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By Root 1653 0

attended, most barely twenty and nearly all homeless. Grellet understood the depths of their misery and wrote: “I wept bitterly over them. The lofty heads, the proud looks were brought down. I have seldom known such brokenness and so general as it was that evening.”2 The police chief magistrate who watched as the crowd exited deemed Grellet foolish and offered to collect all the scum in London for his guardianship. Grellet declined his taunting offer but used the opportunity to ask for permission to visit London’s prisons, where he had heard that even young children were housed.

Grellet quickly filed the required petitions to visit Newgate Prison, “having religious opportunities in the many separate apartments, where the miserable inmates are confined.”3 Once inside, he tried to comfort the boys and men who awaited hanging. When he asked to visit the women’s quarters: “The gaoler endeavoured to prevent my going there, representing them as so unruly and desperate a set that they would surely do me some mischief . . . concluding that the very least I might expect was to have my clothes torn off.”4 Grellet refused to be turned away.

On that auspicious January afternoon, over a glass of brandy to chase away the biting winter chill, Stephen Grellet told Elizabeth Fry, rather breathlessly, what he’d just seen. About three hundred half-naked women and children lived in a cell about forty by forty-two feet in size, allowing each inmate a space about two feet by two feet, barely enough to sit down. A few among them had committed murder or arson. Most were chained and imprisoned for stealing a watch, a dress, a piece of cloth, or a cloak. For minor misdemeanors, prisoners waited up to six months to be assigned a ship that would transport them to Van Diemen’s Land, known today as Tasmania.

Grellet found the women gaoled in conditions much worse than those he had witnessed for Newgate’s men. His aristocratic ease became completely unhinged upon visiting the women’s sick ward. “On going up, I was astonished beyond description at the mass of woe and misery I beheld. I found many very sick, lying on the bare floor or some old straw, having very scanty covering over them, though it was quite cold; and there were several children born in the prison among them, almost naked.”5

Grellet never had to ask Elizabeth for her assistance. Fry immediately volunteered to visit Newgate to see for herself. As it happened, her friend Anna Buxton was visiting when Grellet arrived. Within hours of his departure, the Fry household grew alive with activity. In the twinkling light of the silver candelabras, Elizabeth and Anna immediately began making flannel clothes for the infants at Newgate. Throughout the night, a small parade of Quaker neighbors arrived at Mildred’s Court to assist with the sewing.

The very next day, Mrs. Fry awoke with a fire in her belly as she pulled back the curtains around her four-poster bed. Turning down the cotton sheet underneath several wool blankets and a silk coverlet, Elizabeth felt none of the malaise and depression that had plagued her so often since her mother’s death twenty-one years ago. She was on a mission.

As mistress of Mildred’s Court, Elizabeth’s first order of the day was to attend to her household duties and give the staff their orders. Technically, her address was St. Mildred’s Court, but Quakers do not believe in saints, so the Fry clan simply shortened the name to suit them. Hustling her husband, Joseph, out of bed and into his dark grey waistcoat was a daily ritual. They were served their breakfast in the parlor before Joseph headed downstairs to his office at the family bank. For Elizabeth, getting dressed was somewhat of an ordeal. Her lady’s maid had already laid out a corset and five starched white petticoats. After a quick curtsy, she applied the ornate silver hook and cinched tight Elizabeth’s corset, stiffened with whalebones and not at all comfortable. Then she layered one petticoat at a time, pulling and tugging each into place. As a final adjustment, she fluffed Fry’s billowing skirt and pulled