34 Facts About Mary Carpenter

Mary Carpenter was an English educational and social reformer.

Mary Carpenter published articles and books on her work and her lobbying was instrumental in the passage of several educational acts in the mid-nineteenth century.

Mary Carpenter was the first woman to have a paper published by the Statistical Society of London.

Mary Carpenter addressed many conferences and meetings and became known as one of the foremost public speakers of her time.

Mary Carpenter publicly supported women's suffrage in her later years and campaigned for female access to higher education.

Mary Carpenter is buried in Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol and has a memorial in the North transept of Bristol Cathedral.

Mary Carpenter was born on 3 April 1807, in Exeter, the first child of Lant Mary Carpenter, a Unitarian minister in Exeter, and Anna Penn.

Mary Carpenter established a boarding school at Great George Street, Brandon Hill, which was run by his wife and daughters, where Mary studied the sciences, mathematics, Greek and Latin.

Mary Carpenter taught in the school, had spells as a governess in the Isle of Wight and Hertfordshire and, in 1827, returned to Bristol to become head teacher at what had by now become Mrs Carpenter's Boarding School for Young Ladies.

Mary Carpenter is said to have directly inspired her start on the path of social reform, partly by a chance remark made when walking with Carpenter through a slum district of Bristol.

Mary Carpenter contributed to fund-raising efforts in the abolitionist cause and maintained an interest in this for the next twenty years.

Mary Carpenter published a memoir of Joseph Tuckerman and a series of articles on ragged schools which were published in The Inquirer, an English Unitarian newspaper, and later published in book form.

Mary Carpenter sketched out three classes of schools as urgently needed; good free day schools, feeding industrial schools and reformatory schools.

Mary Carpenter was consulted by those drafting educational bills, and she was invited to give evidence before House of Commons committees and in 1852 she published Juvenile Delinquents, their Condition and Treatment, which contributed to the passing of the Juvenile Offenders Act in 1854.

When Lady Byron died in 1860, Mary Carpenter was given a legacy to outright purchase the Red Lodge, including a cottage to be used for training the girls in domestic service.

Mary Carpenter's diaries reveal the use of 'the cells' located in the cellar of the Red Lodge for disciplining "violent, refractory and noisy girls".

In 1858 Mary Carpenter established a reformatory for boys, called the Park Row Industrial School in Bristol, which was the first certified institution of its kind to be founded in England following the passing of the Industrial Schools Act.

Now that the principle of reformatory schools was established, Mary Carpenter agitated for free day schools, arguing the ragged schools were entitled to financial aid from the government.

In 1866 Mary Carpenter visited India, which had been an ambition of hers since her meeting with Raja Ram Mohan Roy in 1833.

Mary Carpenter visited Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, finding that for the most part girls were not educated past the age of twelve years, mainly due to a lack of educated female teachers.

Mary Carpenter visited many schools, hospitals and gaols and encouraged both Indian and British colonial administrators to improve and fund these.

Mary Carpenter was particularly concerned that the lack of good female education led to a shortage of women teachers, nurses and prison attendants.

Mary Carpenter participated in the inauguration of the Bengal Social Science Association, and addressed a paper to the governor-general on proposals for female education, reformatory schools and improving the conditions of gaols.

Mary Carpenter returned to India in 1868 and achieved funding to set up a Normal School to educate female Indian teachers.

Mary Carpenter presented proposals to for Indian prison reform to the Secretary of the Indian Government.

At the International Penal and Prison Congress in 1872 Mary Carpenter read a paper on The Principles and Results of the English Reformatory and Certified Industrial Schools.

Mary Carpenter read forty papers at conferences of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science between the years of 1857 and 1746, gave many public lectures and was known as one of the most prominent speakers on social reform in an era when few women ever addressed public meetings.

Mary Carpenter went on to Neuchatel, Switzerland to study Louis Guillaume's prison system, and in 1873 to America, where she met abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.

Mary Carpenter visited prisons and in 1874 wrote to the New York Prison Association to express her concern about "the dreadful state of the Prisons".

Mary Carpenter supported the movement for the higher education of women, and had always supported the feminist cause but for most of her life would not do so publicly, believing that the unpopularity of the movement for women's suffrage might damage her educational and penal reforms.

Mary Carpenter was invited for an interview with Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale at Windsor Castle in 1868.

Mary Carpenter never married, but she did adopt a five-year-old girl, Rosanna in 1858.

Mary Carpenter died, in her sleep, at the Red Lodge in June 1877 and was buried at Arnos Vale Cemetery.

Records relating to Mary Carpenter can be found at Boston Public Library, Dorset History Centre, Oxford University: Tate Library, Huntington Library and the British Library Manuscript Collections.