Dickens’s ‘fallen women’

Dickens showed genuine concern for London’s prostitutes and other ‘fallen women’. In 1847, along with his good friend the philanthropist Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, he established Urania Cottage as a place of refuge and rehabilitation for these unfortunates. Here the regime was at variance with traditional houses of reform such as the Magdalen Hospitals for penitent … Read more

William Carleton: famine, disease and Irish society

W.B. Yeats described the author William Carleton (1794–1869) as ‘a great Irish historian’. According to Yeats, ‘the history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields but in what the people say to each other on fair-days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage’, and these were … Read more