Charles Dickens and the women who made him

Dickens is often criticised for his weak female characters. But his great-great-great-granddaughter Lucinda Dickens Hawksley says he is a product of the strong women in his life and the Victorian ideals of his times.

There were so many fascinating women in Dickens’s life: the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who shocked society with her engagement, at 39, to a fiance who was 17 years her junior and her godson; the anti-slavery campaigner and educationalist Elizabeth Jesser Reid; and the author Elizabeth Gaskell, who Dickens tracked down in 1848 despite her writing anonymously. Dickens encouraged Gaskell to continue writing about subjects deemed unsuitable for a female novelist, such as illegitimacy and prostitution.

One of the most influential of Dickens’s female friends was the banking heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts. They met in the early 1830s. A few years later she was asked to be godmother to Charles and Catherine Dickens’s first child, Charley. In 1847, Dickens and Burdett-Coutts set up their most famous joint venture: Urania Cottage in London’s Shepherd’s Bush, intended as a rehabilitation home for so-called “fallen women”, where they could learn basic literacy and numeracy as well as cooking, sewing and cleaning. Dickens worked with prison governors to help women who were about to be released; he was passionate about rehabilitation, convinced that most female convicts were not inherently criminal but simply desperate, failed by a harsh society.