138 KNOWING DICKENS
Dickens told the matrons of the Home only as much as he felt necessary
for them to know. This practice, sometimes read as a kind of co-optation or
dubious identification, was in Dickens’s view a cornerstone of the project.
In his first outline of plans for the Home (to Miss Coutts, 26 May 1846), he
wants to represent the past life of a fallen woman not as a social disgrace but
as “destructive to herself, and that there is no hope in it, or in her, as long as
she pursues it” (4.553).
As the Home opened its doors Dickens wrote “An Appeal to Fallen
Women,” a pamphlet directly addressed to women in prisons, intended to
interest them in the Home. Carefully avoiding the rhetoric of redemption,
he asked his reader to imagine her future life if she were to continue in
her present course—or rather, he imagined her life for her, in images and
cadences that only Dickens could invent. The Home, he promised, would
substitute for these horrors “an active, cheerful, healthy life” where women
would be “entirely removed from all who have any knowledge of their past
career, will begin life afresh, and be able to win a good name and charac-
ter” (5.698–99). The policy was defended again in a letter to Miss Coutts
of 28 March 1849: Dickens claimed that the prison governors Chesterton
and Tracey had strongly recommended the measure, and pointed to “the
promise of confidence under which they [the women] have yielded up their
secrets” (5.516).
He was not, of course, doing to the women anything he had not done for
himself. His own autobiographical confession was written during the first
year of the Home’s existence, and, locked in Forster’s drawer, was subject to
a similar embargo. He wanted genuinely to believe that a sealed confession
could “put away” a shameful past and allow for a changed future. He was
also quite alert to the meaning of “a good character” in the sense that it was
used by servants seeking employment; the interval at the Home was meant
to allow such a “character” to be attested to in a letter of reference. Nor
were the cases grist for his fiction mill in any direct way. As Philip Collins
points out, the idealized and conventional portraits of fallen women in the
novels have little connection with the stories of misdoings at the Home with
which Dickens regaled Miss Coutts (Collins 1962, 112–16). The Case Book
provided material for selected success stories, identified only by case number,
that Dickens presented in “Home for Homeless Women,” the article he
wrote for Household Words in April 1853 (Dent 3.127–41); if Dickens had
had other plans for the book, they never came to fruition.
There is little doubt that Dickens took special pride and pleasure in his
role as sole confessor. In his reports to Miss Coutts he assessed each case
for truthfulness, and seemed to be quite sure that he knew when a girl was