There is a lady in this town, who from the window of her house has seen such as you going past at night, and has felt her heart bleed at the sight. She is what is called a great lady, but she has looked after you with compassion as being of her own sex and nature, and the thought of such fallen women has troubled her in her bed.
The words of Charles Dickens, describing his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts, whose house was a great mansion on Piccadilly, from whose window she observed the prostitutes in Green Park.
Angela is the heroine of my book Heiresses: The Lives of the Million Dollar Babies.
I’ll be honest and say that some of the women whom I wrote about in that book fairly got on my nerves. Not the early ones, who were genuine victims, living as they did in a Britain before the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 - laws that gave them an identity separate from their husbands and prevented them being kidnapped, forcibly married, incarcerated and other such horrors by men hellbent on owning their fortunes.
I wrote about these women in some detail (greatly offending a US book club hostess who seemed to take the descriptions of their suffering personally. ‘Ugh’ was her review. To quote the great Samantha Jones: ‘The motherfucker’s concise’). Their stories were shocking, abysmal, deserving of the utmost sympathy.
It was the later ones - the poor little rich girls such as the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton - whom I found somewhat wearing, with their obsession with identifying their intrinsic worth within a super-abundance of the external. The phrase ‘think yourselves lucky’ did resonate continually in my head - as I pretty much admitted in the book’s intro. Here I write about Barbara Hutton:
Barbara Hutton, from Heiresses
One night at the Paris Ritz in 1957 she sat in her suite— a birdlike figure, somewhat drunk, surrounded as ever by opulence, luxury, surfeit, superfluity—as her friend Noël Coward read her words [poems] aloud to her: “Actually some of them are simple and moving,” he wrote in his diary. The entry was suffused with slightly exasperated pity: “her money,” it concluded, “is always between her and happiness.”
Yet it shouldn’t have been. Should it? Why should money bring unhappiness, when it facilitates what most of us crave: a life that can be one’s own plaything? Exasperation is indeed the order of the day, reading about Barbara’s infernal jewel-drenched misery while braced for the arrival of one’s latest electricity bill.
Later in the intro:
In Dorothy Parker’s 1941 short story “The Standard of Living,” two young stenographers play a game about what they would do if they were to inherit a fortune; the punch line is that their original fantasy figure of $1 million has to be raised to $10 million, when they learn the real cost of the kind of jewellery worn by heiresses. Who, aside from the richissime, has not done something along these lines? Who has not imagined how they would spend ten million or, these days (so liberal with their zeros), one hundred million? I have certainly done it. I have itemized the house on Cheyne Walk, the apartment on the Upper East Side, the cryogenic chamber, the Stubbs, the fittings at Givenchy, the animal sanctuary.
Would all that make me happy? Well: to be honest I think it might.
The Hutton-type heiress, however, is not made happy by these things, because for her they exist without context. They are cut off from the effort that earned them, the desire that yearned for them, the fear that they would never be attained, and the terror that they might be lost. They are simply there. The heiress has never had to imagine what it would be like to be rich, and she cannot know the value of what she has never been without. “There is no moment when you say ‘I’m afraid I can’t afford that one,’ ” as the poor-boy narrator puts it in Agatha Christie’s Endless Night, trying to understand his wife’s near-infinite wealth, the incomprehensibility of the fact that money, in itself, does not make her happy.
Similarly, the heiress has never experienced longing or need, so she cannot appreciate the absolute joy that comes with assuaging those feelings. The payment that soaks up outstanding bills, the windfall that buys a piece of designer clothing: those miraculous changes in circumstance, like sunbursts upon a grey sky, mean nothing to an heiress. Her life is without shade, therefore it is without the blessed relief from shade. It is a procession of sumptuous similarity. “Oh God, not another fucking beautiful day,” as the American Alice de Janzé famously greeted the sight of a sunlit morning at her house in Kenya: the heiress’s authentic cry of despair about her own state of accidie.
But still: you know. Sympathy: limited.
There were three heiresses whom I did love, however. One was ‘wicked Daisy Fellowes’, about whom I might write more in the future - a bitingly amusing fixture of European high society, whose uber-chic silhouette was achieved with a diet that I described as Keith Richard c. 1971, she seized life and had the grace, for all her lethality, to enjoy her money (she was a Singer heiress and would reputedly cross herself if she saw a sewing-machine in a shop window).
Daisy Fellowes, from Heiresses
Second was the splendid Hon. Dorothy Paget, whose silhouette was not chic at all - she was a dedicated eater - but who, like Daisy, lived precisely the life that she chose. Like me, she was a passionate lover of horse racing (although I only enjoy the Flat; she also adored the ghastly jumps). At the time of her death in 1960 she had owned more horses than any woman in the history of racing, and her Golden Miller is still the only winner of both the Gold Cup and the Grand National. She also won the 1943 Epsom Derby, collecting the trophy in the same terrible tweed coat that she wore to every race meeting, Royal Ascot included.
Daisy had innumerable affairs and Dorothy a long-term relationship with the niece of an aristocratic Russian refugee, but both had the instinct that seems to have saved heiresses from calamity: they kept love and money well apart.
This was true - in a very different way - of a very different heiress: my heroine, as I say. As Christmas always puts one in mind of Charles Dickens, it seems apt to tell the story of his relationship with the woman he called ‘Miss Coutts’.
Angela in around 1840, Wikimedia Commons
Angela, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts, was born in 1814. She was the granddaughter of Thomas Coutts, founder of Coutts & Co., royal bankers from the time of George III. When he died in 1822, he left a vast fortune to his second wife - a former Drury Lane actress – together with the decision as to whom, among his many descendants, she should bequeath the majority of his inheritance. The widowed Mrs Coutts observed every eager contender, and eventually selected her step-grand-daughter Angela. She had chosen better than she could possibly have realized.
What had led her to this decision? The girl was apparently unremarkable, yet within her quiet watchfulness lay what made her remarkable. She appeared to fit the Victorian-female ideal, but her will was as unyielding as the whalebone in her corsets. Her father, Sir Francis Burdett, had defied a life of privilege to represent Westminster for the Radicals, and was hero-worshipped for his progressive oratory, although later - as fiery principle struck stony reality - he turned Tory. Among those who despised him for it was the man who would become a central figure in his daughter’s life: Charles Dickens. Meanwhile Angela, in a modest way that frightened neither the horses nor society, would relight the flame of his reforming zeal.
In August 1837, two months after the accession of her near-contemporary Queen Victoria, she assumed her title of ‘richest heiress in England’. She inherited around £1.8 million (not a fixed sum, as it included half the shares of the Coutts banking house), the Piccadilly mansion and her grandfather’s ‘country house’ in Highgate. A gloriously lucky young woman, therefore.
Yet the life of an heiress was not an easy one. As recently as 1825 Catherine Tylney Long, a vastly rich woman who had been pursued by the future King William IV, died in near-penury and extreme anguish after her husband squandered her fortune (which had become his) and tried to snatch her children (which he had every legal right to do).
This horror story may have served as a warning to Angela, as to how not to conduct her life. Yet it seems that she instinctively regarded her inheritance in her own way. She saw it in terms of duty, as if she were its custodian; as a life’s work.
She was besieged, of course, by those who sought to divert her, mainly a long procession of suave suitors. Given Angela’s rigid determination to keep these potentially dangerous husbands at bay, while at the same time feeling all a young woman’s emotions and passions – given, too, the semi-rupture with a difficult, glamorous father who resented her inheritance - it is not entirely surprising that she should have conceived a slightly bizarre tendresse for an older man of iron trustworthiness: the Duke of Wellington. When the Duke was aged seventy-eight and Angela thirty-three, she proposed to him.
He turned her down, but in so kindly a way as to keep the whole thing going. ‘Miss Angela!’ Their companionship was a riveting diversion to high society (one can imagine) and, when the Duke died in 1852, Angela was treated almost like a widow. The whole episode was somehow typical of her. She was defined by a kind of stubborn steely innocence, and was fundamentally indifferent to repercussions, consequences or how a thing might look. There was perhaps no better temperament for a person who sought the betterment of the world.
For even as she was pursuing her girlish obsession with the Duke of Wellington, her deeper engagement was elsewhere, upon a partnership of singular beauty between a man and a woman, but with a third party in the mix, which was their common cause. It was through her meeting with Charles Dickens that Angela Burdett-Coutts first understood what her life’s work could be, and in the fire of his imaginative compassion the future of her inheritance was forged. Flawed and married and all-too-human as he was, Dickens was nonetheless her natural companion; not necessarily in a lover-like sense, although he was a very attractive man; but with a closeness that led him to write in 1860: ‘I think you know how I love you.’ Her response to this is unknown. There can be no doubt, however, that she did know it.
It was in 1843 – the year Angela made her gauche proposal to Wellington - that they began working together. She started by offering help to the ‘Ragged Schools’ in which the very poorest children, the kind who worked for men like Fagin, were educated; it was an unglamorous cause, but that was the point, and it was also what Dickens liked so much about her. She was not out for glory. She had nothing of the virtue-signaller. She meant what she did. Dickens dedicated Martin Chuzzlewit to her, and later would use her as the model for Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield. He was susceptible in every way – his marriage would later break down on account of his passion for the young actress, Nelly Ternan – and brimming with the empathy that was at the heart of his genius; Angela too was susceptible, beneath her reticence and control, and it seems impossible that she should have been indifferent to this man. Yet the relationship remained what it was – a friendship of the most fervent intimacy - and her vast capacity for ardour was instead directed towards a man almost three times her age.
In 1846 she and Dickens embarked upon their first major plan, a home for what were then called ‘fallen women’, the ones whom Angela had observed from her Piccadilly window. Again, how remarkable she was; and how powerfully Dickens appreciated this fact. It was a rare Victorian woman who actually looked upon prostitutes, who did not tell herself that if they were ignored then they did not exist. If one is honest, it would be quite a rare person today. To look out of one’s cage and actually notice what is there - that is unusual.
The home, Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush, opened at the end of 1847. One of the first residents cried when she was shown her pretty bedroom. Dickens, ever humane, had insisted upon details such as a piano in the house; by contrast Wellington was sceptical about the scheme, perhaps believing that by association it might be damaging to Angela. And it was a daring thing to do - the cause commanded little sympathy and huge stigma - yet not for a moment did she hesitate. By 1853 fifty-six girls had passed through the home, of whom thirty remained thereafter on the straight and narrow. Some were serious recidivists and/or alcoholic - one was described by Dickens as a girl who ‘could corrupt a nunnery in a fortnight’ – so the success rate was remarkable, testament to the hands-on nature of their philanthropy, which led them not just to offer shelter but to listen, with empathy, to the shocking stories that had brought these girls to this pass.
As her philanthropic ambitions grew so Angela moved eastwards, to Bethnal Green, where streets are named in her honour and which in the mid-19th century was a place of fathomless squalor. She planned and financed a new housing development called Columbia Square, blocks of flats for people who had been sleeping on straw, which became a pioneering influence upon foundations like the Peabody Trust. It was conceived with the help of Dickens, who praised Angela’s ‘moral bravery’; she also implemented schemes to improve the welfare of working animals, another cause that touched both their hearts, which nobly refused to grow immune to suffering.
Yet the two were becoming more distant, and oddly it was as if the disintegration of Dickens’ marriage had fractured their own intense, subtle connection. They continued to write to each other, and clearly he missed her very much; Angela’s own feelings, meanwhile, were opaque. She was not judgmental about Dickens’ lack of love for his wife, but it is unclear how she felt about his excess of passion for Nelly Ternan. One could not say that she was jealous (although Dickens had certainly been jealous of the Duke of Wellington), nor even that she was perturbed. Yet their alliance was inexorably drawing to its end; and it took with it Urania Cottage, the little house in Shepherd’s Bush that had contained an indomitable belief in the transformative power of kindness. In 1862 Dickens, by then something of a lost soul, assailed by scandal and guilt, was visiting Paris and walked past the Hotel Bristol. He knew Angela to be staying there, but did not enter. Instead he left a message to ‘Miss Coutts’, in which he wrote that he continually ‘lived over again the years that lie behind us’. The end of The Age of Innocence, indeed. He died eight years later, aged just fifty-eight.
Angela in later life, from Heiresses
Angela, meanwhile, kept the great flame of their reforming passion alive until her own death in 1906. Ever mysterious, she dropped her heiress’s guard when she married, at the age of sixty-seven, a man less than half her age; and that really is another story. Yet her true love story was surely with the man who had said of her, simply and aptly, that she had the gift of ‘seeing clearly with kind eyes’.
What a fascinating story, and remarkable a woman. The collective noun 'the rich' is so inaccurate. There are all shades in there, as in every group, but mostly those two categories: the tethered and the untethered. Not a poor little rich girl, this one. Kindness and a clear sense of self do make a difference. This amitie amoureuse is a joy to read about.
Beautiful writing, a treat indeed to sit here with my morning drink reading this. You express perfectly the difference and dilemma between imagining riches and what doors they would open, (you stole my wish list with the Cheyne Walk house and animal sanctuary!) and being born into them.