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Elizabeth had much to ponder as her carriage slowed to a jolting halt. It had been a short, cold ride back to Mildred’s Court after they’d dropped off Anna. As the coachman helped her from the buggy, a liveried butler swung open the town house’s grand door to greet the mistress as she approached the steps. Before crossing the threshold, she first removed Newgate’s muck from the soles of her shoes using the wrought-iron boot scraper located just outside every upper-crust home. Elizabeth immediately requested that hot water be brought upstairs for a bath. Her house servants hurriedly set up the bathtub and prepared several steaming buckets of hot water to be carried from the kitchen stove. Mrs. Fry’s personal maid assisted her mistress in the complicated process of unhooking and unbuttoning her contaminated clothing. Like a rancid onion, every layer was permeated by Newgate’s putrid presence. Her clothes were in ruins, but her soul was on fire.

A Promise Fulfilled

For the next three days, Mrs. Fry lobbied her network of Quaker friends to assist in sewing garments. As promised, she collected and delivered clean clothing to everyone in Newgate’s congregation of the forgotten. The women she first visited left a lasting impression on Elizabeth, but after a week of prison visits, life events prevented her return to their stony tomb until four years had passed.

Mrs. Fry’s Newgate work was put on hold as she gave birth to two more children and suffered the loss of her beloved daughter Betsy at age four. The Tambora volcano eruption led to the “year without a summer” in 1816, causing the tea crop to fail and bankrupting her husband, Joseph, who was heavily invested in it. While they dealt with their financial crisis, they sent their six oldest children to live with wealthy relatives.

Although Elizabeth and Joseph were in debt, the Gurney family still owned a successful banking business. Elizabeth’s mother had died when she was twelve, so she had been responsible for helping raise the younger children, including her brother Joseph John Gurney, who was now an influential lobbyist. He was inspired by “Betsy’s” work to the point of bailing out the Fry bank and joining her mission of prison reform.

When Elizabeth turned to Newgate again, just after Christmas in 1816, it was with renewed purpose. She organized regular visits and opened a schoolroom for the children who were imprisoned with their mothers. She taught the women to sew and to read the Bible. In 1817, she founded the Association for the Improvement of Female Prisoners in Newgate. All of this activity occurred at a time when the public’s sordid interest was turning toward the plight of the poor. A female reverend was strange enough, but the image of her reading the Bible to the Newgate “beasts” was sensational. Stories and drawings of these encounters began to appear in London newspapers, which were now widely available to the general public.

In 1818, Thomas Fowell Buxton, who had married Elizabeth’s sister Hannah, was elected to Parliament and began to promote Elizabeth’s causes. Mrs. Fry had become a figurehead for a prison reform movement and was now backed by powerful allies in Parliament. Little did she know how her widely publicized visits would expose the empire’s secret plan to replace its slave labor pool with poor young Londoners, starving Irish, and other undesirables. Designed by effete Parliamentarians, the scheme hinged on a belief that outcast girls like Agnes McMillan would never be missed. These exiled citizens included the twenty-five thousand girls and women whose unfortunate fate included transport to an isolated island on the other side of the world. In the years to come, Elizabeth would meet many of these women as they passed through Newgate Prison on their way to the convict ships.

Mrs. Fry and her Association for the Improvement of Female Prisoners could not be ignored. She became one of the few advocates for treating the female inmates humanely. This plain and proper revolutionary broke nearly every rule for how a respectable lady