MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 135value of a man he tended to disparage early on with comments about his
sharp nose and his unimaginative nature; eventually he would recommend
Wills’s acumen in business by referring to him as “my other self ” (9.34).
Agents who carried out his desires to the letter without complaint, whether
W. H. Wills at the office or Georgina Hogarth at home, were becoming
essential to his way of life.
Urania Cottage
The third new project of the decade was the Home for Homeless Women,
which involved the creation, organization, and maintenance of a literal house.
Urania Cottage, as it was sometimes called, was the most substantial product
of Dickens’s friendship with the wealthy but shy heiress Angela Burdett-
Coutts. After her parents’ deaths early in 1844, Miss Coutts began to seek
fit objects for philanthropy, and Dickens became one of her chief consul-
tants. The relationship was delicate, not least because the Dickens family was
one of her first charities: Miss Coutts funded the education and training
of Dickens’s elder sons Charley and Walter. Her annual gifts of Twelfth
Night cakes to celebrate Charley’s birthday are elaborately acknowledged in
Dickens’s engaging and deferential letters to her. Between May 1846, when
he responded to her desire to set up an asylum for the reform of prostitutes,
and 1858, when their friendship cooled in the wake of his separation from
Catherine, Dickens became the worldly agent of Miss Coutts’s efforts at
social reform. He planned and managed Urania Cottage, vetted and recom-
mended people who deserved individual charity, and researched London sites
that might be appropriate for the housing projects she planned in 1852–53.
In the process he attempted to educate her in the ways of the lower classes,
and to counter what he considered the overly religious and conservative
aspects of her social attitudes.
Both of the collaborators were peripatetic, and Dickens’s letters often
record the failure of his attempts to find or reach her. The “Spell,” as he
called it, became a standing joke; “we are always like the gentleman and lady
in the weather-glass” (5.201; 7.442). His penchant for immediate, willful
action was disturbing to her; more than once Dickens commented, as he did
in 1850, “I am always for the promptest measures—and I suppose I made
you laugh by my ferocity” (6.86). Responding to a note of praise from her
in 1855, he explains, “You think me impetuous, because I sometimes speak
of things I have long thought about, with a suddenness that brings me only
to the conclusion I have come at, and does not shew the road by which