Death & The Lady: Miss Coutts, Mr. Dickens & The Dead House Committee

Dickens's current preoccupations were many: he was more than half-way through writing Little Dorrit, running Household Words (whose new year's volume was due out next day, featuring the first number of Wilkie Collins's The Dead Secret), overseeing building works at his newly-acquired house at Gad's Hill, dealing with the management of the drainage and gas supply to Miss Coutts s refuge for homeless women at Urania Cottage in West London, and rehearsing and overseeing the preparations - costumes, props, sets, music, invitations and seating arrangements for the many guests clamoring to attend - for his production of The Frozen Deep at Tavistock House, just poised for its dress-rehearsal. [...]I have a strong trust in their putting this matter right for the future - just as I have in your scholarship [i.e.: the William Brown Exhibition] helping to raise up worthy successors to them. The Hospital - established for over a century on the Hyde Park Corner site - had revealed to itself during the enquiry that it had no dedicated storage for the dead other than the postmortem room in the hospital's basement - a top-lit galleried lecture theater with a dissecting table at its center - and an adjoining confined closet.7 A new room, with its own lock, was now erected for the decent storage of the dead after post-mortem examination in new individual "shells" (thin temporary coffins).8 In order to "avoid any appearance of indelicacy in the treatment of the corpses of female patients," a nurse was deputed to "dress and decently dispose" the bodies of the dead, and to take responsibility for showing relatives to the coffin-room at specified hours. 9 The Curator of the Pathological Museum, Dr. John Ogle, under whose remit the Dead House lay, was informed he had been under a misapprehension as to the nature of his responsibilities. To this end, a new bell was rigged up by a specialist contractor, from the Museum and the Dead House to the main hospital building, to summon responsible parties. 10 Thus it can be seen that most of the salient points in Dickens's Statement had hit home, especially the matter of the Hospitals responsibility for the disarray and nakedness of Mrs. Purvis's corpse, the inappropriateness of the manner in which it had been left, and the nonexistence of decent facilities or (most importantly) oversight - either of staffing, accommodation or ethos - for the care of the dead in the Hospital.11 Why the hospital mortuary was under the control of the Curato