The world’s greatest novelist and England’s wealthiest heiress collaborated on a socially progressive project — a home for former prostitutes — when Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett Coutts launched Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush (London) in the 1840s.

The large, comfortable home, which provided its residents access to good food, nice clothes, books, and even music lessons, is detailed in Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, penned by UK academic Jenny Hartley, and published late last year.

Women who desired to live in the home were required to agree to “a year’s quiet domesticity followed by emigration to a distant colony” — places like Canada, Australia and South Africa — according to John Bowen’s review, published in the Times Literary Supplement.

Most intriguing to Dickens scholars is Hartley’s discussion of a “lost” Dickens book, a collection of case studies of the home’s residents, who were required to tell their life stories to the author, and then forbidden to ever mention their past again.

Hartley, as Bowen points out, draws parallels between that aspect of the Urania project and Dickens’ own past, as the son of a man sent to prison for failing to pay debts: “The parallel with the ways that Dickens handled his own family’s shameful secrets is striking. After John Dickens was freed from prison and the twelve-year-old Charles was released from Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, the Dickens family never spoke about the events again.”

About that lost book, Bowen writes, “Hartley has hunted widely, but the book probably went up in smoke in the great bonfire of his papers that Dickens lit one afternoon in the garden of Gad’s Hill.”

Hartley speculates that those case studies amount to Dickens’ lost “sixteenth novel” and his “ur-text, the book behind his other books.”

I’m thinking that most Dickens scholars would call that claim a rather large feat of creative speculation.

Another review of the book was published in The Guardian. Click here to read.