Telling tales of working women
Ink bottle owned by Charles Dickens, DH134 © Charles Dickens Museum
Dickens championed many women writers through his journals, Household Words and All The Year Round, publishing articles and stories by writers like journalist Harriet Martineau, American writer Annie Fields and Egyptologist Amelia Edwards. He also wrote about the plight of working class women in his novels, especially those on the edge of the poverty line, and how they survived day to day.
These creative pieces have been inspired by stories and objects on this theme from the Charles Dickens Museum collection. They have been written by Rosa Chalfen and local community groups - Mosaic LGBT Young Person’s Trust and St Luke’s Community Centre. This project has been funded by the University of Hertfordshire Coproduction Award.
The Great Black World
This piece is inspired by the story of Rhena Pollard, one of the residents of Urania Cottage. This home for homeless women was set up by Dickens and his friend and philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts to 'rehabilitate' women who had been through the workhouse and or the prison system.
‘How horrible then, to know, that she can be so extraordinarily wicked as under that roof which alone protects her from the great black world…’
- Dickens in a letter about Rhena Pollard
They tried everything to save her, but she would not be saved. They tried telling her about Hell and the way flesh melted off bone in the blue centre of a flame. They tried starving her, but somehow the scraps of her body were stronger than the whole.
What was it about her that they hated? Difficult to say. She was young, angry, pretty, poor—this was enough. She was the flaw in the glass, the desire suppressed. She was the rub in their charitable glow.
She shed the bruised and scaled skin of herself and left it on the floor of the Atlantic, to rot there with the white bones of sailors, picked clean, and men’s fortunes scaled over with algae. Then there was only the raw form of her, red and bleeding in the high winds.
She followed the Ottawa River and the land opened up before her. Its marbled planes, a lake frozen over, a split core. So alien that she might have been moving blindly through the blackness of space and stumbled on some new and flawless star.
In Buckingham she found a man grown up from the ground, chapped by sun and frost, his skin flaking off in flurries. He looked her in the eye. His hands had a map of white scars from the lumberyard. She traced them with her teeth, and bit.
They moved like a two-headed wolf, their bodies perfectly balanced, each limb and tendon in sync. Her cubs were born in creeks and coves. They followed the forest and the sound of axe splitting trunk. In the place they settled she could see the whole of the sky, stretch her arms from east to west and take the measure of it.
They tried everything to save her, but she would not be saved. They tried prayers and absolutions. The doctor was called, and opium given. But the century would die with her.
In her own mind she was already looking out over Big Gull Lake, the sweet rancid taste of whisky on her lips, and the sun was sliding down into the water.
By Rosa Chalfen
Untitled
This piece is inspired by a silver spoon in our collection that was pawned and bought back multiple times by Dickens's mother, Elizabeth, in order to provide stability for the family. Dickens's father, John, spent more than he earned, plunging the family into debt regularly.
I’m usually in the presence of the wealthy, the spoilt.
Instead of being in the mouth of a screaming baby – I’m used as a safety net, falling in the hands of those who can’t even begin to imagine what my primary element looks like in its prime. My value, given in a literal sense, in this lifetime of mine. I would have preferred my essence being used in a metaphorical sense – still kept in my safe space. Only to be used as a punchline. Instead I pray maybe – on my next adventure I do not return back to the hungry mouths that scrape my exterior but only till the end of the month, then, I settle in dirty hands once more, as if I wasn’t part of the furniture, “like family”.
By Lilly Dolen
The Spoon
This piece is inspired by the silver spoon Elizabeth Dickens (Dickens's mother) pawned to pay off her husband's debts.
The spoon was happy to be pawned.
’Phew what a relief!’ it would’ve blurted out if it could’ve spoken.
No more licks for a while
Slurpy licks
Hungry licks
Slow licks
Wet licks
Spit licks
Licky licks
Or even bites
Teething bites
Clicky bites
Cherry bites
Crunchy bites
Scrumpy bites
Bitey bites
No more textures spooned, dug out or stirred
Gooey texture
Lumpy texture
Sloppy texture
Gloopy texture
Swirly texture
Hot, cold, lukewarm
A holiday in a pawn shop lying between a silver knife and fork.
Ahh!!! happy families the spoon sighed
Let me rest here for a while.
By Pauline Caveney