Free Imprudent Lady by Joan Smith Page A

endeavour.
    “It's time I was taking my seat in the House,” he explained. “I left the country when I was still quite young, and don't know it as I ought. There's no point listening to some long-winded politician read a list of statistics. You have to see it for yourself.” Prudence could not but wonder why she was included in his trips, but having no desire to be excluded, she remained silent. He did mention occasionally that a knowledge of these things would be helpful in her writing. She knew a view of the facade of a row of slums was not sufficient to enable her to write about the destitute, nor had she any desire to broaden her field of writing into sociology; but it was always pleasant to be with Dammler, and so she agreed with him.
    He had always some new place to take her. Places she had known to exist only by name, and had never thought to see in person. They went one day with baskets of fruit to Bedlam to see the inmates. Prudence was shocked and horrified to see the conditions under which the insane lived.
    “I can't believe people live like that,” she said when they left.
    “Just as well they're insane. If they weren't when they entered, they soon would be. And virtually nothing is done to cure them."
    “Well—but I don't suppose they could be cured."
    “They don't all have damaged brains. Haven't you known people who go off on a crazy spell for a time, but come back to sense later? I have. If it's someone from our class, he is tended privately and as often as not recovers. If it happens to a poor person, he's tossed into Bedlam and left forever."
    “Can nothing be done about it?"
    “Not by you or me alone. Politics is the answer. A problem of that magnitude can only be handled by society collectively—politics, in other words. Newgate is worse, but I shan't take you there."
    “Do you plan to go?"
    “Yes, I go once in a while."
    “Why do you subject yourself to that?"
    “I have been around the world. Now I want to see how other Englishmen live. We writers have to see these things."
    “Yes.” She had lived in London for four years, she estimated, and had seen nothing but her uncle's friends and a few shopkeepers. She felt herself richer for this spreading of her horizons, even if she never wrote about it.
    “I'm going to see the Jane Shores tomorrow,” he said that same day. “Would you like to come? It won't be pleasant either, but it is something a lady writer might be interested in."
    “Where are the Jane Shores?” she asked, imagining them to be some part of the docks.
    “In a Magdalen House. I am talking about the Jane Shores who are in the process of being reformed. Did you think I intended to take you to meet Harriet Wilson?” Prudence only smiled, not knowing Harriet Wilson was the city's leading courtesan.
    “There's one beyond Goodman's Field. I've arranged a visit to see how it's set up. Don't wear one of Fannie's bonnets; it would look out of place. Wear that old round bonnet you saved."
    Prudence felt a home for fallen women was more to her interest than Bedlam and agreed with enthusiasm to go to see them. This particular house, Dammler told her, catered especially to young unwed mothers. “Try not to show your shock if every second one is enceinte," he warned her.
    It was a fine looking building outside, red brick, solid and respectable, but inside it was austere. The young girls were about to go to a church service when Dammler and Prudence arrived and they too went to the chapel. Row upon row of girls came in, wearing greyish-brown stuff gowns, broad bibs, and flat straw hats with blue ribbons tied under the chin. Prudence was struck by their youth—most of them could not be more than fifteen or sixteen—and their innocent faces. She had expected to see bold, hardened women, but these girls walked with heads bent, eyes down, and their hands folded. They looked more like novitiate nuns than prostitutes.
    The sermon was an embarrassment to listen to—upbraiding these