20Dickens to Burdett-Coutts, January 1846, op. cit.

    21Duke of Wellington to Angela Burdett-Coutts, January 5, 1846. The Duke quotes one of Miss Coutts’ideas regarding the scheme she just presented to him.

    22Dickens to Mrs Morson, 4 January 1834, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, vol.12, 1868-1870, Oxford, OUP, 2002. (emphasis in the letter.)

    23Thompson F. M. L., “Social Control in Victorian Britain”, The Economic History Review, Second Series, volumeXXXIV, no 2, May 1981, p. 189.

    24Such is the basic figure Mayhew provides while announcing that some other censuses had claimed some 80.000 prostitutes in London, Mayhew Henry, London streets and the London Poor, op. cit.

    25Mayhew Henry, ibid., p. 447.

    26Hemyng Bracebridge, “Prostitution in London”, in Mayhew Henry, op. cit., p. 474.

    27Ibid., p. 475.

    28Dickens to Coutts, October 8, 1847.

    29Mr Hemyng suggested young prostitutes ought to be removed from their depraved quarters: “Thus situated she (“the innocent young prostitute”) becomes reckless, and careless of her future course. It rarely occurs that one so young escapes contamination; and it is a fact that numbers of these youthful victims imbibe disease within a week or two of their seduction.” “Prostitution in London”, in Mayhew Henry, op. cit., p. 476.

    30Dickens to Coutts, 26 May 1846.

    31Dickens to Coutts, 26 May 1846.

    32Dickens to Coutts, 28 October 1847.

    33Dickens to Burdett-Coutts, May 26, 1846, “It would be necessary to limit the number of inmates, but I would make the reception of them as easy as possible to themselves. I would put it in the power of any governor of a London Prison to send an unhappy creature of this kind (by her own choice of course) straight from his prison, when her term expired, to the asylum.”

    34Pamphlet for the “Rescue Home for Women”, four-page quarto in the Dickens’papers (emphasis Dickens’).

    35Dickens to Burdett-Coutts, May 26, 1846.

    36Dickens to Coutts, May 26, 1846, many-pages’ long letter in which Dickens developed his reflections and philosophy for the Home.

    37Ibid.

    38Ibid.

    39Ibid.

    40Ibid.

    41See the numerous reports Dickens wrote to Coutts between 1846 and 1861, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, vols 6, 7 and 8, op. cit.

    42Hartley Jenny, The House of Fallen Women, op. cit., chap. 3 and chap. 4.

    43“Home for Homeless Women ”, Household Words, April 1853. (my italics) Shortly after the publication of the article, Dickens wrote to Ms Coutts that his account had elicited numerous positive reactions as he received many letters requesting a visit of the cottage or the sending of subscriptions to support the scheme.

    44Lohri Anne, «Caroline Chisholm», Dickens Online Journal: [http://www.djo.org.uk/indexes/authors/caroline-chisolm.html].

    45Dickens to Coutts, May 26, 1846, preparatory phase.

    46Ibid.

    47Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, May 26, 1846 in Osborne Charles C. (ed.), Letters of Charles Dickens to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, New York, E.P. Putton and Co, Inc., 1932.

    48When the Urania Cottage project had been well under way, Dickens suggested the name of his Household Words editor, W.H. Wills as a secretary to work with Miss Coutts in order to help her keep a close watch on her various charities, and particularly on Urania Cottage W.H. Wills was much interested in female emigration as his article “Ships: Safety for female emigrants”, published in Household Words in 1851 shows. With this article Wills contributed to the debate on the lack of moral and physical safety of single female emigrants on boats going to Australia or Canada, a topic which had been brought up by Caroline Chisholm in the same magazine.

    49Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, May 26, 1846.

    50Le Jeune Françoise, The Feminine Experience in the Margins of the British Empire, Canada in the Wrtings of 19th-century Canadian Women, London/New York, Mellen Press, 2012, chap. 6.

    51Greg William Rathbone, “Why are women redundant?”, National Review, April 1862, p. 452.

    52Ibid.

    53Whymper Frederick, Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska, London, John Murray, 1868, p. 3.

    54Ibid., p. 4.

    55Quoted by Perry Adele, On the Edge of Empire, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001, p. 144.

    56Ibid., p. 157

    57Whymper Frederick, op. cit., p. 3-4.

    58Kranidis Rita S., The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1999, 39.

    Auteur

    • Françoise Le Jeune

      Professeure d’histoire britannique et nord-américaine à l’université de Nantes. Elle est membre du CRHIA. Ses recherches portent sur les colonies nord-américaines dans l’empire britannique (relations politiques, crises, révolutions, migrations). Après une thèse sur l’histoire de l’émigration féminine de la Grande-Bretagne vers la Colombie-Britannique au xixe siècle (1997), elle poursuit ses recherches sur les colonies canadiennes et sur les relations empire-périphéries au xviiie et xixe siècles. Elle a publié de nombreux articles et ouvrages (Avec A. Ayala, Les rébellions canadiennes vues de Paris (1837-1838), 2011; The Feminine Experience in the Margins of the British Empire, 2012; Avec P.-A. Linteau et Y. Frenette, Transposer la France durant la grande migration transatlantique (1870-1914), 2017.

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    1George Hill to Bishop Garrett and Angela Burdett-Coutts, 17 November 1859, Columbia Mission Papers, C C 2 O 1: Original Papers – Correspondence with Bishops, Diocese of British Columbia, George Hills.

    2Anderson John Parker (1912), “Burdett-Coutts, Angela Georgina”, Dictionary of National Biography, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1912, p. 259-266.

    3Mayhew Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, London, 1862, volume 1-4.

    4Such is the basic figure Mayhew provides while announcing that some other censuses had claimed some 80.000 prostitutes in London, Henry Mayhew, ibid., p. 473-474.

    5Midgley Clare, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790-1865, London, Routledge, 2007, p. 138-139.

    6About the relationship between Ms Coutts and the FMCES, see Midgley, op. cit., 142. The present article is partly based on a version of an unpublished conference I gave at Université de Rennes II in January 2007 on Victorian charities and the Empire.

    7Chisholm Caroline, The ABC of Colonization, London, Rivington, 1854.

    8Diamond Marian, Emigration and Empire, The Life of Maria S. Rye, London, Routledge, 1999, chap. 3.

    9Strong Rowan, Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies c.1840-c.1914, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, chap. 2.

    10Damousi Joy, Depraved and Disorderly, Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

    11Jenny Hartley, a Dickens specialist contributed to edit Dickens’twelve volumes of correspondence, which include letters exchanged with Ms Coutts. She discusses Dicken’s writings on Urania Cottage in Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, London, Methuen, 2008.

    12Burdett-Patterson Clara, Angela Burdett-Coutts and the Victorians, London, John Murray, 1953, p. 118-120.

    13Ibid., p. 40.

    14Duke of Wellington to Angela Burdett-Coutts, April, 12, 1847, Coutts’ Letters and Papers (1845-1871), Lambeth Palace Library, MSS 1374-88

    15Duke of Wellington to Angela Burdett-Coutts, January 5, 1846, op. cit.

    16Damousi Joy, Depraved and Disorderly, Female Convicts, op. cit.

    17Letter to Charles Knight talking about Hard Times and the role of his “crusading” journal Household Words, December 30, 1854. “To shake some people in the terrible mistake of these days… those who see figures and averages, nothing else — the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time… to stimulate and rouse the public soul to a compassionate feeling that it must not be …” See The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.7, edited by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993.

    18Dickens wrote of her and her participation in some the Ragged Schools, in Household Words for October, 8, 1853, “The Ragged Schools, the institution of which began by a shoe-maker of Portsmouth, and a chimney sweeper of Windsor, and was carried on by a peer of the realm”, see Burdett-Patterson Clara, op. cit., p. 145.

    19Correspondence between Ms Coutts and Dickens published in Osborne Charles C. (ed.), Letters of Charles Dickens to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, New York, E. P. Putton and Co, Inc., 1932. Extract from a letter written in April 1845.

    20Dickens to Burdett-Coutts, January 1846, op. cit.

    21Duke of Wellington to Angela Burdett-Coutts, January 5, 1846. The Duke quotes one of Miss Coutts’ideas regarding the scheme she just presented to him.

    22Dickens to Mrs Morson, 4 January 1834, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, vol.12, 1868-1870, Oxford, OUP, 2002. (emphasis in the letter.)

    23Thompson F. M. L., “Social Control in Victorian Britain”, The Economic History Review, Second Series, volumeXXXIV, no 2, May 1981, p. 189.

    24Such is the basic figure Mayhew provides while announcing that some other censuses had claimed some 80.000 prostitutes in London, Mayhew Henry, London streets and the London Poor, op. cit.

    25Mayhew Henry, ibid., p. 447.

    26Hemyng Bracebridge, “Prostitution in London”, in Mayhew Henry, op. cit., p. 474.

    27Ibid., p. 475.

    28Dickens to Coutts, October 8, 1847.

    29Mr Hemyng suggested young prostitutes ought to be removed from their depraved quarters: “Thus situated she (“the innocent young prostitute”) becomes reckless, and careless of her future course. It rarely occurs that one so young escapes contamination; and it is a fact that numbers of these youthful victims imbibe disease within a week or two of their seduction.” “Prostitution in London”, in Mayhew Henry, op. cit., p. 476.

    30Dickens to Coutts, 26 May 1846.

    31Dickens to Coutts, 26 May 1846.

    32Dickens to Coutts, 28 October 1847.

    33Dickens to Burdett-Coutts, May 26, 1846, “It would be necessary to limit the number of inmates, but I would make the reception of them as easy as possible to themselves. I would put it in the power of any governor of a London Prison to send an unhappy creature of this kind (by her own choice of course) straight from his prison, when her term expired, to the asylum.”

    34Pamphlet for the “Rescue Home for Women”, four-page quarto in the Dickens’papers (emphasis Dickens’).

    35Dickens to Burdett-Coutts, May 26, 1846.

    36Dickens to Coutts, May 26, 1846, many-pages’ long letter in which Dickens developed his reflections and philosophy for the Home.

    37Ibid.

    38Ibid.

    39Ibid.

    40Ibid.

    41See the numerous reports Dickens wrote to Coutts between 1846 and 1861, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, vols 6, 7 and 8, op. cit.

    42Hartley Jenny, The House of Fallen Women, op. cit., chap. 3 and chap. 4.

    43“Home for Homeless Women ”, Household Words, April 1853. (my italics) Shortly after the publication of the article, Dickens wrote to Ms Coutts that his account had elicited numerous positive reactions as he received many letters requesting a visit of the cottage or the sending of subscriptions to support the scheme.

    44Lohri Anne, «Caroline Chisholm», Dickens Online Journal: [http://www.djo.org.uk/indexes/authors/caroline-chisolm.html].

    45Dickens to Coutts, May 26, 1846, preparatory phase.

    46Ibid.

    47Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, May 26, 1846 in Osborne Charles C. (ed.), Letters of Charles Dickens to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, New York, E.P. Putton and Co, Inc., 1932.

    48When the Urania Cottage project had been well under way, Dickens suggested the name of his Household Words editor, W.H. Wills as a secretary to work with Miss Coutts in order to help her keep a close watch on her various charities, and particularly on Urania Cottage W.H. Wills was much interested in female emigration as his article “Ships: Safety for female emigrants”, published in Household Words in 1851 shows. With this article Wills contributed to the debate on the lack of moral and physical safety of single female emigrants on boats going to Australia or Canada, a topic which had been brought up by Caroline Chisholm in the same magazine.

    49Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, May 26, 1846.

    50Le Jeune Françoise, The Feminine Experience in the Margins of the British Empire, Canada in the Wrtings of 19th-century Canadian Women, London/New York, Mellen Press, 2012, chap. 6.

    51Greg William Rathbone, “Why are women redundant?”, National Review, April 1862, p. 452.

    52Ibid.

    53Whymper Frederick, Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska, London, John Murray, 1868, p. 3.

    54Ibid., p. 4.

    55Quoted by Perry Adele, On the Edge of Empire, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001, p. 144.

    56Ibid., p. 157

    57Whymper Frederick, op. cit., p. 3-4.

    58Kranidis Rita S., The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1999, 39.

    Les circulations européennes à l’âge des Empires coloniaux au xixe siècle

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    Le Jeune, F. (2020). Charity, social control and female emigration in the “white empire”, Angela Burdett-Coutts’ and Charles Dickens’ Urania Cottage: reforming prostitutes for the colonial market. In V. Chaillou-Atrous & F. Le Jeune (éds.), Les circulations européennes à l’âge des Empires coloniaux au xixe siècle. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. https://doi.org/10.4000/13vtm
    Le Jeune, Françoise. « Charity, Social Control and Female Emigration in the “white empire”, Angela Burdett-Coutts’ and Charles Dickens’ Urania Cottage: Reforming Prostitutes for the Colonial Market ». In Les Circulations européennes à l’âge Des Empires Coloniaux Au Xixe siècle, édité par Virginie Chaillou-Atrous et Françoise Le Jeune. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2020. doi:10.4000/13vtm.
    Le Jeune, Françoise. « Charity, Social Control and Female Emigration in the “white empire”, Angela Burdett-Coutts’ and Charles Dickens’ Urania Cottage: Reforming Prostitutes for the Colonial Market ». Les Circulations européennes à l’âge Des Empires Coloniaux Au Xixe siècle, édité par Virginie Chaillou-Atrous et Françoise Le Jeune, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/13vtm.

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    Chaillou-Atrous, V., & Le Jeune, F. (éds.). (2020). Les circulations européennes à l’âge des Empires coloniaux au xixe siècle. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. https://doi.org/10.4000/13vzk
    Chaillou-Atrous, Virginie, et Françoise Le Jeune, éd. Les circulations européennes à l’âge des Empires coloniaux au xixe siècle. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2020. doi:10.4000/13vzk.
    Chaillou-Atrous, Virginie, et Françoise Le Jeune, éditeurs. Les circulations européennes à l’âge des Empires coloniaux au xixe siècle. Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/13vzk.
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