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WORK TITLE: Charles Dickens
WORK NOTES:
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CITY: London, England
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/research-centres/literature-and-culture-research-centre/staff/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-hartley-b594389/?ppe=1
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Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Roehampton, London, U.K., professor; co-founder, Prison Reading Groups Project.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Jenny Hartley is a professor at the University of Roehampton in London, England. She has written extensively on Charles Dickens as well as on women’s writing in Britain during World War II. With Sarah Turvey, Hartley cofounded and runs the Prison Reading Group project, which aims to improve the lives and rehabilitation of prison inmates through reading and discussion.
Hearts Undefeated and Millions Like Us
Hartley is the editor of the anthology Hearts Undefeated: Women’s Writing of the Second World War. This volume contains more than one hundred entries by established authors such as Vita Sackville-West, Vera Brittain, and Virginia Woolf, as well as lesser-known individuals, among them nurses, refugees, an air-raid warden, a bus conductor, and a prison inmate. In addition to fiction and journalism, the book includes prayers and passages from diaries, personal letters, and autobiographies. Hartley arranges this material thematically according to the different stages of the war and the various forms of war work in which the contributors participated.
In Millions Like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War, Hartley argues that women’s fiction of the war has been unjustly neglected, and deserves recognition. She examines the work of various novelists, including Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Inez Holden, Monica Dickens, Rose Macaulay, and Stevie Smith.
Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women
Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women explores the novelist’s efforts, starting in the 1840s, to provide social services to destitute young women in London. From early in life, Dickens had been familiar with the desperation of poverty. His father had been thrown into debtor’s prison, and as a boy Dickens had been forced to earn money for his family by working in a factory. As a novice newspaper reporter, Dickens had covered court proceedings in which members of London’s underclass frequently appeared. Throughout his life he walked miles each night, encountering beggars, pickpockets, con men, prostitutes, and others who lived on the streets. Many feared being picked up by the authorities and sent to London’s dreaded workhouses, which operated essentially like prisons for the indigent.
Dickens was particularly concerned about the plight of single girls and young women, who had few opportunities for legal employment and were often forced to prostitute themselves in order to survive. Indeed, prostitution was rampant in mid-1800s London, and Victorian society feared it as a moral contagion and a threat to family life. Few, however, believed that “fallen women” could be rehabilitated. But Dickens held a more radical view, believing that safe housing and education could save former sex workers from the shame of the streets and prepare them for new lives in Australia, South Africa, or Canada. He worked frenziedly to raise money for the project, find an appropriate site to accommodate residents, and devise a program of moral and practical instruction. Dickens hired teachers and supervisors and personally interviewed residents for what became Urania Cottage. All the while he was also writing novels, publishing a weekly magazine, and presiding over a busy and complex family and social life that included a wife, nine children, and several dependent relatives.
Drawing from Dickens’s copious personal correspondence, Hartley presents an intimately detailed picture of Urania Cottage, its staff, and its residents. Some girls adapted well to the home’s program and went on to establish decent lives. The novelist wrote in a letter to Urania’s matron that of the first fifty-four women to have lived at the home, thirty had emigrated and had written back that they were doing well. Others, however, chafed at the home’s strict rules; fourteen of the initial fifty-four had left the program without completing it, and ten had been expelled. Many of these disappeared back into poverty. But Hartley was able to contact several descendants of Urania girls who had moved to Canada and Australia, in once case tracing an inmate’s journey from workhouse to Urania to successful motherhood and membership in the Salvation Army in Canada.
Reviewing Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women in the London Guardian, Claire Tomalin said that Hartley “has written a book that every Dickens-lover, and everyone with an interest in social history, will want to read.” Christian Post contributor Mark Earley called the book “fascinating” and observed that Dickens’s “belief in human dignity and the power of change sprang from his faith.” Observing that Urania Cottage’s story is “vividly conveyed” in the book, History Extra reviewer Pat Than said that “we learn more about Dickens than about these other sad lives” in this account of Urania Cottage.
The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens
As editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, Hartley “selects letters that illuminate the dimensions of Dickens’s mind, the range of his interests and the scale of his moods and passions,” said a contributor to Kirkus Reviews. Dickens was as prolific a letter writer as he was a novelist, producing thousands of long, passionate missives to a broad range of recipients, including close friends, fans, and a dismissive lover from his early youth, as well as luminaries such as Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and Michael Faraday. Dickens’s letters cover a broad range of topics, among them his works-in-progress, his travels to the United States, and his secret affair with the young actress Ellen Ternan.
Nicholas Lezard, writing in the London Guardian, admired Hartley’s insights as an editor, pointing out that she has taken pains to include materials that provide context for his various letters. “The whole book bursts with the author’s energy,” said Lezard, “and you will love him and know him better after reading even a few of these letters.”
Charles Dickens: An Introduction
Pointing out that Dickens has been the subject of numerous previous biographies that have covered almost every aspect of his life and work, Tulsa Book Review contributor Ryder Miller nevertheless found Hartley’s Charles Dickens: An Introduction to be a “wonderful telling” of Dickens’s story. The book, which Miller described as “voraciously researched and very accessible,” takes a fresh look at the writer’s difficult childhood, covering his father’s imprisonment for debt and Dickens’s shame as a child at being put to work in a blacking factory. Hartley also looks at Dickens’s early work as a court reporter and his mature career as a best-selling and wealthy author with legions of adoring fans.
Hartley writes that serialization of his books shaped Dickens’s writing, prompting his use of cliff-hanger endings for chapters. In this way, suspense and waiting became integral to the meaning of his books. Citing passages from David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, and Oliver Twist, Hartley reveals Dickens’s essential radicalism. A writer for Kirkus Reviews deemed Charles Dickens a “deft, authoritative, and engaging reappraisal of the great Victorian novelist.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2012, Jeffrey Meyers, review of The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, p. 30.
Guardian (London, England), December 19, 2008, Claire Tomalin, review of Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women; July 14, 2015, Nicholas Lezard, review of The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2011, review of The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens; October 1, 2016, review of Charles Dickens: An Introduction.
New Statesman, February 6, 2012, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, review of The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, p. 45.
Publishers Weekly, December 19, 2011, review of The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens. p. 41.
Spectator, March 24, 2001, Hugh Massingberd, review of Reading Groups, p. 48.
Times Literary Supplement, February 20, 2009, John Bowen, review of Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women.
ONLINE
Christian Post, http://www.christianpost.com/ (October 17, 2009), Mark Earley, review of Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women.
History Extra, http://www.historyextra.com/ (March 10, 2010), Pat Thane, review of Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women
Tulsa Book Review, https://tulsabookreview.com/ (February 1, 2017), Ryder Miller, review of Charles Dickens.
University of Roehampton Web Site, https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/ (August 16, 2017), Hartley profile.
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Jenny's most recent publication followed the progress of the young women whom Dickens rescued from the streets and prisons of London and welcomed into the Home for Fallen Women. She is currently working on the Prisons Reading Group project.
Jenny Hartley: CHARLES DICKENS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Jenny Hartley CHARLES DICKENS Oxford Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) 16.95 ISBN: 978-0-19-878816-4
Restless, tireless, and prolific, Dickens became an adjective in his own lifetime.As part of Oxfords informative
Introduction series, Hartley (English/Univ. of Roehampton; Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, 2008,
etc.), scholar in residence at the Charles Dickens Museum, offers a brisk, acutely perceptive overview of the British
writers life, work, and legacy. Her distillation of Dickens biography touches on familiar points: the lonely, povertystricken
childhood; a brief, adolescent romance; marriage and the birth of 10 children; his affair with actress Ellen
Ternan; his long career as a journalist and editor; and his catapult to fame, at the age of 24, with the serial publication
of The Pickwick Papers. Besides creating biographical context, Hartley sharply examines the themes that
engaged Dickens throughout his career, dominated by his critique of the dehumanizing structures, ideologies, and
bureaucracies of nineteenth-century Britain. Because of his fame, Dickens was a sought-after speaker in support of
good causes, which included sanitary reforms, the establishment of schools for poor children, and the improvement of
conditions in workhouses and debtors prisons, something he recalled, darkly, from personal experience. He could be
dismissive and cynical about those in power: My faith in the people governing, is on the whole, infinitesimal, he once
declared. He was, said George Orwell, certainly a subversive writer, and Hartley calls him a life-long radical. She
judiciously extracts passages from Dickens major writingsDavid Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Hard
Times, Little Dorrit, and the much-loved A Christmas Carol, to name a fewto exemplify the authors
characterizations, plots, and style. His use of cliffhanger chapter endings, Hartley writes, was a strategy necessary in
serial publication, which builds waiting and suspense into the meaning of the novel and makes them a crucial part of
the reading experience. Just as the term Dickensian has entered the English language, the novels have endured in
popularity throughout the decades.
A deft, authoritative, and engaging reappraisal of the great Victorian novelist.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Jenny Hartley: CHARLES DICKENS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465182011&it=r&asid=c0f543a88d805cb9687b2cf4e5f0ecab.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
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From our own correspondent
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
New Statesman.
141.5091 (Feb. 6, 2012): p45.
COPYRIGHT 2012 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens
Edited by Jenny Hartley
Oxford University Press,496pP, [pounds sterling] 20
Dickens was a driven man. "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish," he once observed, but
pacing the streets of London was only one of the ways in which he attempted to shake off his old stories or pursue new
ones . In Italy, he could be found peering into the smouldering crater of Vesuvius or joining the crowds in Rome to
watch a man being beheaded. In America, he was equally at home poking around prisons or contemplating the prairie's
open spaces .
"The Inimitable" was inexhaustible. Even when he was sitting quietly at his desk, Dickens enjoyed travelling
vicariously through his letters sometimes a dozen or more a day, from terse one-liners to accounts that generously
unfurled over several pages. He used his pen like someone scratching an incurable itch.
Very few of Dickens's private letters were written with an eye on posterity. Indeed, in 1860, he spent an afternoon
burning "basket after basket" of them and many more were lost after John Forster filleted them for The Life of Charles
Dickens (1872-74). Yet even after his correspondence had been thinned out, there was enough left to fill the 12 fat
volumes of the Pilgrim edition, published by Oxford University Press between 1965 and 2002, and new letters continue
to come to light.
To whittle down the achievement of the Pilgrim editors to a single volume is the scholarly equivalent of trying to write
the Lord's Prayer on a grain of rice. That Jenny Hartley has taken up the challenge deserves the gratitude of every
reader of Dickens. That she has succeeded so magnificently deserves the highest praise. Her selection is a miracle of
compression and editorial tact.
It also has the unintended effect of speeding up Dickens 's life even further. "I am become incapable of rest," he wrote
to Forster in 1857. "I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself." By 1862, the idea had
become a sad refrain: "Few men are more restless than I am." Turn the pages of this volume and a life that was already
lived at breakneck speed takes on the colouring of a cartoon flickering into life.
Hartley's selections from 1851 offer a good cross section of Dickens's different epistolary moods and modes. Alongside
letters in which he encourages or gently admonishes contriobutors to his journal Household Words, they include a
warning to the would-be author Fanny M Lomax not to venture on "the great sea of literature" ("I fear you may be ship
wrecked" ), a detailed analysis of dreams, "the first shadows of a new story hovering in a ghostly way about me", a
touching letter to his wife, Catherine, about the death of their daughter Dora, and detailed plans for a new shower and
"cheerful-coloured waterproof curtains" he wanted for his bathroom. Read side by side, they produce the same "streaky
bacon" effect he had outlined in Oliver Twist, in which the playful and earnest compete to catch the reader's eye. No
two letters are the same. He can produce a different voice for every occasion.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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There is a similar variety in the list of Dickens 's correspondent s. Over the years, their number grew to include
begging-letter writers (their most imaginative requests included a donkey and a Gloucester cheese), public officials, and
hundreds of ordinary readers who wrote to him "With suggestions, complaints and praise. He seems to have replied to
them all. In many ways, their interest in him reflected the interest he took in them, whether by addressing them directly
or writing in a style that made them feel they were part of a huge shared joke. From The Pickwick Papers onwards, he
sent out the serial instalments of his novels like a series of long. chatty letters that each reader felt was aimed directly at
him or her.
Perhaps this accounts for the imaginative overlap between Dickens's correspondence and his fiction. Just as many of his
stories contain letters, such as Fanny Squeers' s hilarious attempt to turn a long shriek of frustration against Nicholas
Nickle by into icily measured prose, so many of hi s letters contain stories. Often, these resemble narrative doodles or
comic set pieces in search of a suitable setting: Dickens dressed up as a conjurer "causing pieces of money to fly, and
burning pocket handkerchiefs without hurting 'em", or a dog that appeared daily at the local pub for a pint, which he
lapped from a pewter pot.
Others focus on the people Dickens has encountered, many of whom sound strangely like fictional characters
auditioning for a role in his next novel: a Genoese noblewoman who enjoyed smoking the kind of cigars "which would
quell an elephant in six whiffs", or a delivery man who had relieved himself outside Dickens's house and "was rather
urgent to know what I should do 'if I was him' ". Even stray phrases can be rich with narrative potential, such as his
reference in one early letter to Thomas Beard as "our mutual friend", or an account from 1850 that recalled how one of
hi s sons 'would have fired a perfect battery of stones' if he hadn't been let into the house an early glimpse of Deputy in
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the "hideous small boy" who flings stones as an alternative to words.
Given these encounters between Dickens 's public and private life - and he usually signed himself "Charles Dickens"
with the same flourish whoever he was writing to - perhaps it was inevitable that the gossip surrounding the collapse of
his marriage centred on a letter. Having handed his American agent a document that gave hi s side of the story, he later
claimed to be "exceedingly pained" that this "private and personal communication ... found its way into some of the
London papers".
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Perhaps he was, or perhaps he had authorised a leak that would allow him to get his readers onside while retaining the
moral high ground. Either way, it indicates what he found especially attractive about the letter as a form. Like his
fiction, letters allowed ordinary life to be controlled and even rewritten. Picking up a sheet of notepaper, the twists and
turns of experience could be made as predictable as the movements of his hand across the page .
Dickens viewed his work as a magazine editor in a similar light, explaining to one contributor in 1867 that he had spent
the morning going over her story, "filling up the cracks, and smoothing the joints and hinges". In this excellent volume,
he has found an editor willing to follow his lead. Not only do Hartley's annotations fill and smooth where necessary, but
she has chosen enough oddities to give he r selection an auth entically Dickensian flavour everything from his recipe
for dog food to his judgment on Verdi's II trovatore ("rubbish"). Every page crackles with the author 's irrepressible
energy, from a schoolboy note to his final letter on 8 June 1870.That evening, he suffered a massive stroke and within
24 hours he was dead. He was 58 years old. Reading how much he crammed into his life, the only surprise is that he
lasted that long .
Robert Douglas Fairhurst is the author of "Becoming Dickens: the Invention of a Novelist"(Harvard University Press,
[pounds sterling] 20)
newstatesman.com/writers/roberl_douglas-fairhurst
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. "From our own correspondent." New Statesman, 6 Feb. 2012, p. 45. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA282760319&it=r&asid=375eecabdd51d865aeb9589d30da502d.
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The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens
Jeffrey Meyers
Booklist.
108.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2012): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens.
By Charles Dickens. Ed. by Jenny Hartley.
Mar. 2012. 584p. Oxford, $34.95 (9780199591411). 823.8.
These 450 letters, drawn from a total of 14,000, are well chosen and annotated, but the print is very small. Dickens is
not one of the great confessional correspondents. In his energetic, often hasty responses to ideas and people, projects
and places, debts and death, histone varies from chummy to fawning. He describes the genesis of his novels, creation of
characters, choice of titles; his editing of periodicals and performing in amateur theatricals. He attends a public
hanging: "I stand astounded and appalled by the wickedness it exhibits." He writes that "invention seems the easiest
thing in the world. But the difficulty of going at what I call a rapid pace is prodigious." He exclaims that he's breaking
his heart over the death of Little Nell "and cannot bear to finish it." A near-fatal railway accident throws him into
shock: "I was in the carriage that did not go over the bridge, but which caught on one side and hung suspended over the
ruined parapet." Essential for those interested in Dickens but not riveting for the casual reader.--Jeffrey Meyers
Meyers, Jeffrey
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Meyers, Jeffrey. "The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2012, p. 30. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA279137354&it=r&asid=612dab39828e1662df1fa4b4b0d5bc6e.
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Selected Letters of Charles Dickens
Publishers Weekly.
258.51 (Dec. 19, 2011): p41.
COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Selected Letters of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley. Oxford Univ., $34.95 (584p) ISBN 978-0-19-959141-1
Biographies and other celebratory works have arrived with the bicentennial of Dickens's birth. Expertly edited by
British scholar Hartley (Charles Dickens and His House of Fallen Women), this collection of several hundred letters--
culled from the 14,000 published in a dozen volumes--may be the best. It is difficult in tight quarters to do justice to the
sheer range and gusto of these letters, written to friends, "to the editor," and as the occasional leaflet. Dickens touches
on myriad subjects: the death of his beloved sister-in-law; sensitive as well as less patient letters to would-be poets and
novelists ("I do not regard successful fiction as something to be achieved in 'leisure moments'"); commentary on "the
wickedness and levity" of a crowd viewing an execution; and the rupture of the author's marriage. Among the famous
recipients are Elizabeth Gaskell, Hans Christian Andersen, Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wilkie Collins,
Thomas Carlyle, and George Eliot (addressed initially as "My Dear Sir"). The book almost serves as a lost novel with
the character Dickens as his own hero. A helpful chronology and well-crafted index make this an even better collection,
serving to bring Dickens's classic works even more vividly to life. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Selected Letters of Charles Dickens." Publishers Weekly, 19 Dec. 2011, p. 41+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA275920638&it=r&asid=83bff0771f0964c416e196aa666232d0.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A275920638
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Hartley, Jenny: THE SELECTED LETTERS OF
CHARLES DICKENS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2011):
COPYRIGHT 2011 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hartley, Jenny THE SELECTED LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS Oxford Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $34.95 3, 1
ISBN: 978-0-19-959141-1
From the massive 12-volume The Letters of Charles Dickens, editor Hartley (English Literature/Roehampton Univ.;
Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, 2008, etc.) selects letters that illuminate the dimensions of Dickens'
mind, the range of his interests and the scale of his moods and passions. No one will ever write like this again, not in
this brave new world of e-mail, emoticons and textual truncation. Dickens was an epistolary phenomenon. He wrote
often (thousands of letters), with great fluidity and wit and at great length. In an early, heartbroken letter to a young
woman who had dismissed him, he reeled off a 141-word sentence that basically said, "I am returning some things you
gave me." He wrote to the high and the low, to geniuses and wannabes and fans and fools alike. Hartley includes
samples of letters to Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, William Makepeace Thackeray and Michael Faraday. In an
1862 letter to Wilkie Collins about Collins' novel-in-progress No Name, Dickens interrupts his praise to teach his friend
the difference between "lie" and "lay." Among responses to pious people wondering why Dickens' stories weren't more
patently Christian are work-a-day samples of Dickens in his roles as husband, father, writer, editor, friend and
colleague. Dickens also wrote to friends about his travels to the United States. During his first visit to our shores in
1842, he was a bit more caustic about us than he was in 1867. Of great interest are his letters about his works-inprogress
and his furtive affair with actress Ellen Ternan. Hartley, who reproduces the annotations from the complete
edition, wisely stays out of the way and lets her gifted principal command the stage. Savory appetizers that will cause
curious readers to order the full 12-course meal.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Hartley, Jenny: THE SELECTED LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2011. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA274719233&it=r&asid=e1caaaf580fd589ffcc88eef206c0e3d.
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READING GROUPS
Hugh Massingberd
Spectator.
286.9007 (Mar. 24, 2001): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2001 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
READING GROUPS by Jenny Hartley OUP, 5.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 194, ISBN 0198187785
A few years ago I inadvertently joined what I suppose could be classified as a `reading group' -- breathlessly billed on
the blurb of this paperback survey as `one of the success stories of the age. Newspapers are writing about them;
celebrities are forming them.' (Coo, just fancy.) I had been under the impression that it was merely a dining club but
then, suddenly, there developed an alarming round-the-table discussion as to what we had all thought of -- yes, you've
guessed it -- Captain Corelli's Mandolin (which, of course, comfortably tops this survey's hit parade). Needless to say, I
had not read it. Now, I learn women have been admitted to the gathering, which is hardly surprising as the survey
shows that all-female groups account for 69 per cent of reading groups and only 4 per cent are all-male. I have not been
back since.
I wish I could say that Jenny Hartley's chatty, copiously researched and instructive study has persuaded me to change
my mind, but she does not allay my abiding worry that I might find myself in `a group therapy situation', being
gratuitously insulted by comparative strangers. (`Hugh, I sense some repressed hostility there. Can I share with you the
probability that you're a deeply insecure paranoid fantasist?') Indeed one American therapist told the survey that she
was recently called in to counsel three groups `in crisis' and spent `hours and hours' on `group therapy'. I rest my case.
By way of a defence mechanism, no doubt, I am tempted to echo Sir John Betjeman's disappointment that a chapter
entitled `The Pleasures of Reading' turns out not to be a celebration of the architectural joys of Berkshire's county town.
(Betj, though, would surely have approved of the Lavery picture on the cover, `Girl in a Red Dress Reading by a
Swimming Pool'.) But perish the thought that I might be categorised by Jenny Hartley ('Principal Lecturer, University
of Surrey, Roehampton') among the `metropolitan journalists' who `may sneer at "the virtues of middle-class England's
favourite night out"'. A footnote reveals that this particular `sneer' appeared in The Spectator last year. You begin to
understand where Ms Hartley is, as they say, `coming from' when a few pages later she refers to James Naughtie as `the
genial Scottish host of Radio 4 Bookclub'. Hoots, mon.
Yet, setting aside such page-turners as `Book groups are also big in New Zealand' and the all too predictable lists of
what Anthony Powell memorably dismissed as `pretentious middlebrow verbiage of the worst kind', Reading Groups is
chock-full of (sometimes unintentionally) funny one-liners culled from the survey's questionnaires, some of which
might even have graced Powell's own recently published A Writer's Notebook. `Up till one in the morning with the
Book of Job,' commented one working mother. `No stopping us now.' The representative of another group noted, `We
have two male members: this stops us making too many sweeping generalisations about men.' (Quite so.) And I
particularly liked such vignettes as `One member will not read beyond the first swear-word or bonking session'; `Four
of the five men wear hearing aids that whistle when they get excited'; and `one woman sleeps most of the way through'.
The literary judgments quoted often have a refreshing directness. `Denis Healey's The Time of My Life -- very tedious
reading.' `Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire -- nobody liked it.' `Fever Pitch -- what a moaner, oh for heaven's sake
grow up, we all said.' `Jeanette Winterson's Boating for Beginners -- nothing in it, couldn't make any sense of it, author
obnoxious.'
In such remarks as `We have learnt to steer clear of magic realism' one recognises the authentic voice of that forgotten
species, the Common Reader. This survey tends to confirm my fear that proper novels are simply not being
recommended. By way of supplementary background research, I asked one of my wife's friends what she is encouraged
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to read by her green-belt group. The answer was the usual pseudo-intellectual piffle. Sowing the seeds of subversion, I
suggested that she proposed the new novels by Ferdinand Mount and D.J. Taylor. Perhaps a blow for the counterrevolution
could be struck by a Spectator Reading Group?
Massingberd, Hugh
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Massingberd, Hugh. "READING GROUPS." Spectator, 24 Mar. 2001, p. 48. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA78033267&it=r&asid=51ece8de266e1ecdeae48584cdb68249.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A78033267
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Dickens, Charles: Charles Dickens and the House
of Fallen Women
John Bowen
Biography.
32.3 (Summer 2009): p588.
COPYRIGHT 2009 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Full Text:
Dickens, Charles Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women. Jenny Hartley. London: Methuen, 2008. 320 pp.
17.99 [pounds sterling].
This is about the home for former convicts and other women directed by Dickens in the 1840s. "Jenny Hartley's
excellent new book tells this extraordinary story with compassion, common sense and a lively awareness of the unruly,
self-dramatizing energies (both Dicken's and the women's) at play within and beyond the home's four walls."
John Bowen. TLS, Feb. 20, 2009: 7.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Bowen, John. "Dickens, Charles: Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women." Biography, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, p.
588+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA209409068&it=r&asid=797b77dd5bd39bef5f011d8cbdc5cbd4.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A209409068
Charles Dickens: An introduction
$16.95
It is hard to say something about Charles Dickens (1812-1870) that has not been said before. There are scores of academic books about him. He was the most famous writer from the British Victorian age. He represented British culture. He created some very famous characters and told stories that are still beloved today. He wrote a variety of different types of novels, leaving behind an oeuvre that is vast, wonderful, charming, and humanitarian. He championed the poor and the underclass, giving them references for their struggle to improve their lot.
Charles Dickens, An Introduction by Roehampton University Professor Jenny Hartley is a wonderful telling of his life and accomplishments. It is voraciously researched and very accessible. As told, Dickens had a difficult early life, with his family going to debtors’ prison in England while he was sent off to work early in the factories. That shame and poverty enabled him to write about the struggles of working class and poor people, with some of his most memorable characters being children in difficult straits. He wound up in journalism and then a writer. He serialized his stories in magazines, some of which he owned, and published giant books. Hartley relays a fascinating and insightful biographical tale about an author who inspired the creation of communities of fans.
Reviewed By: Ryder Miller
Author: Jenny Hartley
Page Count: 176 pages
At A Tulsa Library: Check It Out
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publish Date: 2017-Jan-01
ISBN: 9780198788164
Amazon: Check It Out
Issue: February 2017
Category: Biographies & Memoirs
The house that Charles built
Claire Tomalin enjoys a vivid account of Dickens's efforts to help destitute women
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Claire Tomalin
Friday 19 December 2008 19.01 EST First published on Friday 19 December 2008 19.01 EST
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). Dickens's will to do good drove him to take on what any normal person would have found impossible, and Hartley shows him in action, passionate to help the half-crushed victims of Victorian society, despotic in putting his benevolent plans into practice, demonic in his energy. From the spring of 1846, when he first proposed the plan, until 1858, when it became impossible for him to remain connected with it, it was at the centre of his thoughts.
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You have only to look at his collected letters to marvel that a man who was already writing novels, running a weekly magazine, conducting a splendid social life, bringing up nine children, and raising money for other charitable causes, should find time to visit the house in Shepherd's Bush, often several times a week, to supervise it, select inmates, consult with prison governors, hire and fire matrons, deal with the drains and the gardener, report to Coutts in detail several times a week on whatever was happening there, handle the money, keep careful written accounts of the backgrounds of the girls, and arrange their emigration to Australia, South Africa or Canada.
Hartley reminds us how women were dealt with in Victorian institutions in London: the harsh, silent prisons, and the Magdalen Hospitals for penitent prostitutes, where they were constantly reminded of their shame as they worked under strict rules at sewing and laundering. The plan Dickens sold to Coutts was to make the home like a real home, with a matron who would never ask about the pasts of the young women, with comfortable bedrooms and good food, a garden where they could grow flowers, books to read - even a piano.
His idea was to prepare each inmate for emigration, and his hope was that they would marry and have families. Coutts needed some persuading of this, since she believed that a woman once fallen could not expect to return to such happiness. Hartley makes a fascinating point that a survey made in Paris in the 1830s showed that many French women succeeded very well in moving out of prostitution and returning to mainstream life, whereas the English believed a woman, once "corrupted", could never be uncorrupted.
Dickens took the French view. He disagreed with Coutts on other points: for instance he favoured brightly coloured dresses for the girls, while she did not. He wanted to keep religious preaching to the minimum, she thought it essential. He even arranged for his friend John Hullah, a fine musician, to come to instruct the girls in singing; but it was expensive, and here Coutts balked. She had bought the house, had it put in order to his specifications and was already paying something like £500 a year - a large sum then, even for a very rich woman - to keep it running.
Hartley draws a lively picture of the home, and the characters of many of the inmates, including the matrons over whose appointment Dickens agonised. Women who had worked in prisons were likely to be too harsh. One who applied for what she called the "horrible task" clearly ruled herself out. But he struck gold with Mrs Morson, who was in charge for five years. As Hartley says: "She is a new variant of Victorian womanhood: a middle-class single parent supporting her family by means of a satisfying career." She came of good parentage and married a doctor working as chief medical officer for the Brazilian Mining Association, going out with him to live in the rainforest; and there he died, leaving her with two small daughters and pregnant. She had to make her own way back to England with them, by mule and then man-of-war, and when she arrived home she found the money her husband had left for her had been embezzled. Luckily she knew Coutts, and so heard of the job. Luckily again, her parents were able to care for her children, including the baby son.
Dickens took to her at once, finding her warm-hearted and intelligent. She taught the girls to read, write and cook well, and made mealtimes enjoyable occasions. She was tough with any who stole, drank or caused trouble. Above all, she was motherly, and the girls wept with her when they left, and again when she left. Not surprisingly, she was wooed and won by a second husband; but she was always proud of the work she had done, and of her association with Dickens. Her story alone could make a film.
So would the stories of the girls, although tracing them is hard, because they came from poverty and either disappeared back into poverty or departed for the colonies. In 1853 Dickens reported to Coutts that out of the first 54 inmates, 30 had emigrated and sent back good reports of themselves, 14 had left of their own accord and 10 had been expelled. Pretty good. Some could not bear the quietness and not being allowed out. Some decided that emigration was too like transportation, some were drawn back into their old lives. Isabella Gordon, cheeky and charming, boasted of her power over the staff (and Dickens), and recruited a gang of girls who stirred up trouble. Dickens conducted a trial at the home and finally put her out, crying, on a dark afternoon, with only an old shawl and half a crown. She leant against the house for a minute and then went out of the gate and slowly up the lane, wiping her wet face with her shawl, forlorn and hopeless. We know these details from Dickens, who watched her.
Hartley's impressive research has stretched to the other side of the world, and she has made contact with several descendants of Urania girls. She has tracked their stories in Australia, and even found a photograph of Rhena Pollard, a Sussex girl who moved from workhouse to prison to the home, and went on to Canada, making a decent marriage, bringing up seven children on an Ontario homestead and joining the Salvation Army. Dickens would have enjoyed the sight of her as a decorously dressed matriarch with intense eyes and a formidable jutting jaw.
Hartley sees Pollard as a model for Tattycoram in Little Dorrit. She draws other parallels between girls at the home and figures in Dickens's novels, such as the prostitute Martha in David Copperfield, and she suggests that the girls acted as models and muses for Dickens. But although she argues this through carefully, it is the one part of the book that worries me, because the voices he gives to Martha, and to Tattycoram, and indeed to Nancy in Oliver Twist and Alice in Dombey and Son, are not the voices of real women. Their high-flown speeches make them into stage representations of fallen women. "Oh, the river!" cries Martha, "I know it's like me, defiled and miserable - and it goes away, like my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled - and I feel that I must go with it!"
The few real words Dickens reports in his letters are not like this. A girl called Goldsborough answers his question about what sort of work she might do in the colonies with, "that she didn't suppose, Mr Dickerson, as she were a goin to set with her ands erfore her". Another complaining girl says, "Which blessed will be the day when justice is a-done in this ouse." A third, who has had her marks for good behaviour taken away, and is told she must earn them back, tells Dickens: "Ho! But if she didn't have em giv up at once, she could wish fur to go." These sound like real girls, not dramatic constructions. Dickens created character almost entirely through voice, so why was he unable to give convincing voices to the street women in his fiction? There is a question still hanging there.
Never mind. Hartley has written a book that every Dickens-lover, and everyone with an interest in social history, will want to read. It is packed with good stories, as its cast of forgotten women move through it - a tiny band amid all the wretchedness of 19th-century London. It also throws new light on a great episode in Dickens's life - an episode that ended abruptly when he fell in love, after which the whole enterprise slowly collapsed. You might see it as the revenge of Urania Aphrodite.
• Claire Tomalin's books include The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Penguin).
Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women
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BY MARK EARLEY , CHRISTIAN POST GUEST COLUMNIST
Oct 17, 2009 | 1:00 PM
The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the editorial opinion of The Christian Post or its editors.
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In the work we do at Prison Fellowship, we're indebted to many brave and inspired workers who have come before us. One famous name you'll recognize, if you're a regular listener, is that of William Wilberforce, the great British crusader against slavery. And then there's another name that you'll recognize, though you might not expect to hear it in this context: Charles Dickens.
A fascinating new book by Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, explores a little-known project conceived and carried out by Dickens in the mid-1800s. Better known as one of the world's great novelists, Dickens was also an active philanthropist who supported a number of worthy causes.
The concern for the poor that appears in so many of his books was a real-life concern of Dickens. As one reviewer put it, that concern helped him shape "the moral imagination of his countrymen."
Hartley writes of Dickens, "While he never had much faith in governments, he did have faith in the power of the individual to change for good."
In 1846, Dickens wrote to a wealthy friend, Angela Burdett Coutts, about his idea for a home for "fallen women." At the time, such "fallen women" had few resources available to them: As Hartley tells us, there were "no hostels or half-way houses, no job centres or training, and no employment" for a woman who had lost her character.
The prisons and workhouses were full of such women, who often ended up back on the streets after they served their time. And few people believed they could be redeemed. Sound familiar?
Dickens thought they could. With financial backing from Coutts, he launched Urania Cottage, a home where these women could find food, shelter, and vocational training. Dickens' friends and associates were recruited to help find women in prisons and other institutions who wanted the opportunity for a fresh start. The ultimate goal was to send them to Australia to find good jobs and eventually start their own families.
The project was small-scale; Hartley estimates that perhaps a hundred "flourishing emigrants" successfully started new lives after their time at Urania. But those were a hundred lives that would probably have ended in poverty and ruin without it. "A drop in the ocean of course," Hartley concludes, "but worthwhile nevertheless."
Although Hartley tends to downplay it, religion played an important part in this venture. Angela Burdett Coutts was a devout Christian. And although Dickens himself was unorthodox in some of his views, his views on poverty and human rights came directly from the Bible. In the letter that he sent to candidates for Urania, he appealed to the young women in the name of "Almighty God, who knows the secrets of our [hearts], and Christ, who died upon the cross, to save us."
Dickens' belief in human dignity and the power of change sprang from his faith. Well over a hundred years later, these are the same faith-based principles that we hold as we minister to prisoners and their families in the United States and around the world.
As our fellow worker from another era believed and demonstrated, no class of human beings, no matter how degraded and despised by society, is beyond the reach of the redeeming love of Jesus Christ.
Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women
The famous author's attempts to help Victorian prostitutes
Wednesday 10th March 2010Submitted by: Sue Wingrove
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Author: Jenny Hartley
Publisher: Methuen
Reviewed by: Pat Thane
Price (RRP): £8.99
A London beset by impoverished young people in marauding gangs, so respectable women fear to walk the streets. Products of poverty-stricken homes where fathers have vanished, or no homes at all when parents were dead or couldn’t cope. Growing up in institutions or on the streets, victims of physical and sexual abuse. A broken society with broken homes producing unhappy children. This was London in the 1840s, a sad place, disfigured by vast disparities of wealth, income and life chances.
Its story is vividly conveyed in the novels of Charles Dickens, who had experienced some of it in his childhood. He tried to give practical help to some of the young female victims when in 1847, he established Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush, financed by the wealthy Angela Burdett-Coutts, who was distressed about the women and child prostitutes who crouched on the steps of her house in Piccadilly. Dickens was less exceptional in this venture than Hartley suggests, one of many well-meaning Victorians who tried to mould excluded young people in their ways, understandably unconscious of how profoundly damaged they were. Dickens’s way was training in domestic skills, with education, music and poetry, provided that they obeyed the rules, until they were fit for emigration to the colonies, domestic service and marriage.
Hartley aims to explore the stories of the young women, but this is difficult since few sources survive other than scraps in Dickens’s letters to Burdett-Coutts. It seems that only about half of those Dickens sought to rescue stayed the course and many of the rest fled from surveillance when they reached Australia or South Africa. She is more illuminating on the ways that Dickens used his close observations of them to create some of his greatest characters. We learn more about Dickens than about these other sad lives.
Pat Thane is professor of British history, University of London