Among the Fallen

Among the Fallen is a sophisticated, compelling and troubling work that will appeal to older teens, especially girls, and to adults who appreciate historical novels. When readers first meet Prisoner E22, the 16-year-old narrator-protagonist, she is pacing in her cell at the Tothill Fields prison for juveniles. The year is 1857, the milieu is mid-Victorian England.

"I am caught up in him again like a web," she thinks. "Was there ever a girl called Orpha once?" Further on we read, "Ghosts fly in and out of my cell without my say." Stream-of-consciousness narration effectively shows how deeply Orpha is haunted by her past. In bouts of terror, she relives the occasions when her abuser forced himself on her, threatening to cut her with his knife. Orpha's tendency to "float and watch" while working at assigned tasks suggests that she may be suffering from dissociative disorder. Psychological conditions like disassociative and post-traumatic stress disorder were not defined or studied in medicine at that time but were certainly experienced, especially by the Victorian poor.

Schwartz captures readers’ interest by hinting at the tragic events leading to Orpha's imprisonment but withholding information. Piecing together the circumstances leading to Orpha’s becoming "one of the fallen" is intriguing and stirs readers’ sympathy. The story is rich in detail not only about social conditions generally, but specifically those in prisons. Orpha's head has been shaved, and her hands are stained from picking oakum; that is, unravelling hemp ropes from retired ships into fibres to be used in caulking seaworthy vessels. Inmates are forbidden to communicate with each other. Even in chapel, each girl is in a separate cubicle open at the front so that she can see the chaplain deliver his hellfire sermons. The cubicle walls are thin, though, and Orpha and Ivy, a young counterfeiter, manage to talk under cover of hymn-singing.

When Orpha finds a letter in her cell from "a friend" inviting her to apply to enter a home and rebuild her life once her term is up, she thinks it's a trap, "from a man, most likely...No man writes a letter to ones such as us unless he wants something." She finally does reply, though, and is interviewed by the director of Urania, a home in the country for destitute women. The refuge is named for the Greek muse of the sky, a place of divine power. Through this interview, readers learn more about Orpha's situation. Both of her parents, actors, were dead by the time she was 11- years-old. Her friend, Emma, daughter of a theatre owner, has written to her at Tothill, but Orpha is ashamed to respond. Orpha was raped and became pregnant, but she was unaware of what was causing changes in her body until her aunt kicked her out because of her condition. She fell in the street, miscarried, and was taken to hospital, then prison. While the interviewer from Urania points out that she was accused of infanticide, prostitution and robbery, readers learn as the story progresses that the reality was different.

Urania was a real place. Founded and funded by the wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett Coutts in 1847, it operated until 1862 and usually housed 12 girls at a time. After spending a year of rehabilitation, which included training in household skills and basic literacy and numeracy, a girl went to respectable employment overseas, most often in Australia. Orpha is interviewed by a Mr. Dickens, someone adult readers and some teens will recognize as the famous Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, and, indeed, he and Miss Coutts collaborated in creating and operating the home.

To determine Orpha's level of literacy, Mr. Dickens has her read aloud from Sketches by "Boz", the pseudonym he used for his first published works. Orpha has read this collection of stories about slum life in London, and she tells him so. "Pa used to say that though the poor are the dregs of society, Boz loves us!" she exclaims. She asks if he knows if Boz is still alive and writing. Dickens, who now publishes under his own name, says that Boz is indeed alive and that she will likely read his work again.

While Orpha is the primary story teller, Dickens' voice appears in reports and casebook entries (see introductory Excerpt). Not all Urania residents can be reformed. One girls takes off with her lover while another is so violent that she is asked to leave. Dickens is ahead of his time in his belief that talk therapy can free sufferers of dissociative disorder from their traumas, and, although Orpha is not as forthcoming as he would like, he eventually convinces her to use her literacy skills to write of her experiences. This suits Orpha, who, despite the rapport that she and the famous author establish, finds it easier to confide in the matrons or in Miss Coutts. Meanwhile she thrives at Urania, particularly when her prison friend, Ivy, joins her.

I wondered if Schwartz would include in her novel the scandal surrounding Dickens in 1857-8. At age 45, Dickens fell in love and had an affair with an 18-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan. His wife Catherine was stout and exhausted from bearing ten children and wasn't as much fun as she had been in their youth. In 1858, he published an open letter criticizing Catherine and announcing that he was separating from her, a move that shocked Victorian England - though not enough that his novels fell into disfavour. Reluctantly, Catherine left the family home, taking one child with her. Dickens supported her in another household. She never saw him again.

To her credit, Schwartz does not dodge this historic fact. In her notes, she refers to two Dickens biographers who wrote of the Ellen Ternan affair. She includes a scene prior to the scandal in which Orpha has been invited to visit the Dickens home. She senses "great distance" between husband and wife who seem to lead parallel lives, and she discovers that Catherine has a supply of laudanum pills to take the edge off things. Eventually Miss Coutts reveals the scandal to Orpha: "Charles has done the unthinkable - what men do," she says. "So we as women must carry on and guide our girls without him." His connection with Urania is terminated.

Orpha has already discovered that Dickens wanted the girls' stories as material for future novels, and, while she is grateful for his discussions with her about self-expression in writing, Orpha is happy to complete her journey of rehabilitation with the help of Miss Coutts as she is more at ease in the company of women. Ivy, in contrast, is in love with her partner in crime, Jack, who was transported to Australia. In the end, she looks forward to a fresh start there with him and wants Orpha to join them and be part of their family. Rather than a Dickensian happily-ever-after ending with all the loose ends tied up, Among the Fallen has a more realistic open-ending.

Thanks to her extensive research and skilled storytelling techniques, Virginia Frances Schwartz has depicted the plight of the Victorian poor with gritty realism. While parts of the story are too graphic for young teens, older teens and adults will find it gripping.