Elizabeth Fry
The name Elizabeth Fry is forever associated with Newgate Prison, one of the earliest institutions of incarceration in London. The reform movement in Britain at the time was driven, of course, by all of the elements of enlightenment, but also by the enormous changes brought about in British society by the Industrial Revolution, and the subsequent demographic shifts from rural to urban. The administration of justice was one early focuses of this movement, and penal reform subsequently became the subject of a great deal of impassioned debate.
Elizabeth Fry was Quaker, a Christian organization responsible for a great many of the social reform of the age. She was born in 1780 into a well-to-do middle-class banking family, and enjoyed a comfortable and closeted childhood. She married into the Fry confectionary family, and might easily have settled into obscurity had she not, by chance, visited the notorious Newgate Prison in East London.
There she was moved in particular by the deplorable conditions of the women’s section, where women and children existed in cramped and overcrowded conditions. Women ate, defecated, cooked and ate in the same cells were they slept on straw. Elizabeth Fry recalled often with horror the sight of children clinging to their mothers as they were dragged to the gallows.
She initially did little more to assist than preach, and although her efforts would always have a Christian overtone, she very quickly realized that preaching alone was not enough. So she founded the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners of Newgate, through which she was able to provide more practical assistance, but which also became a very important and influential vehicle for generating awareness. In 1818, she presented testimony to the British House of Commons, which resulted directly in the tabling and passing of the landmark Prison Reform Act of 1823.
Thereafter, with considerable momentum behind her, she broadened her direct outreach to women’s prisons nationwide, creating halfway houses and night shelters for vulnerable and vagrant women. She also campaigned tirelessly to modify and improve the transportation system, which was by then beginning to gather pace.
Elizabeth Fry was without doubt one of the most important social reformers of the age, and a pioneer of a movement of social reform that, after her in 1845, at the of sixty-five, continued to gather strength.