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The two friends linked by heavy chains and iron loyalty had never traveled more than twenty-five miles from home, so London must have seemed like the end of the world. The city proper grew ever more congested. Children taunted the girls and threw stones at the coach. Janet’s bright red hair made for a fine target. This was not the performance Agnes had imagined in her dreams of singing on a London stage.

3

The Angel of Newgate

Nighthawks

All roads for the desperate poor eventually led to Newgate Prison. Righteous reformer Elizabeth Gurney Fry, in an act of selfless determination, shocked the nation when she founded a Quaker ministry inside London’s chapel of the damned. By the time Agnes and Janet were headed to Newgate, Fry was already a London celebrity.

Elizabeth’s husband, Joseph Fry, accepted his wife’s commitment to a higher purpose. He also tolerated her blatant defiance toward how London ladies were supposed to behave. In return, every day of the week except Sunday, Mrs. Fry rousted Joseph out of a deeply stuffed parlor chair, rallying the ambition that too often escaped him. On workdays, the dutiful Mr. Fry opened their front door and headed out to his bank’s counting house, conveniently located just below their living quarters at Mildred’s Court. In the morning fog, Joseph sometimes tripped over the skirts of women and children who waited patiently on the front stoop. Word had spread on the streets near Bishopsgate, Poultry, and Cheap-side about a Mrs. Fry who helped destitute women, offering them fresh food and clean clothing. “In very hard winters she had soup boiled in an out-house in such quantities as to supply hundreds of people with a nourishing meal.”1

Between the births of her children, eleven in all, Elizabeth expanded her humanitarian projects. Determined to stop the spread of smallpox, she vaccinated families who lived in remote villages and in London’s darkest slums. She established a girls’ school in Plashet for the children of laborers and servants, set up libraries for men stationed at remote coastguard locations, and founded a nursing school that provided free care for those without funds. Years later, Florence Nightingale, a distant cousin, would take some of Fry’s well-trained nurses to the Crimean War front. Still, this was not enough.

In a coincidental turn of fate, just as Elizabeth was searching for her own spiritual purpose, a French aristocrat turned American Quaker minister knocked on her door at Mildred’s Court. On a cold, rainy afternoon in January 1813, Stephen Grellet was shown into the Frys’ drawing room, the well-known British Quaker William Forster at his side. A striking figure with ragged silver hair, dark bushy eyebrows, and a prominent nose, the pockmarked but graceful Grellet could barely contain the fullness of his heart.

Grellet was an outspoken reformer, who devoutly followed the tradition of Quaker empathy and compassion for society’s outcasts. Drawn to the cause of London’s forgotten poor, Grellet was appalled to learn that nearly a million faced imminent starvation. As the New Year approached, Parliament refused imports of wheat and oats in an effort to maintain the high price of British-grown grain. Artificially inflating the price of grain backfired. It undermined the farmer and caused a dramatic spike in crime as thousands fled the fields and flocked to the city for work that did not yet exist. Bread had become a luxury item in London. The poor either suffered starvation or took desperate measures to feed themselves, resorting to theft and prostitution. Some abandoned their children. Others blinded reality with London’s cheap and plentiful gin.

Stephen Grellet rejected the ruling class’s prevailing belief that the destitute deserved their suffering. In January 1813, he called a meeting for thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes at the St. Martin’s Lane Quaker house. It was an unprecedented request, and no one knew what to expect. The meeting was called for seven P.M. because most among this group were considered “nighthawks.” Surprisingly, thousands