Elizabeth Fry, Prison Reformer
12 October -- Commemoration
If celebrated as a Lesser Festival,
Common of any Saint, page 527
Elizabeth Gurney was born at Earlham in Norfolk in 1780. At
the age of twenty, she married Joseph Fry, a London merchant
and a strict Quaker. She was admitted as a minister in the
Society of Friends and became a noted preacher. The
appalling state of the prisons came to her notice and she
devoted much of her time to the welfare of female prisoners
in Newgate. In 1820 she took part in the formation of a
nightly shelter for the homeless in London. She travelled
all over Europe in the cause of prison reform. She was a
woman of a strong Christian and evangelistic impulse and
this inspired all her work. She died on this day in 1845.