Research into the life of Charles Dickens, whose 200th birthday is celebrated today, has thrown up a case of how the acclaimed novelist, journalist and champion of social reform had been roped into saving a Victorian prostitute who didn't want saving. In fact, the unnamed "fallen woman" had little time for busybodies like Dickens, and in a letter to The Times of London, fumed: "You the pious, the moral, the respectable, as you call yourselves, why stand you on your eminence shouting that we should be ashamed of ourselves? What have we to be ashamed of, we who do not know what shame is?"
The correspondence had been found in the newspaper's archives as it prepared for the Dickens bicentenary, marked elsewhere with publication of biographies like Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life and recent new film and TV adaptations of his work.
In 1858, the newspaper published, under the pen-name "Unfortunate", a feature by a woman among the ranks of the 80000 or so prostitutes in London at the time.
The article impressed the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, a reformer campaigning against prostitution and the woman who bankrolled a shelter for "fallen women" set up by Dickens. Burdett-Coutts had urged Dickens to find out who she was, and the author wrote to the paper requesting her identity. The Times, however, reported that it appeared both Burdett-Coutts and Dickens had not read the article all the way through. In it, the anonymous woman described how, as the child of drunken parents, she became a prostitute at 15 and had no regrets - she made a good living, had educated herself, supported her family, paid her debts, put her brothers through apprenticeships and had "been charitable to her fellow creatures".
Dickens thought it best that she remain anonymous.
The Times last week reported that it was possible the article was a fake, but the editor at the time, John Thadeus Delane, insisted on its validity.
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