London Calling - Elizabeth Fry

1780–1845

It was the time Dickens wrote about—manored, mannered gentry and discarded orphans. London in the early 1800s was the most influential city on earth, holding the wealth of a worldwide empire, but thousands of residents lived in abject poverty. Children slaved in workhouses, debtors went to prison, and certain sections of town teemed with a criminal underclass.

Elizabeth Gurney Fry tried to make things better. This affluent Quaker, the wife and daughter of bankers, the mother of eleven children, saw that women were living in deplorable conditions in London’s Newgate Prison. She felt God’s call to do something about it. First she brought bedding and clothing. Then she asked the inmates what they needed, and in response she started a school for their children. They wanted to be productive, so Fry and her teammates taught them sewing, knitting, and various crafts. Since many of the inmates were illiterate, the Bible was read to them.

It wasn’t easy. “I have often thought that, in this little prospect, I must go like David, when he went to slay the giant . . . ,” she wrote. “I go not trusting in any power, or strength of my own. . . . I trust the Lord will be with me, and make the sling and stone effectual.”

Soon Elizabeth Fry became an expert in prison reform, and her work expanded as she sought other ways to help poor women in society—including starting a nurses’ training school that later influenced Florence Nightingale. She wasn’t the only Christian reaching out with God’s love. Others, like William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, had been pushing social reform for some time, including the abolition of slavery. Yet it would be hard to overstate the impact Fry had on British society at that time.

What are you doing to help the needy?

We all have lots of good excuses, as Elizabeth Fry did, for not getting around to this, but when God tugs at our hearts, we need to respond. How can we use our talents and resources to do God’s work in the world? There are still prisons, and they’re still scary places. There are still people suffering in financial, physical, or emotional need. We can walk on past . . . or we can step out in faith, like little David against the giant.

Remember those in prison, as if you were there yourself.

Hebrews 13:3