Tattycoram

Alicia Kerfoot is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Audrey Thomas’s story of the “real” life behind a Victorian
foundling and one of Charles Dickens’s characters is unexpectedly
unique. Harriet Coram (named after the foundling hospital) tells us her
story and creates suspense without losing the realism of a life. Her
adoptive parents from the country care for her until she is five (an
experience that shapes her life), before the hospital reclaims her.
Thomas portrays the very real issue of inherited identity with
sensitivity; she compellingly captures the inner voice of Hattie, who
sees the hospital as both protection and imprisonment.

The narrative takes Hattie into the home of Charles Dickens (major
benefactor of the hospital) to be a maid and governess. Thomas brings
Dickens into being for the reader in the same way that he conjures
“them up and then, by God, they appear in real life!” This is a
pivotal line, and one that connects Harriet’s shame at her name and
orphanage uniform to the power of narrative (textual or visual) to
control identity. Dickens’s sister-in-law knows how to utilize this
power, and calls Harriet by a name that associates her artistic talent
for “tatting” with her foundling hospital last name:
“Tattycoram.” This name draws the narratives of identity and fiction
together when Dickens uses it years later for a Harriet-like character
in Little Dorrit.

Free of the orphanage and the expectations of others (and of the
reader), Harriet teaches school in the country, helps to run a women’s
rehabilitation house, lives with her bird-catcher stepbrother, survives
cholera, and returns to the country with her other stepbrother. After
reading Little Dorrit, Harriet realizes that the women who give up their
children are a multitude of individuals, not characters. She imagines
“millions of little candles in memory of the children they have given
up.”

Thomas does not openly comment on the social implications of illicit
sexuality and maternity in Victorian England. Instead she imagines the
internal identity of just one character who experienced the London
Dickens made famous.