The Charles Dickens Letters Project

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Individual letter:

Dickens, Charles. To [addressee], [date of letter]. Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship). [URL of individual letter], [date of access].

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Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

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Period:

1841-1850

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charity

Urania Cottage

To SYDNEY TURNER,1 24 FEBRUARY 1848

Text from facsimile of first page only (aa), and extract and summary (bb) in Bonhams online catalogue, May 2020.

^aDevonshire Terrace

York Gate Regents Park

Twenty Fourth February 1848.

Dear Sir

I beg to assure you that I have been greatly interested in your letter, and by the papers you have kindly sent me.2 If so short a notice had found me disengaged, I would certainly have come to the Dinner on Saturday.3 But I am hopelessly bound to another good work of^a ^ba less public and extensive interest,4 and cannot possibly do so. . . he also tells Turner that he is much occupied just now, and shall be, until about the twenty fifth of March,5 but should be happy to visit his institution at some later time.^b

1. Sydney Turner (1814-1879, Dictionary of National Biography); Church of England clergyman and school inspector. In 1841, he became resident chaplain to the Institution of the Philanthropic Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders, which was located at St. George's Fields, Southwark, until the decision was taken in 1848 to move the school to Redhill, Surrey. Turner wrote many articles and pamphlets on the reformatory movement, including Mettray (1846) with the police magistrate Thomas Paynter.
2. Presumably regarding the fundraising effort to move the Institution from Southwark to Redhill; a public subscription was opened in Jan 1848.
3. The Institution held an annual Anniversary Dinner on 26 Feb 1848 at the London Tavern, Bishopsgate Street. Viscount Morpeth presided (Morning Chronicle, 28 Feb 1848, p.3).
4. Urania Cottage, the home for homeless women in Shepherd’s Bush, founded in 1847, which housed former prostitutes, criminals and destitute girls. CD played an active role, overseeing the house with Angela Burdett Coutts. For CD’s account of Urania Cottage, see his article "Home for Homeless Women", Household Words 7 (23 April 1853): 169-75. See also Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women (London: Methuen, 2009).
5. CD was occupied with Dombey and Son, which he completed in late Mar 1848.