12 October: Boreham on Elizabeth Fry

A Transformation Scene
As long as the world has a heart to appreciate the valiant and sacrificial struggles of those who blazed the trail to a better and kinder civilisation, it will give a thought, on October 12, to Elizabeth Fry, who died on that day. At the outset, there was nothing to suggest the splendour of her career. The demure and sombre Quakers of the eighteenth century looked with profound suspicion on the antics and capers of the madcap Betty. The soul of gaiety, she was a born romp and the ringleader in every frolic. On one occasion she organised her sisters into highwaymen and held up the Norwich coach.

At a stately English home, a servant one afternoon announced that "a beautiful young woman on horseback in a scarlet riding habit "was coming up the drive. A Quakeress in a scarlet riding habit! Is it any wonder that broad-brimmed hats shook dubiously whenever their devout wearers pondered the frivolities of Betty? And is it any wonder that a girl of such high mettle achieved an adventure that changed the face of civilisation? She was thirty-three—mother of eight children with three more yet to come—when she tackled the task that seemed hopelessly beyond her strength. A chance visitor described to her the loathsome conditions under which the prisoners lived at Newgate. Mrs. Fry sickened as she listened to the appalling story. In defiance of the warnings of friends and officials, she hurried off to London, insisted on penetrating the noisome dungeons, and, as a consequence, beheld a spectacle that, ever after, haunted her like a nightmare. In one vile chamber she found more than three hundred cowering miscreants herded together in filth indescribable. Every dictate of decency was hideously violated. Untried suspects as well as convicted felons were treated with a callousness to which wild beasts would never be subjected.

Work That Impressed People Of All Classes
Sydney Smith declared that the most sublime spectacle in modern history was that of this queenly and cultured women devoting her conspicuous powers of intellect and heart to the redemption of the prisoners of Newgate. And Thomas Carlyle entirely agreed with him. Carlyle declared that to see the most detested and repulsive outcasts on the face of the earth clinging not only fondly but worshipfully to the only being who ever cared for them was enough to break a man's very heart. Some of the most eminent painters of the time found in that impressive scene a worthy subject for their brushes; and, as a result, we all seem to have looked into that serene, Madonna face, surmounted by its plain Quaker cap.

All the authorities agree that one secret of Mrs. Fry's success lay in her remarkable gift of perfect reading. Her elocution was natural and unstudied; yet the foremost masters of rhetorical art declare that her modulation and enunciation were absolutely flawless. Public speakers from every platform and forum, as well as ministers of all denominations, thronged to hear her in the hope that, discovering her secret, they might become infected by her skill. "Guided," said "The Times," of London, "guided by the inner light that never failed her undaunted soul, she tamed the wildest savagery and assuaged the darkest despair by her intuitive perception of human needs, her intrepid commonsense and her intense kindness of heart." With womanly intuition she sensed the service that was at the moment needed, and, as a natural result, she touched the life of the nation at a vital point.

The Overflow Of Benevolence To Other Shores
For, since the world began, no reformer ever witnessed a swifter and more sensational response to her endeavours. "Newgate," says Mrs. Fry's daughter, "became almost a show. The statesman and the peer, the city functionary and the foreign traveller, the high-bred squire and the country clergyman, flocked to witness the astounding transformation that had passed over the horrible scene." In one of his letters, Sir James Mackintosh tells of a dinner at which many peers and several members of the Cabinet were present, and at which the amazing triumph of Mrs. Fry was discussed, not only with enthusiasm but with emotion. Nor was England the sole area of her conquest. Not content with the transformation of Newgate, she passed from prison to prison throughout the provinces, and then, greatly daring, set out to visit the gaols of the principal European capitals. In her biography we sometimes see her in the condemned cell with the trembling wretches who, on the morrow, amidst public derision and execration, will become the prey of the gallows; we see her on the crowded deck of the convict ship that is about to bear its living freight of human misery to the uttermost ends of the earth; we see her in hospital wards, in lunatic asylums, on battleships, in the committee-rooms of the House of Commons, and, very frequently in the palaces of kings.

The last phases of her adventurous life are almost entirely concerned with her pilgrimage from court to court on behalf of unfortunates. Crabbe has chanted her eulogy in terms that expressed the universal sentiment:

One, I beheld, a wife, a mother, go
To gloomy scenes of wickedness and woe!
She sought her way through all things vile and base
And made a prison a religious place;
Fighting her way—the way that angels fight
With powers of darkness—to let in the light
Yet she is tender, delicate and nice,
And shrinks from all depravity and vice;
Shrinks from the ruffian gaze, the savage gloom
That reign where guilt and misery find a home;
Yet all she braved; she kept her steadfast eye
On the dear cause and brushed the baseness by.

Believer or unbeliever, Protestant or Catholic, Jew or Gentile, it was nothing to her. She worked hand in hand with men and women of every rank and station, of every creed and nationality; and for that reason, men and women of every class and kind will always cherish her inspiring memory and pass the story of her courageous crusade from one generation to another.

F W Boreham

Image: Elizabeth Fry