Elizabeth Fry and Prisons

The descriptions of English prisons in the 1800s are shocking to read:

 There was no kindness, no humour, no order, even of meals, and nothing to do. The only diversions were gambling, fighting and drunkenness. Those who were dead drunk were happiest. A nineteenth century gentleman, in a letter to the London Chronicle, recorded: ‘Sir, Of all the seats of woe on this side of hell, few, I suppose, exceed or equal Newgate.’

So the keeper and turnkeys were understandably astonished when Elizabeth and her friend, Anna Buxton, laden with bundles, entered the prison and walked purposefully through vaulted passages until at last they came to the women’s yard at the extreme southern end of the building.

 Elizabeth Fry’s first impression of Newgate from outside might have been one of a certain architectural beauty. But inside she found gloom, bad smells, and overwhelming pandemonium. The sounds which echoed down the vaulted passages and grew louder as she approached were hardly human. Stephen Grellet had described the women’s quarters: 

They occupied two long rooms, where they slept in three tiers, some on the floor and two tiers of hammocks over one another… When I first entered, the foulness of the air was almost insupportable; and everything that is base and depraved was so strongly depicted on the faces of the women who stood crowded before me with looks of effrontery, boldness and wantonness of expression that for a while my soul was greatly dismayed.

Following their guide, Elizabeth and Anna passed the barred gateway of the women’s yard and were compelled to stop and look. The women, seeing visitors, pressed to the bars, stretching out desperate hands, whining, begging for pence to spend on beer at the prison tap. Those in front were fought by those behind; hands snatched them back by the hair, pinched them and punched them in the ribs with fists and elbows. Elizabeth’s wise eyes missed nothing. She had seen drunken Irish, gypsies in the extremes of poverty, the squalor of the London slums but she had never before seen a mass of women, by the hundreds, reduced to the level of wild beasts. Even the male prisoners were shocked at the depravity they saw in the women. One of them described going to the partition dividing the men’s from the women’s yard,

 We looked over, and the scene was even more disgusting than in the other yards. Their manners, gestures, language, were alike indicative of vice and ignorance....Oh, my happier, more enlightened countrywomen, while you are subscribing your thousands and tens of thousands for the propagation of Christianity, little do you think what misery exists in your own land and among your own sex.