II
MARY CARPENTER
"That it may please Thee … to show Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives."
Mary Carpenter was thirty-eight years old when Mrs.
Fry died in 1845. We do not hear, in reading the lives
of either, that the two women ever met, or that the elder
directly stimulated the activity of the younger. Yet the
one most surely prepared the way for the other; their
work was upon the same lines, and Miss Carpenter, the
Unitarian, of Bristol, was the spiritual heir and successor
of Mrs. Fry, the Quaker, of Norwich.
There is, it is true, a contrast in the manner in which the two women approached their work in life. The aim of both was the rescue of what Mary Carpenter called "the perishing and dangerous classes." But while Mrs. Fry was led, through her efforts on behalf of convicts, to establish schools for them and their children, Mary Carpenter's first object was the school for neglected children, and through the knowledge gained there she was led to form schemes for the reformation of criminals and for a new system of prison discipline. Mrs. Fry worked through convicts to schools; Mary Carpenter through schools to convicts.
It will not therefore be imagined that there is any want of appreciation of Mrs. Fry when it is said that Mary Carpenter's labours were more effective, inasmuch as they
