MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 137Finding and interviewing appropriate inmates was one of Dickens’s pri-
mary tasks; not many women would commit themselves to enforced domes-
ticity and emigration (which they sometimes quite naturally confused with
penal transportation) as conditions of their acceptance, nor did many meet his
standards of truthfulness and deference. Developing reliable sources of poten-
tial candidates was always an issue. When the Home opened, nearly all the
inmates came directly from serving light sentences in prisons, on the recom-
mendation of Augustus Tracey, Governor of Cold Bath Fields, Bridewell, or
G. L. Chesterton, Governor of the Middlesex House of Correction. By the
spring of 1850 Dickens was responding to Miss Coutts’s desire to widen their
nets; he tried “the Ragged School class of objects” (6.160), and suggested that
he write an article in the newly formed Household Words that might attract
recommendations. (It was not until 1853 that Miss Coutts could be con-
vinced to approve such an article.) Gradually the range of sources expanded to
include local magistrates of police courts, other institutions like the Magdalen
hospitals, and individual social workers.
Dickens wrote brief reports of each woman he recommended for Miss
Coutts’s approval; as the admissions process became routine, he increasingly
decided on his own. In addition to selecting inmates, Dickens helped to
interview and train the two matrons or superintendents who kept the daily
life of the cottage going. His management of these managers was fraught
with distrust, doubtless on both sides, until in 1849 Miss Coutts produced a
Mrs. Morson, a matron he thoroughly approved. Her powers, like those of all
Dickens’s agents, had their limits; he was the person who intervened and laid
down the law during the numerous crises of conflict, insubordination, theft,
and escape that erupted regularly in the life of the Home. He also organized
and ran the weekly meetings of the oversight Committee, tried to find well-
regulated ships that would not tempt emigrants to fall back into their old
ways during the voyage out, and organized major and minor repairs to the
cottage with the same vigilance he demonstrated in his own houses.
Critical accounts of Urania Cottage have recently concentrated on Dick-
ens’s insistence on separating the young women from the stories of their
pasts. As each inmate entered the Home, Dickens would interview her alone
under a promise of confidentiality, eliciting a history that often included
parental abandonment or abuse, dubious associates, failed attempts to make
livings, homelessness, petty crime, or seduction and prostitution. He would
record the story in his Case Book, and forbid the woman to tell the story
again, to anyone; from that point on she was to make herself into some-
one who bore a good character, and she was to be protected from anyone
who had knowledge of her past. Miss Coutts had access to the volume, but