140 KNOWING DICKENS
the fact that they did not own their clothes—“They have a great pride in the
state of their clothes, and the neatness of their persons” (Dent 3.130, 132). He
could not let go of this theme: if new inmates struggle to learn self-control,
“Patience, and the strictest attention to order and punctuality, will in most
cases overcome these discouragements” (Dent 3.135). Like the occupants of
his own houses, the residents of Urania Cottage were enjoined to conform to
the needs of Dickens’s own temperament.
It did not seem to occur to him that his own neatness and punctuality
were not universally acknowledged forms of virtue, or that even the most
sincere young women had figured out how to get good marks and the small
monetary rewards that came with them. Nor did he seem to make a clear
distinction between what he wanted to hear and truthfulness. He reported
that during the inmates’ private weekly meetings with the Committee, they
are “under no restraint in anything they wish to say. A complaint from any
of them is exceedingly uncommon” (Dent 3.130). No doubt he had a good
ear for cant, but his insistence that he knew when a woman was lying took a
comic turn in 1857, when he lectured Miss Coutts about giving the inmates
colorful clothes instead of the drab working-dress material she had bought for
them. Apparently the women had reported their satisfaction to Miss Coutts,
but Dickens knew better how to assess their remarks: “I do not believe them
to be true, and I have a very great misgiving that they were written against
nature, under the impression that they would have a moral aspect.” Dickens,
of course, thought the love of colorful dress was natural, and helped to create
“a buoyant, hopeful, genial character”; it followed that the girls must have
been lying when they approved the drab material (8.310–11).
Dickens counseled Miss Coutts wisely and often about limiting their
expectations of success, but in practice he was angered by any form of insub-
ordination. His letters tell vivid stories about bad apples who had to be
expelled, leading some critics to applaud his empathy and pleasure in those
escapades. Dickens was almost always keen to give the inmates a second
chance if they broke rules, consorted with men over the garden fence, or
threatened to leave, but his role in these stories is invariably that of the hero
and detective, the lone male in a covey of women who drops into a crisis,
sorts it out, thinks of an ingenious solution, and disappears. When Jemima
Hiscock and Mary Joynes got “dead drunk” after forcing open a small beer
cellar in 1850, Dickens was furious; he suspected them of getting spirits over
the wall from outside and of plotting to leave after robbing the house of
clean linen. Jemima was dismissed immediately; both were put down as liars
with “pious pretences” (6.84–85). Later that year, Dickens was “in a mighty
state of indignation” when two girls stole some money from a matron and