The Quaker Who Walked Into Newgate

In 1813, Elizabeth Fry stepped through the iron gates of London's Newgate Prison and found three hundred women and their children crammed into two rooms. The stench was unbearable. Guards refused to enter. Yet Fry, a mother of eleven and a devout Quaker, returned the next day — and the day after that.

She brought fabric so the women could sew. She organized a school for the children sleeping on stone floors. She read Scripture aloud in a place most clergy would not set foot. When Parliament mocked her proposals for prison reform, she did not waver. When newspapers questioned her motives, her heart remained steadfast. She simply kept showing up.

Fry spent her family's wealth freely on those the world had discarded. She established shelters for the homeless across London. She trained nurses before Florence Nightingale made it fashionable. At her funeral in 1845, over a thousand people lined the streets of Norwich — many of them former prisoners whose lives she had rebuilt with her own hands.

The Psalmist writes that the righteous "have distributed freely, they have given to the poor; their righteousness endures forever." Elizabeth Fry feared the Almighty more than she feared Newgate's darkness. And because her trust was anchored in the Lord rather than in comfortable circumstances, her light rose in the darkness for others — exactly as Psalm 112 promises it will.