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Mrs. Fry’s carriage rolled through the cobbled streets now bustling with activity. As the morning fog lifted, dead horses, drunks, and sometimes infants were found decomposing, stiff, mouths agape, and covered with flies. Despite the handkerchief pressed to her nose to block the cold and filter the soot, Elizabeth could not help but gag on the noxious vapor of raw sewage and decay that clung to everything, and everyone, on the streets of London.

“I Come as a Thief ”

The street grew noisier as the Frys’ driver arrived at the corner of Newgate Street and the Old Bailey. The coachman began to slow the horses when the carriage approached the gaol entrance. In the flesh-chilling morning rain, Elizabeth and Anna came face to face with Newgate’s stoic presence. The prison had been rebuilt after a fire in 1780; creator George Dance’s design drew on the school of architecture terrible, a style intended to evoke terror in those on both sides of its walls. London’s Lord Mayor William Domville eagerly and enthusiastically promoted Newgate’s sinister reputation, believing that fear deterred crime.

The very structure of the building was designed to undermine the prisoner’s spirit in every possible way. Female statues depicting Liberty and Plenty interrupted the harsh masonry blocks under the protection of sheltered niches in the wall. The cornucopia of plenty taunted those for whom there would be no feast of abundance. A French-capped Liberty mocked the freedom lost by those within the granite walls.

Newgate’s ominous exterior characterized what novelist Henry Fielding described as a “prototype of hell.”8 Iron chains carved above the main entrance offered a stern warning as newcomers were admitted into this human-made purgatory. A façade of windows composed of stone, rather than glass, reinforced the prison’s impenetrability and purposeful claustrophobia. Bricks filled in framed indentations where light should have entered, suggesting a cruel joke by designer George Dance. Newgate’s real windows faced inward and delivered a ridiculing message to the damned: This hell hath no escape. His design allowed the prisoner not a single glimpse of the outside world. Instead, the windows faced the inner yard, where fellow inmates were marched in circles for exercise.

Elizabeth and Anna looked up at the chains and shackles carved over each doorway, representations of the leg irons worn by prisoners inside who could not afford to pay an “easement.” Inscribed on a sundial just above the menacing iron door were the words Venio sicut fur (I come as a thief). The two Quakers had passed Newgate many times but had never considered entering.

The horses came to a stop. Newgate’s center gate opened, and the driver helped the ladies down from the carriage. John Addison Newman, the gaol’s governor, greeted them personally. Bundles of flannel baby gowns tucked under her arm, Elizabeth explained the reason for their visit. They wanted to attend to the physical neglect of the infants and the spiritual deprivation of their mothers. This was a highly unusual request, and Governor Newman planned to dissuade the ladies from their folly. Seldom did outsiders find the courage to enter this dreary enclave. Fewer still dared visit the Newgate females, a place where no male risked entry by himself, fearful of assault by the unruly creatures.

The governor had no choice before a determined Elizabeth Gurney Fry. He grudgingly acquiesced to her request and unlocked the inner gates to the gaol. The ladies were led to the infirmary, housed in a small room on the prison’s second level. At first, Elizabeth and Anna stood motionless outside the tiny quarters. Gagging from the reek of death, the two needed a moment to regain their composure. Nothing in their serene souls could prepare them for the scene before them: A woman was in the process of removing clothing from a dead child to put on her own suffering baby. Without saying a word, Elizabeth and Anna untied the flannel bundle and passed