Mr Dickens and Miss Coutts

A bitter-sweet story, for the sixth day of Christmas

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, the great philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. The house at whose window she stood was a mansion on Piccadilly, from which she could see the prostitutes - ‘such as you’ - in Green Park.

Angela is the heroine of my 2021 book Heiresses: The Lives of the Million Dollar Babies (about which I chat in a podcast at the end of this post). I have long wanted to write a script about her, although as usual with these things one hears that somebody else has something ‘in development’. Anyway I loved her dearly while writing the book, not least as she was such a respite from all the heiresses who perversely effed things up for themselves (hello Barbara Hutton). As well as being a philanthropist on the grand scale, who - among much else - gave vast sums to the East End and in aid of the Irish famine, she did kindly, intimate, thoughtful things like sending a spin-drier for the hospital sheets to Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, and paying for water troughs and drinking fountains all over London for the poor horses and dogs.

Above all I loved the beautiful, singular relationship that she shared with Dickens - about whom I always feel a certain guilt because I have read so little of his work. I inherited a very old set of books from my paternal grandfather, a rather glamorous figure (Irish-born, briefly owned a theatre) about whom I have sometimes wanted to write, but am unsure how to do so as he died years before I was born. He would read Dickens aloud to his four children. Every year, in his mysterious honour, I resolve to get beyond Great Expectations and Bleak House… but in the meantime I thought it timely (Christmas/ Dickens) to release this aged post - somewhat expanded - from behind the paywall. Hope you enjoy. Happy new year, dear subscribers!

Angela, 1^st 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 an immense 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 contender, each of whom eagerly put his/ her best foot forward, and eventually selected her step-grand-daughter Angela. Given my Agatha Christie obsession this always reminds me of a comparable situation in Crooked House… those who know the book will know.

What had led her to this decision - a notably shrewd one? Angela was apparently unremarkable. Yet within her decorous watchfulness lay what made her remarkable. Although she appeared to fit the Victorian-female ideal, as in the image above, 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 enlightened 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 Sir Francis’s 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. An enviable young woman, therefore? Again I think of the comparable figure in Crooked House, and the instant loneliness that her inheritance conferred, like the fall of a sword separating her from her old life.

Two centuries ago, moreover - before progressive legislation such as the Married Woman’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, which gave wives an identity separate from their husbands - the position of heiress was not merely isolating, but fraught with real danger. The money that should have bestowed power rendered her, in fact, appallingly vulnerable. Heiress-snatching was a familiar Georgian pastime. Even when the law caught up with that (but only in England, hence the totemic flights to Gretna Green), marriage could mean entry into a crocodile pit. Angela would have been all too aware of this, of the awful warnings embodied by heiresses such as Catherine Tylney Long, a Regency It girl whose hand had been sought by the future King William IV (quite the counter-factual), and who died in 1825, her life entirely wrecked, after her husband - an aristocratic fortune-hunter - squandered her fortune (which had legally 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 affairs. Yet it seems that she instinctively regarded her money in her own way. She saw it in terms of duty, even destiny, rather as Victoria would have viewed becoming Queen. She was merely the custodian of what she inherited. Doing right by it was her 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 them at bay, while at the same time feeling all a young woman’s emotions and passions – given, too, the semi-rupture with a father who resented her elevation - 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. I find the unworldly inappropriateness of this very touching.

He turned her down (‘Miss Angela!’) but in so kindly - flattered - a way as to keep the whole thing going. 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 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 society.

For even as she was pursuing her girlish obsession with the Duke of Wellington, her deeper engagement was elsewhere, upon a partnership between a man and a woman which had a third party in the mix: 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, 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 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 no trace 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 (later the site of the BBC Lime Grove studios) opened at the end of 1847. 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, to the shocking stories that had brought these girls to this pass.

As her ambitions grew so Angela moved eastwards, to the hunting ground of the killer - Jack the Ripper - who would, in her lifetime, savage the kind of women she had tried to help. In Bethnal Green 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 her schemes to improve animal welfare, another cause that touched both their hearts, which nobly refused to grow immune to suffering. As she put it:

Life whether in man or beast is sacred; inhuman treatment of animals should be held to be a wrong and a sin.

Yet the two were becoming more distant, and oddly it was as if the disintegration of Dickens’ marriage had fractured their 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 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, 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 former actor of barely thirty; and that really is another story, one in which Queen Victoria (slightly competitive with the revered Angela) took an almost soap opera delight. ‘That poor foolish old woman Lady Burdett-Coutts’, she wrote gleefully in her journal, after Angela was presented at court with her husband. It is an extraordinary coda; although I think that the true love story was with the literary genius who had said of her, simply and aptly, that she had the gift of ‘seeing clearly with kind eyes’.

And here’s the podcast…