136 KNOWING DICKENS
I arrived there. But it is a broad highway notwithstanding, and I have trod it
slowly and patiently” (7.617). Miss Coutts served as lady patroness in many
ways; among them, she was a figure for whom Dickens could project his best
representations of himself.
As they appear in his writing about Urania Cottage, those self-repre-
sentations are singularly free of conflict or anxiety about the authoritarian
nature of his management practices. The Home, as its inmates were taught
to call it, essentially served as a halfway house between prison or prostitution
and emigration to Australia or the South African Cape. Most of the young
women (there was room for thirteen when the house opened in November
1847) stayed there for about a year, during which they were supposed to tame
their natures and to become adept at a range of household tasks that would
enable them to become servants, or wives and mothers, in the colonies.
The daily routine was completely ritualized; every hour was accounted for,
and the girls were subject to surveillance at all times. They did not leave
the cottage except to attend church in groups on Sundays, or to exercise
and tend little gardens on the premises. Incoming and outgoing mail was
read by one of the matrons. There was neither privacy nor ownership; the
women made and wore clothes they did not own, from materials chosen—at
least initially—by Dickens in four different colors, to avoid the stigma of
uniforms. If they ran away wearing these clothes—which were kept under
lock and key—they were subject to arrest for theft. Those who rebelliously
insisted on leaving were, Dickens decided, to be threatened with a common,
ugly, coarse ( but of course clean) dress acquired for the purpose of making
them think twice about an impetuous and resentful departure (6.804).
In effect, the house was run on principles Dickens had—rather imagina-
tively—adapted from studying prisons and other institutions that attempted
to effect reformations of female character. His strategies must therefore be
read against the background of punitive discipline and religious reclamation
that prevailed across this Victorian enterprise in general. “These unfortu-
nate creatures are to be tempted to virtue,” he insisted to Miss Coutts when
she wanted clergymen on the scene. “They cannot be dragged, driven, or
frightened.” Everything about their treatment was to be subject to two
guiding principles: “first to consider how best to get them there, and how best to
keep them there (5.183). Clergymen might present obstacles: “the almost
insupportable extent to which they carry the words and forms of religion”
in other refuges and asylums “is known to no order of people as well as to
these women,” who retain “an exaggerated dread of it” (5.182). Clearly Dick-
ens’s battle against cant was a driving force in his enthusiasm for creating
Urania Cottage.