Descendants of people who travelled great distances to face the harshness of unknown lands and make new lives often wonder about the reasons behind the journeys. Canada received many young women, especially during the Victorian era, who were trained as domestics, and sent or brought out by charitable organizations. The majority of them succeeded in obtaining employment and establishing families that made considerable contributions to the country's settlement.
Urania Cottage
In Lime Grove, Shepherd’s Bush, a mostly rural area west of London in 1847, author Charles Dickens and wealthy patron Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts established Urania Cottage for ‘fallen women’. Dickens, well aware of the harshness faced by the poor in Victorian England, knew that abandoned or orphaned young women barely earned subsistence income for menial work, and if unemployable as domestic servants, they often turned to petty theft or prostitution.
The home was to be a shelter from societal dangers – a place where the women could be educated while enjoying good food and comfortable accommodations in a family atmosphere. Unlike other organizations that presented austere conditions, there was to be no sermonizing, hard labour or contemplation of personal sins in surroundings where the women could wear colourful clothing, grow flowers, learn music, and form friendships.
It was expected (and agreed to by residents) that the women who stayed for about a year and learned the skills required for domestic employment would go to the colonies. Many of them who wrote letters to Dickens reported on successful employment situations and/or marriages.
Troublemakers who persistently refused to adhere to house rules were swiftly ejected. Dickens personally screened the applicants for staff positions, and the individuals recommended for accommodation at the home, and sent an invitation (“An Appeal to Fallen Women”) to each potential resident.
Charles Dickens Reports
Though Dickens may have destroyed the casebook in which he recorded detailed information garnered from interviews with the women, his numerous letters provide details of life at Urania Cottage. Through extensive research, Jenny Hartley, author of Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, learned that Dickens became totally absorbed in all aspects of the planning, scheduling, and day-to-day life at the home.
Approximately 100 women resided there during the home’s existence, and in one of his 1853 reports Dickens relates that 30 of the first 54 inmates immigrated and established good lives, 14 left Urania Cottage of their own accord, and 10 were expelled.
Rhena Pollard
Rhena Pollard (1836-1899), a former workhouse/prison inmate, and subsequent resident of Urania House, was apparently unable or unwilling to adhere to the strict house rules. Described as audacious or a slow settler by the author, she received a stern ultimatum after threatening to leave the house. Dickens responded that if she chose to leave, he would make her wear the roughest dress available in the house, and evict her as an “utterly friendless speck”.
Rhena remained at the cottage, and “was the subject of an especially good report”. Unlike the majority of the graduates from Urania Cottage, she travelled to Canada rather than Australia.
Marriage and Homesteading in Canada
In 1856, Rhena Pollard married Oris Cole Jr. in Buckingham, Quebec and settled in the rugged colonization area of Cloyne, Ontario where the couple became homesteaders and had eight children. It would not have been an easy life in that area where large numbers of farmers worked through winter with lumbering companies in order to supplement their meagre earnings. Women carried the burden of maintaining the home, caring for the children and livestock while the men were away at the camps. While her husband may or may not have known about Rhena’s troubled past, it appears that community members were unaware of her encounters with the famous author.
In her book, Jenny Hartley speculates that Charles Dickens’ fearless, dark-haired Tattycoram in Little Dorrit may have been fashioned after the small, fearless, high-spirited Rhena Pollard Cole.
Sources:
Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2008
Kathleen Airdrie - Kathleen has thirty years' freelance writing experience covering history, biographical profiles, environmental and social issues
