| Nov 04, 2010


It took a special breed to withstand the rigours of the pioneer lumbering days in the Cloyne area and set up a household and raise a family. In 1857, Oris Cole, the son of a school board trustee from Buckingham, Quebec, came to Cloyne with his small, dark-haired immigrant bride of 19 or 20 years of age, hoping she would be up to the challenge.

Oris may or may not have known that his bride, Rhena Pollard, had already overcome some significant challenges in her life; that she had come into contact with the most famous writer of his age and that a character in one of his famous novels may have been based upon her.

Certainly no one in Cloyne seemed to know that Rhena Cole had been a prisoner in Sussex, England, when she was only 14 or so and had ended up as one of about 100 young women who participated in a social experiment/”home” for women in distress called Urania Cottage.

All local records indicate that she lived out her life as a pioneering mother. She raised seven children and joined the Salvation Army at some point in her life. She died in 1899 at the age of 63 and is buried in the Harlowe cemetery. Her great granddaughter, June Gillies of Winnipeg, Manitoba, has a family photograph that includes a severe, slim, dark-haired woman who was likely Rhena Cole.

For Jenny Hartley, a professor of Literature from England who has a particular interest in Charles Dickens and has written a book about Urania Cottage that is called “Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women”, that photograph is golden. It is the most prized artefact she has found in all of the research she has done about the 100 or so women who were taken in by Dickens and his benefactor, the wealthy Miss Burdett Coutts, between 1847 when Urania Cottage opened and 1857 when it closed.

Hartley has a fair bit of definitive information about Rhena Pollard from her days at Urania, from letters between Dickens and Coutts.

She was a particularly difficult girl, described alternately by Dickens as a “slow settler” a “troublemaker” and “audacious”. She rebelled against the strict rules of the house on several occasions, and at least one point she threatened to leave the house in a fit of temper. Dickens reportedly got out the worst, roughest dress that could be found in the cottage, and said he would send her out into the world in it as an “utterly friendless speck.”

She ended up staying, and in a letter from February 9, 1855, Dickens told Miss Burdett Couts that “Rhena Pollard was the subject of an especially good report.”

For Dickens, Urania Cottage had the dual purpose of being an experiment in socialising poor, uneducated women, and giving him an opportunity to experience the way these underclass girls talked and thought, which was particularly useful for someone who created so many famous ‘Dickensian’ characters. Indeed, most of the images of 19th century industrial revolution working-class England that are now burned into the collective consciousness came through the characters he created.

In the mid 1850s, Dickens was writing “Little Dorrit”, and in it there is a character named Tattycoram, a small, dark-haired, stubborn, fearless woman who bears a remarkable resemblance to Dickens’ accounts of Rhena Pollard, according to Jenny Hartley.

While most of the young women from Urania Cottage emigrated to Australia or stayed in England, Pollard was one of a very small number who came to Canada. She is also one of only two that Jenny Hartley has been able to trace.

In preparing a CBC Sunday Edition Documentary for airing on the 198th anniversary of Dickens’ birth earlier this year, Karin Wells took up the Rhena Pollard Cole story. Jenny Hartley had traced her to the Cloyne area, and she approached Marg Axford of the Cloyne and District Historical Society for further information. Together, Wells and Axford uncovered the gravestone of Oris and Rhena Cole in the Harlowe cemetery last year.

The historical society has approached North Frontenac Township for permission to put a marker in the cemetery about Rhena Pollard Cole and the township has agreed, so there will be a permanent record of her remarkable journey from Sussex, England, into the company of Charles Dickens and on to the wilds of the land of the Oxen and the Axe.

As a post-script, it appears that Dickens’ life took a less fortuitous turn than Rhena Pollard’s after they parted company. In 1857, at the age of 46, Dickens left his wife and 10 children, which led Miss Burdett Coutts to sever ties with him. Urania Cottage closed as well. Dickens became associated with an actress named Ellen Ternan, who was then 17. He published some of his greatest work in the next two or three years, “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Great Expectations”, but died of a stroke in 1870 at the age of 58.

As Jenny Hartley said in the CBC radio documentary, “Rhena Pollard outlived Dickens by 30 years, but Tattycoram outlived them both.”

(Prepared using material from the podcast of the CBC’s Sunday Edition, February 7, 2010, and the account “Fame Comes to Harlowe” from the Cloyne and District Historical Society Newsletter, The Pioneer Times, Vol. 8, No. 1, April 2010)

 

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