Novelist & Social Worker

THE HEART OF CHARLES DICKENS (415 pp.)--Edited by Edgar Johnson--Duell-Little ($6).

When Charles Dickens was twelve, his spendthrift father was thrown in debtors' prison and little Charles was put to work in a shoe-polish factory. "No words," he wrote 25 years later, "can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship ... I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond."

A good deal of Dickens can be read as a writer's reaction against his own child-labor and childhood shock. Yet Dickens was not only a fighter with words. He fought hand to hand with the dragon of poverty in the slums of London, and his sword was the mighty bankroll of "the richest heiress in all England," a Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts. The Heart of Charles Dickens is the story of their high-purposed and sometimes amusing friendship, told in a selection from more than 500 letters, most of them published for the first time, which Dickens wrote his lady bountiful.

Wan Child, Pale Horse. Dickens and Miss Coutts (pronounced Coots) met, probably in 1835, at the house of a banker named Marjoribanks (pronounced Marshbanks). Dickens was already a well-known journalist, she a leading socialite, a "charmer" whom even the old Duke of Wellington was said to be chasing. Angela put aside all suitors, however, for she had given her heart to the poor. Her profits, she decided, should go with it, and she turned to Dickens for advice in her philanthropies. For more than 30 years, through all the hurry of his vivid career, Dickens found time to investigate most of the many appeals for her aid; he was, in short, almost a full-time social worker as well as a major novelist.

"On Thursday night, went to the Ragged School," he wrote, "and an awful sight it is ... I have very seldom seen, in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children." Again, he describes to Miss Coutts a slum called Hickman's Folly: "wooden houses like horrible old packing cases full of fever for a countless number of years. In a broken down gallery at the back of a row of these, there was a wan child looking over at a starved old white horse . . . The sun was going down and flaring out like an angry fire at the child--and the child, and I, and the pale horse, stared at one another in silence for some five minutes as if we were so many figures in a dismal allegory."

The Ragged Schools (set up by private charity for England's poor) promptly got support from Miss Coutts, and landlords in the slums were encouraged to install sanitary facilities by the good lady's promise to meet all costs above a basic minimum. The novelist and the heiress drew up plans for slum clearance, model-housing projects, community flats with gardens, and Dickens gave days on end to making their paper schemes come brick & mortar true.

Converted Prostitutes. Their pet project, however, was something called "Urania Cottage," or "Miss Coutts' Home for Fallen Women at Shepherd's Bush." A good half of the letters in the volume are concerned with the difficulties of reconstructing Jezebel in the image of Mrs. Grundy.

Dickens had some practical sense in such things. He felt that it was useless to talk to a prostitute of her duty to society. "Society," he wrote, "has used her ill ... and she cannot be expected to take much heed of its rights or wrongs." He thought, instead, that the charges of Urania Cottage should be "tempted to virtue" by kindness and by the chance to learn an occupation and good habits, to hear pleasant music and read not only elevating but even enjoyable books, to putter in gardens, and, finally, by the chance to sail, passage-paid by Miss Coutts, to Australia or some other country and into the arms of a pioneer husband.

Yet present candy often proved more alluring than the future carrot. The gardener sometimes had to pursue the local roughs who were found sneaking along the back fence for one reason or another. Time & again a girl would sneak out before daylight with the petty cash or any other item she could lay hands on. Dickens became a well-known figure in the magistrate's court. Although few statistics remain, it appears that between 1847 and 1853, the home cared for 56 women, ten of whom were expelled for incorrigible misconduct and seven of whom ran away. Of those who made the trip to Australia, all seemed to have made good except three, who relapsed, in the sea air, on the voyage out.

Editor Edgar Johnson has written an excellent introduction to the book and helped the continuity with informative notes. He challenges Bernard Shaw's opinion that Dickens wrote nothing but "roast beef and Yorkshire pudding letters," and these letters bear him out.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.