Elizabeth Fry

I have been wanting for a while now to read about the female social reformers in the UK. Josephine Butler is also on my to-read list. Elizabeth Fry was born into a wealthy Quaker family in the late 1700s. She moved from her happy family home in Norfolk to London when she married into another wealthy Quaker family. Whilst in Norfolk, Fry felt a burden to teach the many poor and uneducated children in Norwich. They would come and have lessons in the laundry room and were referred to as "Betsy's imps". When she moved to London and started having babies she was very torn between all the duties of home and wanting to alleviate poverty. The book gives a fascinating insight into the political scene at the time and the Napoleonic Wars. It highlights the huge disparities between rich and poor, particularly noticeable in London. I'm only half way through the book, but here are some things I copied:

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I found the following interesting about young people having their own space. It's something I notice living where we do- the locals are never alone. The desire for being alone is generally not something well understood. It has many implications as you struggle for privacy to be able, for example, to read certain books:

[Elizabeth] needed room to grow. In the late eighteenth century the need of a healthy person to be alone occasionally had not been recognised; and a room of one’s own was rare. A quarter of a century later young Florence Nightingale would complain about having no time or space to herself. And the girl heir to the English throne grew up in the stuffy safety of her mother’s bedroom only to make one of her first commands as Queen Victoria in 1837: ‘Then may I be alone for half an hour?’ Elizabeth shared a bedroom with three other sisters; she was seldom alone for a moment, day or night, in that abundant family circle.

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The following also hit a chord with me, as although most children here do now go to school, they are not given a love of books and a love of learning. Most certainly don't know the joy of having "opened up to them the world of books". We get laughed at by some friends for having so many books and way too many ladies are completely illiterate. Many in the past had to stay at home and not go to school, to help their mothers look after large families (especially if fathers had been killed in the struggle against Sadam):

She wanted someone to help, even with her limited qualifications, now, today. She didn’t want to wait any longer. And then it hit her. All around her were children without any education. Her very desire to educate herself had taught her the value of such knowledge and the crippled state of life without it. These poor children all around her could neither read nor write – and neither could their parents. They had no one to tell them stories, to open up to them the world of books. Timidly she approached one little boy and read to him and taught him Bible stories on Sunday evenings. He was delighted and told his friends. Soon more children wanted to come. Elizabeth took the growing brood up to the ‘eleven-sided attic’ and taught them. Their eagerness touched her and she was thrilled at her success. As the numbers grew, she left the attic and took them into the laundry where they did not need to traipse through the house. From 50 to 70 children of all ages gathered there weekly, some of them already wizened and distorted by work in the factories of Norwich.

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Joseph Lancaster [who] was setting in motion an educational revolution of such importance that within 34 years there would be ‘Lancasterian schools’ throughout England. His school was non-denominational and run on a monitorial system. He had the idea that if he allowed boys to make a noise, they would not consider it such a bore to be taught. He divided his horde into small groups of twelve, each with a monitor to keep order, collect and distribute lesson material, and hear lessons recited. The actual teaching of the younger children was partly done by the older, who first learned a lesson, then taught it. The method was both enlivening and economical and Elizabeth, remembering her crowded class of 70 ‘schollers’, was inspired.