Elizabeth Fry

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
And I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Oh, here's another from the list. Yeah.
But I'm not clear how it got on the list,

(00:22):
when it got on the list, what prompted me to go, yeah,
let's talk about her. But here we are. Uh, And
an interesting and worthy entry, although I feel like my
examination of her is a little bit different in terms of, like,
where I spend time than maybe some other biographies, but
we can talk about that on Friday. Elizabeth Fry is

(00:42):
lauded as an early 19th century prison reformer. She was
definitely that, despite the fact that she had no formal
background in prison or social work or training to go
with that. But her life story also, to me, offers
a really interesting exploration of how a person finds their
calling and how much they may struggle intellectually and emotionally

(01:04):
getting there. So I'm focusing a little more on that.
I also want to mention her name a little bit
because this wasn't something I purposely did but found myself doing,
just so you understand. We will talk about the fact
that Elizabeth Fry went by the name Betsy. And I
found myself inadvertently referring to her as Betsy as I

(01:25):
was laying this out. Anytime we're kind of dealing with
her in her relationships with her childhood or family, even
as an adult. And then once she starts doing sort
of more professional things, although you kind of have to
air quote that a little bit, I started calling her Elizabeth.
So just FYI, either of those I think is accurate.

(01:48):
Although Elizabeth, as Tracy is about to tell you, was
her birth name. Yeah. Elizabeth Gurney was born on May 21st,
1780 in Norfolk, England. Her parents were John and Catherine Gurney.
And Elizabeth, who as Holly just said, went by Betsy,
was their third daughter. After her, the Gurneys had some
more kids. The total was 11 other children in addition

(02:10):
to Elizabeth. She was kind of in the middle-ish of them.
Her father was a banker and owned a wool factory,
which he had inherited. And for a while, the family
lived in Norwich, but they spent their summers at a
country home in Bramerton, which is about four miles away.
The family moved to Earlham Hall outside of Norwich when

(02:31):
Elizabeth was nine to accommodate this growing family. The Gurneys
were well off, and they had a wide range of
domestic help, including private tutors to teach the children writing, French,
and drawing. And although her family was a loving one
and she adored her mother, Betsy's childhood wasn't exactly easy.

(02:53):
Because as a child, she was kind of shy. She
was somewhat withdrawn. She worried a great deal and later
described having anxiety about bad things happening to her family members.
I read one thing about how she would constantly wake
up in the night convinced that her mother was dead
and run to check on her. And she stayed anxious.

(03:16):
We'll just give you a little spoiler alert on that one.
She was also afraid of the dark. She was afraid
of being submerged in water. So like when her siblings
were all excited to go like play in the lake
and go swimming, she was scared to do it. She
was afraid of even mildly scary things and stories. Like
when her mother would read her Bible stories to go

(03:37):
to bed at night, she would often become much more
frightened than the average child. And she just was really sensitive.
So she's described as crying a whole lot of the time.
She was so anxious, in fact, that she had trouble
concentrating when it came to the lessons her mother learned.
and the Tudors gave them, and her siblings would actually

(03:58):
tease her about this. It seems like it was a
very teasing household, and they would call her stupid, and
that made her feel even more anxious. The Gurneys were Quakers,
but they straddled the line between the Quaker world and
the society circles of Norwich, and they weren't as strict
in their religious dealings as other Quakers in the area were. Still,

(04:20):
the Quaker ideals were important to them, and Elizabeth saw
her mother and grandmother care for the poor of the
community as a routine part of their daily life. And
then when Betsy was just 13, all of her anxious
fears kind of came true when her mother died after
a three-week illness, and that was, of course, a huge blow.

(04:42):
But Catherine and Betsy had been especially close. Her mother
had once referred to Betsy in a letter to a
relative as my dove-like Betsy. And on the other side
of that relationship, Betsy had always felt like her mother
was the one person who was patient and understanding with
her and her anxiety, and she felt completely untethered and

(05:05):
alone after the loss, even in the midst of their
big family. She wrote in her journal about being what
she called in a valley, and that seems to have
been how she described being in a depression. In the
years that followed, Betsy found herself separating from her religion
in a number of ways. While she believed in the

(05:25):
social ideals of Quakerism, she started to spend time with
Unitarian friends. She wasn't the only member of her family
to be drawn to other religions. Other members of the
family found themselves aligned with Anglicanism. John Gurney had not
raised his children as strict Quakers, and because they had
contact with a lot of people from different denominations through

(05:47):
social events, Betsy's siblings had done really as much exploring
as she did. But more important than where she stood
on religion in Norwich society was that she was still
the daughter of of a family of means, and even
though she was a shy and anxious girl, she certainly
did have suitors. She was briefly engaged to a man

(06:09):
named James Lloyd, who broke that engagement off and broke
her heart in the process, although it is unknown why
exactly he did so. That whole relationship and how it
ended is a little unclear. But after it ended, her
depression was bad enough that she became physically ill, and
her father actually sent her to see a special doctor
in London. A 1981 biography about Elizabeth Fry, written by

(06:33):
June Rose, says of her during this time, quote, on
the rare occasions when she felt inclined, Betsy could be
quite as carefree and charming as the others, and despite
the family's pity for her, she seemed to attract the
opposite sex. She apparently had other proposals in her late
teen years, although she was also trying to work out
her identity for herself, and she didn't seem to take

(06:56):
them especially seriously. During the year that Betsy turned 17,
Prince William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester in Edinburgh, was staying
in Norwich, and the family had various occasions to entertain him,
which was a big deal and was apparently quite thrilling
for all the siblings. Betsy vacillated between being excited about this,

(07:19):
feeling guilty about being excited by it, and then kind
of spiraling into a morose reflection on waste and the
pain of socializing. After the first time she met the prince,
she wrote in her diary, quote, I met the prince.
It showed me the folly of the world. My mind
is very flat after this storm of pleasure. She was

(07:40):
clearly really at odds with herself, and she started to
describe feeling as though her talents would be, quote, devoured
by moth and rust if nothing more important than all
this revelry happened during the prince's residence in Norwich. It did,
in the form of another visitor. And that was William Savory,

(08:03):
a Quaker from the U.S., who gave a sermon at
their local monthly meeting in February of 1798. Betsy went
to see him speak again the next day after she
first encountered him, and she wrote in her journal, quote,
I have had a faint light spread over my mind.
At least, I believe it is something of that kind,
owing to having been much with and heard much excellence

(08:24):
from one who appears to me a true Christian. It
has caused me to feel a little religion. My imagination
has been worked upon, and I fear all that I
felt will go off. I fear it now, though at
first I was frightened that a plain Quaker should have
made so deep an impression on me. But how truly

(08:44):
prejudiced in me to think that because good came from
a Quaker, I should be led away by enthusiasm and folly.
But I hope I am now free from such fears.
I wish the state of enthusiasm I am in may last,
for today I have felt that there is a God.
I have been devotional and my mind has been led
away from the follies that it is mostly wrapped up in.

(09:08):
Savory's anti-war sermon had reconnected Betsy with her Quaker religion
after several years of drifting away from it. We also
have an account of Betsy seeing Savory speak as written
by her sister Richenda, which reads, quote, Betsy was generally
rather restless at meeting, and on this day I remember
her very smart boots were a great amusement to me.

(09:31):
They were purple laced with scarlet. At last William Savory
began to preach. His voice and manner were arresting, and
we all liked the sound. Her attention became fixed. At
last I saw her begin to weep, and she became
a good deal agitated. Incidentally, Savory mentioned in his account
of the day that some of the families at the

(09:53):
meeting in Norwich seemed too steeped in grandeur, which might
have actually been a reference to bets fabulous purple boots.
They had been seated on the front row. Yeah, a
number of biographers have been like, Betsy showed up and
showed out, and he may have just been like, this
is too much for me. Yeah. But they did become friends.

(10:14):
Betsy may have also feared that she would drift away
from this newfound fervor, but her journal entries seemed to
only become more intense in feeling. She wrote several days later, quote,

(10:36):
into my heart, which I hope with care and keeping
it from the many drafts and winds of this life,
may not be blown out, but become a large brilliant
flame that will direct me to that haven where will
be joy without a sorrow and all will be comfort.
I have faith. How much to gain? Not all the
treasures in this world can equal that heavenly treasure. May

(10:59):
I grow more and more virtuous, follow the path I
should go in, and not fear to acknowledge the God
whom I worship. I will try, and I do hope
to do what is right. Just a few weeks later,
Betsy was in London with her father, and they went
to a theater performance in Drury Lane, which she hated.

(11:20):
She wrote, quote,' I own I enter into the gay
world reluctantly. I do not like plays. I think them
so artificial that they are to me not interesting.' and
all seemed so very far from pure virtue and nature.
My hair was dressed, and I felt like a monkey.
London is not the place for heartfelt pleasure, so I

(11:42):
must not expect to find it. But William Savory was
also in London at that time, and she made sure
to see him give sermons on several occasions while in
the city. The sudden, intense devotion to religion on Betsy's
part caused some strain and some concern in the family.
Joseph Gurney and Betsy's siblings, of course, noticed a huge

(12:03):
change in her, and Betsy herself expressed concern in her
diary that she didn't know how to live the life
she felt called to without hurting her family. Coming up,
we are going to talk about the ways that Betsy
sought to live a life true to the Quaker religion.
But first, we are going to pause for a sponsor break.

(12:33):
From the time of Betsy's encounter with Thomas Savory and
feeling suddenly religious, Betsy lived her life in a state
of devotion to Quakerism, even going so far as to
just adopt the practice of referring to others as thou
in thee instead of ever using the word you and
wearing a dark bonnet and often a hood. This was

(12:55):
amidst a family where no one else was doing the
same thing, so she definitely stood out. But in addition
to these sort of surface behaviors, she also started doing
a lot of work in her community to help others.
She worked on feeding and clothing the poor, and she
started a Bible program for children. When one of the
men who worked at Earlham was seriously ill, she sat

(13:18):
with him every day and read to him. He did
not survive that illness, and she was with him almost
to the end of his life. She also found a
kinship in a cousin named Priscilla Gurney, who had also
dedicated her life to that of a plain Quaker, so
much so that Priscilla had left home to live in
the Quaker colony at Colebrookdale. Visiting that Quaker colony, Betsy

(13:42):
found a fresh bout of inspiration, and as she became
more and more engaged in plain Quaker ways, her family
sometimes made fun of her, continuing that theme of teasing.
And then a new visitor arrived at Earlham in 1798
to visit Betsy's brother John. That was Joseph Fry. The

(14:02):
following year, he visited again, but this time it was
clear that he was more interested in seeing Betsy than
seeing her brother. Joseph proposed, and Betsy told him that
she needed six days to give him an answer. This
was a case where neither family was wild about this match.
Joseph came from a wealthy family that made their money

(14:23):
importing tea, but they were very strict Quakers, and in
the estimation of the Gurneys, not very worldly. Betsy told
him no, but she also felt as though she would
never meet such a good match for her and anyone else.
When Joseph wrote to Betsy's father and asked to visit
in December of 1799, Betsy asked her father to please

(14:45):
let him come, although she was still a little unsure
about marriage for herself. And she kind of continued to
be wishy-washy about it, noting that she was embarrassed by
Joseph's clumsiness when they were out together, but she also
missed him when he was gone. At one point, she
wrote that she liked him as a friend but disliked

(15:06):
him as a love interest, but also that she thought
they were soon going to be together. There's also this
moment in the midst of this where her dad actually
writes to him and says, like, stop coming. She's not
treating you right. Like, she's dragging you along, and that's
not fair to you either. So Betsy was obviously kind
of a dramatic teen, that's for sure. And at one point,

(15:28):
when the two of them were out walking together when
he was visiting, she shared her uncertainty with Joseph Fry,
and he told her that if she wanted to be
engaged to him, but then at any point felt that
she couldn't go through with the marriage, even if it
was the day before they were supposed to get married,
that that would be okay, and he understood. And she

(15:48):
wrote that after this, quote, he kissed me, which agitated
me so much I went upstairs and cried. Soon thereafter,
she started writing in her journal that she loved him.
Though she continued to have moments of doubt, the two
of them got married on August 19, 1800. They were
married at a Quaker meeting, and Betsy described the day

(16:08):
this way, quote, I awoke in a sort of terror
at the prospect before me, but soon gained quietness and
something of cheerfulness. After dressing, we set off for meeting.
I was altogether comfortable. The meeting was crowded. I felt
serious and looking in measure to the only sure place
for support. It was to me a truly solemn time.

(16:31):
I felt every word and not only felt, but in
my manner of speaking, expressed how I felt. Joseph also
spoke well. Most solemn it truly was. Joseph's work was
in London, and so that is where the couple lived,
which kind of tickled me after she said she could
not find much happiness there. Settling into that new life

(16:53):
in the city did have challenges for Betsy, although some
of those challenges are a little surprising. They had more
to do with Joseph's family's perception of her than any
of the issues she was having leaving Norwich, although she
did miss home. The Fry family had been part of
the Society of Friends since its founding in the 17th century,

(17:14):
and although they lived in a big city, as we
said earlier, the Frys kept quite strictly to the Quaker
way of life. They lived simply and intentionally. On the
other hand, Betsy had been raised in Norwich, far from
the city, but her father had not lived that way,
and he had enjoyed a way of life that his
wealth and social standing afforded him. Betsy had grown up

(17:36):
going to lavish parties and entertaining princes, and to the
Fry family, the perception was, as she wrote in her journal, quote,
my manners had too much of the courtier in them.
They thought she was kind of too fancy, maybe a
little too frivolous in the way she socialized. This had
to have felt a little bit like whiplash to Betsy,

(17:56):
since at home she was being teased for being so
strict in her Quakerism and she expected that marrying Joseph
was going to put her into a family that was
more closely aligned with her beliefs. Reading Elizabeth Fry's journal
entries from throughout her life, but especially her early marriage,
offers a view of a person who's in a constant
state of self-awareness. This period sounds both anxious and offers

(18:22):
a glimpse of a person settling into their life and
finding its comforts. She wrote things like, quote, Elsewhere, she wrote, quote,

(18:54):
I must try to trust in the Lord and I
hope to find safety. I felt quite in a state
of agitation until we went to meeting. It made me
feel almost ill in body both last night and this morning. However,
my mind was sweetly calmed in the meeting and I
felt vastly relieved from my terrors and a little love

(19:14):
and trusting in the heavenly master. She also mentioned really
enjoying the quiet of times when it was just her
and Joseph in the house together. And as many newlyweds,
Betsy and Joseph discovered a number of matters of conflict
in their marriage. Joseph wanted his new bride to be
more direct in her social dealings, and Betsy wanted her

(19:37):
husband to be a little bit more diligent and dedicated
to his business. And the family continued to add stress.
Tracy just mentioned that she really found, you know, sort
of a pleasure and a comfort in the quiet times
when she and Joseph got to be just at home
alone together. But it didn't happen very often because the
home that Betsy and Joseph lived in was part of

(19:59):
the family business. So it was used as a sort
of common space. They kind of treated it like communal property,
and people came and went whenever they wished. And Betsy
was expected to host any Quakers of prominence who visited London,
and that had been the Fry family practice for decades.
So she kind of had to be ready to just
offer up a bed to anybody who came into town.

(20:22):
And all of this actually led Betsy to a period
where she described feeling disconnected from the religious passion that
had been a factor in choosing to marry Joseph Frye.
She was involved in the daily happenings of a devout
Quaker family, but she didn't find it to be the
spiritual experience that she hoped for. She described the first

(20:42):
year of her marriage as feeling muddled and uncomfortable as
she tried to fit in and find her place. And then,
to add to the many things that she was learning
to live with, she suspected she was pregnant soon after
they moved to London, and she was. This was the
start of a family life that would ultimately include 11

(21:03):
children spread out over 22 years. After her first child,
a daughter named Catherine, was born on August 22, 1801,
she wrote in her journal, quote, I did not experience
that joy some women describe. Elizabeth Fry has been described
as a hypochondriac in a lot of accounts of her life,
and that anxiety over health matters was also a part

(21:26):
of her motherhood. She was constantly afraid for the health
of her children just from the very beginning. Her journal
entries during this time also start to take a really
rather negative tone. She seems to find fault with everything
around her. Biographer June Rose put it this way, quote,
in her early 20s, Betsy Fry's personality was at its

(21:49):
least attractive. She was ill at ease with herself, frustrated
in her religious aspirations. unable to use her powerful intelligence
for the social work in which she was to excel.
And Betsy was also pregnant again not long after the
first child arrived, and she wasn't very happy about it.
She loved her children, but she also wrote, very frankly,

(22:12):
that women had a much harder path in life than
men because of the expectations of having and rearing children
in addition to all of the daily things they were
expected to do. She also very much seems to have
been prone to what today would likely be recognized as
postpartum depression, as she often described feeling constant nervousness, physical exhaustion,

(22:34):
and a sense of being, quote, overcome and undone. We'll
talk about the ways that Elizabeth Fry found peace and
fulfillment after we hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff
You Missed in History class going. Elizabeth Fry did find

(22:58):
some peace and purpose in outreach to the poor, doing
charitable work in London similar to that which she had
done in Norwich. Her home at Mildred's Court eventually became
a place where the city's poor would stop in for help,
requesting things like clothing or food or a little money
to get them through. Then, after becoming known for this work,

(23:19):
she was given an opportunity to serve as a visitor
to the Friends School and Workhouse in Islington. She would
visit the children there and bring them snacks for tea
time and share Bible verses with them and pray with them.
And she found all of this really fulfilling. It seemed
that getting out of her own head and focusing on

(23:39):
helping others was a huge boost to her well-being. Elizabeth
started doing so much work in the community, led entirely
by her desire to do good in service to the
ideals of the Society of Friends, that it garnered her
a lot of attention. That's attention she insisted she didn't want.
She started and ran a soup kitchen. She continued to

(24:01):
give people clothing and money and food, and she tried
to help anyone who asked, although she definitely had some
opinions about who actually qualified as needy. We'll talk about
that more on Friday. The other thing that was significant
in this time is that Elizabeth had found her voice.
She had described being afraid to speak in any kind

(24:22):
of strong tone or about anything but friendly acquiescence with people.
But in advocating for people who were less fortunate than herself,
she was able to muster both courage and strength while speaking.
She was often moved to speak at regular Quaker meetings,
and eventually this led to her being recognized with the

(24:42):
title of minister by the Society of Friends in March
of 1811. One of the causes that Fry dedicated herself to,
and which is perhaps her best-known work, was the struggle
of women in the prison system. In 1813, Fry was
encouraged by Stephen Grellet to visit Newgate Prison. He was
a friend of the family. And what she saw was,

(25:04):
of course, very eye-opening to a woman who had been
raised and privileged. Up to this point, it was standard
procedure for women to all be incarcerated together. And that
meant people who committed violent crimes were in the same
huge open area as people who had been brought in
for petty crimes. Sometimes women were also kept in the

(25:26):
same room as men. A lot of women in prison
were single mothers. They had no one to leave their
children with, so the kids were also in prison with them.
Some of the women and children were barely clothed. Additionally,
there were women who had not gone through the legal process.
They were awaiting trial but were being held alongside people

(25:48):
who had been convicted and were serving sentences. Obviously, this
whole scenario is fraught with problems from basics like hygiene
to more serious issues of safety. Additionally, male jailers were
put in supervisory positions over the women being held. So
there's an obvious power imbalance there and some danger. But

(26:09):
there was also inequity in all of this for those
guards because they did not make a regular salary. They
were paid fees by the imprisoned women as their income.
Also men, but in this case, she was dealing mostly
with women. If someone had extra cash, they might be
able to bribe a jailer for preferential treatment or even

(26:30):
early release. But if they had no money, that meant
that the jailers did not get paid and their situation
got really rough. In some cases, people stayed in prison
well past the terms of their sentence because they just
couldn't afford the jailer's fees that they needed to pay
to be released. Elizabeth Fry saw ways she thought she

(26:51):
could help, and she built on reform work that was
already underway for the general prison system to focus on women. Initially,
this started simply with reading the Bible to the women
of Newgate, but several years after her first visit, she
really launched a campaign for reform. It started with a
school for the children who were at the prison with
their mothers. And she also worked on creating a thorough

(27:15):
assessment of the cases of the various women in the prison—
So there was a count of who was serving time
for what crimes, who was just there awaiting trial, etc.,
as a way to advocate for classification and separation of
groups based on the situation they were in and the
severity of their offenses. She also wanted to initiate a

(27:35):
variety of programs to rehabilitate women and enable them to
provide for themselves when their sentences were finished. Some of
these women were destined for Australia via the ships that
transported people to penal colonies as part of a colonization project.
We have talked about that on the show before. And
Elizabeth Fry wanted to ensure that anyone who left Newgate

(27:58):
had enough life skills to increase their chance of survival
on trips like that and also hopefully would give them
a chance at a better life once they arrived in Australia.
To formalize all of this work and expand it, she
reached out to other Quakers who were interested in reform,
and she formed the Ladies' Association for the Improvement of

(28:18):
the Female Prisoners at Newgate in 1817. Fry got a
boost through family in this enterprise. In 1807, her sister
Hannah had married a man named Thomas Fowle Buxton. Buxton
was a brewer, but in 1818, he ran for and
was elected to Parliament. He had been an Anglican all

(28:39):
his life, but had become interested in the causes that
the Quaker community supported through his marriage into the Gurney family.
And he was willing to take Elizabeth's concerns about incarcerated
women before Parliament. He published a book titled An Inquiry,
Whether Crime and Misery Are Produced or Prevented by Our
Present System of Prison Discipline in 1818 that was part

(29:01):
of that effort. And that did bring attention to a
lot of the issues we have mentioned. She wrote during
this time, quote, It is now more than three years
since we first began our operations in Newgate, and how
encouraging it is that the experience of every year should
increase our hopes and diminish our fears as to the
beneficial result of these exertions. Indeed, it is wonderful to

(29:25):
observe the effects of kindness and care upon some of
these forlorn creatures, how it tenders their hearts and makes
them susceptible of impression. I am of opinion, from what
I have observed, that there are hardly any amongst them
so hard but that they may be subdued by kindness, gentleness,
and love, so as very materially to alter their general conduct.

(29:48):
Some of the worst prisoners have, after liberation, done great
credit to the care taken of them. Also in 1818,
Elizabeth Fry was brought before a House of Commons committee
on prison conditions to speak on these issues. By this point,
she was considered to have a good deal of expertise
on the matter because she had been making regular visits

(30:10):
to Newgate for several years. But her Quaker beliefs on
these matters proved to be problematic. Fry was adamant that
the death penalty should be abolished, which got a lot
of members of Parliament pretty riled up. The argument made
against her position was that without the threat of judicial homicide,
there was not a strong enough deterrent against serious crimes.

(30:35):
But this was also a time when even pretty minor
offenses could result in a death penalty, although there was
a movement to reform legal codes which was underway. Some
of the detractors of Fry's ideas sought to discredit them
by pointing out that she was not an expert in
matters of the law and she was essentially a tourist
in the spaces that she wanted to reform. Fry traveled

(30:59):
throughout Europe starting in 1818, touring prisons and documenting what
she saw in them. And she used these detailed notes
to write up reports about each one, which included recommendations
for improvements. A lot of the time, she had actually
been invited because once she appeared before the House of Commons,
people started to want to hear what this reformer had

(31:19):
to say. These recommendations, which were not only for incarcerated women,
but for facilities that housed men as well, were generally
very similar to the ones that she had made for Newgate.
She advocated that women and men should be incarcerated separately,
with violent offenders and misdemeanor offenders also kept separately, and
that women should serve as supervisors and jailers of other

(31:42):
women instead of male guards. She also continued to recommend
ideas intended to reduce recidivism and make the time that
people spent serving sentences productive rather than letting them simply
sit in their cells. So one of the things she
suggested uniformly was education. This included religious studies, but also

(32:04):
non-religious instruction and training for useful employment once their time
in prison was over. Because Fry had become something of
a public figure, in 1821, the association that she founded
to help Newgate's incarcerated women population had evolved to have
a broader base of supporters and the potential for greater impact.

(32:26):
And it was decided at that point that it would
be better served by a name that reflected this wider scope.
So at that point, it became the British Ladies' Society
for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners. In 1822, Sir
Robert Peel became Home Secretary in Parliament, and he was
much more open to the reforms that Elizabeth Fry had

(32:47):
been campaigning for than his predecessor had been. Due in
part to her influence, in 1823, the Jails Act was passed,
which stated, quote, prisons should be made secure, jailers should
be paid, female prisoners should be kept separately from male prisoners,
doctors and chaplains should visit prisons, and lastly, attempts should

(33:09):
be made to reform prisoners. This was a first step,
and Elizabeth Fry and the other members of her reform
society continued to champion the cause of prison reform. In
the 1830s, there was still a great deal of debate
about the management of incarcerated populations. So even though a
decade of reform advocacy had been going on, they were

(33:31):
still arguing about it in Parliament. In October 1835, the
House of Lords appointed two men to inspect the prisons
of London. Those were philanthropist and juvenile criminal reformist William
Crawford and the chaplain of Millbank Penitentiary, Revlin Whitworth Russell.
And their first report was about Newgate exclusively because they

(33:53):
realized it had plenty of things that they needed to discuss.
Their findings were actually pretty similar to all the things
that Fry had found when she first visited Newgate. Additionally,
their report specifically spoke about the work of Elizabeth Fry.
And these two inspectors commended her efforts, and they acknowledged
that they had improved the hygiene of the prison, they

(34:15):
had beneficially occupied people with things to do, and it
had had a positive impact in other ways. But there's
always a big caveat. The issue that they had with
her was that some of the women's programs and lectures
and training sessions included happened at times that caused them
to miss chapel services. The implication here was that the

(34:38):
work of a Quaker woman was interfering with the workings
of the Anglican church in the prison systems, and that
was a problem. That aspect of the report damaged Fry's
standing with the public to a degree, but she was
still respected in many circles, including very powerful ones. By
the time Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837, Elizabeth

(35:00):
Fry was well known for her reform work. So much
so that the young queen met with her on a
number of occasions to speak about her work. Fry toured
Europe giving talks about prison reform and was welcomed by
heads of state and asked to give reports and counsel
by them. This also garnered her a good deal of
criticism from some Quakers who worried that her fame was

(35:23):
not in line with the religion she claimed. Yeah, she
was always very adamant. Like, I don't want credit. I
don't want to be lauded for this. But, like, at
the same time, she was being very vocal and there
was kind of no way to not be famous. So
she was kind of stuck between a rock and a
hard place in that regard. Yeah. The 1840s saw a

(35:45):
great deal of family tragedy for Elizabeth Fry and a
slowing down for her as well. Her beloved son William,
an adult at that point who had doted on her
and had taken care of her in many instances, died
along with his daughter of scarlet fever. The family had
been afraid to even tell Elizabeth because they thought she

(36:06):
might die of shock or grief immediately. But she did
endure the news, although she also lost four more family
members in a very short period of time after this,
including her supporter in Parliament, Thomas Fowle Buxton. In September
of 1845, she wrote to one of her sons, quote,
I deeply feel that from long and continued illness, I

(36:29):
can be very little to your dearest father in his
latter days, and I feel it most important that his
sons should be his helpers and comforters. I think that
you cannot expect that you will very long have a
mother to come to. Elizabeth Gurney Frye died A few
weeks later, on October 12, 1845, in Ramsgate, Kent, after

(36:52):
a stroke. Although there was no funeral ceremony in keeping
with Quaker tradition to eschew such things, an estimated 1,000
people showed up to watch silently as Elizabeth was interred
in the Quaker cemetery at Barking in East London. And
that's Elizabeth Fry. Yeah. This is very fascinating. Do you

(37:14):
have some listener mail? I do. I can't wait till
Friday because I have so many thoughts about Elizabeth Fry. Yeah.
But in the meantime, I have a listener mail from
our listener, Ren, who's writing about Beulah Henry and writes,
Hi there, Holly and Tracy. I just listened to your
podcast about Beulah Louise Henry and the flagpole invention idea.
I believe it is a simpler design than described. It

(37:35):
may look something like this. The pole is lowered into
a surrounding hole, preventing contact with the ground. This would
give it more clearance as it moves around being lowered.
For safety reasons, I assume you would need a cover
for the hole when it is not being lured. Maybe
a six-year-old would have thought of that. This is just
a thought. Please enjoy my silly little drawing on the
sticky note. I spend my days inventing lab equipment. What

(37:57):
I have found is that the simplest ideas prove to
be the most effective. Your show brings so much joy
to my life. I have listened to you for years,
and often the podcast accompanies me while I do my work.
Thank you for all of your dedication to craft. Keep
up the good work. Okay, one, I think you're a
cool person because... If you're inventing lab equipment, that is neat.
I don't think this is what Beulah had in mind, though.

(38:18):
I kept going back and looking at the exact quote,
and I don't think it quite lines up because it says,
there should be a hole right through that pole so
the flag could drop through and never touch the ground.
So the hole is through the pole, not the pole
going into a hole. And as I say this, I
feel like I'm writing the silliest children's book ever. The

(38:41):
pole and the hole. But this solution of rents is
quite ingenious, I will say. It just drops the whole
flag and its pole underground until it is re-raised the
next time, which is genius. Someone somewhere sent us a
video of like a patio umbrella. And the patio umbrella,

(39:03):
instead of folding down and then you tie it up
on the outside... it sort of folded inside out and
dropped down into the pole that holds it up. And that,
to me, is more of a hole through the pole,
because the whole pole was hollow. See, when you keep
saying whole pole, you do sound like you're writing a
children's book. It is a little weird, yeah. Yeah, I

(39:24):
don't know. Oh, Beulah, I'm going to get in my
time machine and be like, I'm going to waste every
other opportunity. to go, girl, what did you mean? We're
all really trying to suss this out. We're very confused
about the whole through the pole. I like it, though,
because it's making us all think creatively, which is always
a benefit to our minds to do that. And also,
you know, just who knows what someone will invent as

(39:45):
a consequence. I'm just delighted that someone who invents things
actually had the desire to weigh in on this. So
thank you so much, Wren. If you would like to
write to us and share your thoughts on maybe how
this poll hole situation works, or on Elizabeth Fry and
her very emo self, which, again, we're going to talk

(40:06):
about a lot on Friday, or anything else that comes
to mind, you are invited to do so at historypodcast
at iheartradio.com. If you would like to look at the
show notes and the sources that we use to put
together shows, you can do that at missedinhistory.com. Each episode
has show notes that will show you all the things
we looked at and read or in some cases skimmed.

(40:29):
And that is easy to access. If you would like
to subscribe to the show and you haven't done that yet,
that is also easy to do. You can do that
on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your
favorite shows. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the

(40:51):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

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