Elizabeth Fry

3 Key excerpts on "Elizabeth Fry"

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  eBook - ePub

  Newgate Narratives Vol 1

  • Gary Kelly(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) was a member of the large and well-to-do Quaker family of Gurneys of Norwich. As a child she was nervous and a slow learner, and experienced a spiritual conversion in 1798; her strong religious feeling would bolster her life of social activism, often verging on feminism, as seen in the passages cited here. In 1800 she married Joseph Fry of a Quaker mercantile family and bore eleven children. She was active in a variety of charities for the poor, campaigned for vaccination against smallpox, and in 1813 found her most famous calling after visiting the women’s side of Newgate Prison. The conditions there appalled her and she set about improving them with the help of women associates, usually supported by their men family members. She developed an increasingly formal organization and won official approval for her work, marked by the formation in 1817 of the Ladies Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate. Described and promoted by Fry and others over the next few decades, the Ladies’ plan of reformation was widely hailed and taken at face value, though there is evidence that many of the beneficiaries of their attention calculated it was in their interest to go along with the Ladies’ schemes (see for example the testimony of Newgate prisoners in the passages in this volume from the 1836 Reports of the Inspectors of Prisons). Nevertheless, the direct action of Fry and her associates set an example to many other humanitarians and reformers, and to this day the many societies around the world for assisting imprisoned women are named after Elizabeth Fry.

  This biography – or hagiography – of Fry celebrates her while quietly disclosing the emotional and psychological tensions she suffered for engaging in social work and activism of kinds usually closed to women and often disapproved of as unfeminine, but yet exploited by numbers of nineteenth-century women as a way to enter the public sphere.

  Note on the text: the present editor’s omission is indicated by […]; spellings such as ‘your’s’ for ‘yours’ and ‘her’s’ for ‘hers’ were accepted variants at the time the book was published. CHAPTER IX.

  1817, 1818. Extract from Crabbe’s Poems—Letter to her sister—General state of Prisons—School in Newgate—Case of Elizabeth Fricker—Newgate Association—Description from Buxton—Sophia de C—’s Journal—Vote of thanks from the City—Letters from Robert Barclay, Esq., &c.—Letters to her daughters—Notice in newspapers—Marriage of her brother, Joseph John Gurney—Extracts from letters—Winter in London—Examinations before House of Commons.

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  Making and remaking saints in nineteenth-century Britain

  • Gareth Atkins(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  Sisters of Charity, Jameson cited the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59), pointing out that the Roman Church made space ‘for female agency’, assigning to ‘devout women … spiritual functions, dignities, and magistracies’, while ‘in our country’:

  If a pious and benevolent woman enters the cells of a prison, to pray with the most unhappy and degraded of her own sex, she does so without any authority from the Church; no line of action is traced out for her, and it is well if the Ordinary does not complain of her intrusion, or if the Bishop does not shake his head at such irregular benevolence. At Rome, the Countess of Huntingdon would have a place in the calendar as Saint Selina, and Mrs. Fry would be foundress and first Superior of the blessed Order of the Sisters of the Gaols.8

  The reference to Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) is unsurprising, for few women were made to embody the ideal of sisterhood in charity as much as the prisoner reformer, or would be more associated with lay constructions of saintliness. In popular representations of Fry’s work at Newgate Gaol we can detect the quasi-secularisation of female sanctity to validate women’s public service. Indeed, Victorian ideals of female saintliness were heavily influenced by these imaginative reconstructions of Newgate’s dungeons. As I shall show, Mrs Fry became the saintly model other women were urged to follow, while subsequent portraits of laudable women would be drawn in similarly hallowed hues. By way of example, I explore Fry’s contemporary, Sarah Martin (1791–1843), prison visitor at Great Yarmouth Gaol, also effectively canonised by the Victorians. By depicting women reformers in saintly terms, their advocates mythologised and sentimentalised their accomplishments, I argue, and certainly obscured less conventionally ‘feminine’ aspects of their dogged commitment. I begin, however, by outlining the posthumous ‘canonisation’ of the two prison visitors and their place in hagiographic accounts of ‘worthy women’.

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  Trailblazing Women of the Georgian Era

  The Eighteenth-Century Struggle for Female Success in a Man's World

  • Mike Rendell(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword History

    (Publisher)

  In many respects prison inmates were left to look after themselves. Basically, the prison authorities locked them up and left them to their own devices, and it was not until Elizabeth Fry came along that the female prisoners received the help they needed to help themselves. She discussed her plans with the prisoners and got them to agree to organise a prison school. She introduced Bible classes and personally gave readings every Friday. She encouraged a team of women to help her improve conditions in gaol, recognising the power and importance of ‘women working together for women’. Prison dress was introduced, and alcohol and gambling was banned. In April 1817 she formed the Ladies’ Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate, aiming:

  to provide for the clothing, the instruction, and the employment of these females, to introduce them to knowledge of the holy scriptures, and to form in them as much as lies in our power, those habits of order, sobriety, and industry which may render them docile and perceptible whilst in prison, and respectable when they leave it.

  Four years later the scope of the group was extended to cover all women in all prisons, becoming known as the ‘British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners’. As such it can be regarded as the very first female organisation operating right across the whole of Britain.

  In 1818 she became the first woman ever to give evidence to a parliamentary committee looking into prison conditions. Elizabeth’s ideas transformed the prison environment. A place where society had dumped what were regarded as the vilest dregs of humanity became places of hope. Kindness replaced cruelty, and soon the fame of Elizabeth Fry spread nationwide, acquiring her the name ‘the angel of prisons’. Her success seems to have surprised even her, writing about the female prisoners in 1817: ‘Already, from being like wild beasts, they appear harmless and kind.’

  She travelled extensively around Britain, and later throughout the continent, addressing women’s groups and pressing for further changes. Always, she urged the creation of local female committees to arrange prison visits. Elizabeth also campaigned against capital punishment, was opposed to solitary confinement for women, called for greater religious tolerance, and pressed for improvements in the conditions on board the prison ships heading for Tasmania and New South Wales.

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