A detailed fast paced read. Thoroughly enjoyed.
In 1847 a home for “homeless women" was established in Shepherds Bush by Charles Dickens and financed by his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts. This novel explores an imaginary story regarding some of the inhabitants of the home at Utopia Cottage.
The young women (well, girls really) who were selected for life at Utopia Cottage had to follow a strict daily routine, were taught household management and were given basic reading and writing skills. Not all of the girls were appreciative!
Most of the young women were shown as well rounded characters, with interesting back stories and their own storyline going forward within the narrative. It was hard not to have sympathy for these young individuals who found themselves at the very bottom of society.
There is also a sub plot concerning the patron Angela Burdett-Coutts. Unfortunately I did not feel any warmth towards her, and on the whole she seemed to come across as completely self absorbed.
This was a detailed but fast paced read. Thoroughly enjoyable and probably my favourite of the author’s novels.
Beautifully written, extensively researched and brilliantly tied together, daily life in Urania Cottage and the different women’s battle to survive against all odds had me gripped from beginning to end.
History: Charles Dickens, the famous novelist, and Angela Burdett-Coutts, the heiress of Coutts bank, open the doors of Urania Cottage, offering fallen women a second chance, in November 1847.
The Household: Mrs Holdsworth welcomes her charges - former prostitutes and petty thieves, the broken, the homeless and the vulnerable – to a new life while millionairess, Angela Burdett-Coutts, faces the terror of her old life a few miles away when she discovers her stalker of ten years has been released from jail.
I loved the way the lives, thoughts and actions of Mrs Holdsworth and Angela Burdett-Coutts were reimagined and interwoven with those of the fictional characters, sisters Martha and Emily and soul sisters Josephine and Annie.
I read The Household in two sittings. The detailed descriptions of open sewers and hooves clattering over cobblestones, guttering candles and porcelain bedpans, squalid living conditions and sumptuous, glazed swan feasts transported me back in time to Victorian London, vividly picturing the fashions and furnishings, people and places. The growing tension and suspense as the multiple plots thickened kept the pages turning.
Beautifully written, extensively researched and brilliantly tied together, day-to-day life in Urania Cottage and the stories of these very different yet equally determined women fighting to survive in the face of adversity had me gripped from beginning to end.
A well-researched historical novel.
I found this an immediately engaging, easy to read and page-turning story. Having read ‘Charles Dickens: A Life’ by Claire Tomalin, I was already aware of the ‘Urania Cottage’ project and so was keen to find out how the author would fictionalise this social experiment. It soon became clear that the author had done a considerable amount of research into this period of Victorian history, as well as into the joint philanthropic project of Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts (millionairess and co-owner of Coutts Bank), which offered an alternative future to young women who had, for one reason or another, spent time in prison, and whose prospects looked bleak. However, at no point in my reading did I feel she had allowed her research to overwhelm the story (a mistake too many authors make!), instead she used it sparingly, yet very effectively, to portray an evocative sense of time and place and to highlight the social mores of that era. The idea of providing a structured environment in which young women could be taught not only how to cook and keep house, (in preparation for a life in service in Australia or one of the other colonies), but would teach them how to read and write and also offer lessons in other subjects, eg religion, history, geography and music, may seem rather patronising to our modern sensibilities, but for many of these young women, most of whom had had almost no education, it offered hope for a better future … although, as an experiment in social-engineering it was always likely to have at least as many ‘failures’ as ‘successes’!
I found that the various interconnecting storylines added a satisfying multi-layered dimension to the development of the story and also provided opportunities to gradually reveal insights into the backgrounds of the well-drawn individual characters. Although there were a few occasions when I thought that the pacing of the story felt rather slowed down by the number of plotlines, on balance the story held my attention and interest and I admired the author’s skill in weaving historical facts into her storytelling.