Carpenter, MARY

Carpenter, MARY, philanthropist, was born at Exeter, 3d April 1807, the eldest child of Lant Carpenter, LL.D. (1780-1840), Unitarian minister at Exeter from 1805 till 1817, and afterwards at Bristol. Trained as a teacher, and afterwards a governess, she took an active part in the movement for the reformation of neglected children, and besides advocating their cause in her writings, she founded a ragged school, several reformatories for girls, one of which, the Red Lodge Reformatory, she superintended. The visit of Rammohun Roy to Britain in 1833, and of Tuckerman, the Boston philanthropist, had helped to turn her attention and sympathy towards India, and towards the destitute children of her own country. She founded in 1835 a 'working and visiting society,' of which she was secretary for more than twenty years. She opened a ragged school in one of the worst parts of Bristol in 1846, and boys' and girls' reformatories at Kingswood and at the Red Lodge (1852-54); and in 1852 gave evidence before a parliamentary committee on juvenile delinquency. She promoted the Industrial Schools Act of 1857, and some of her proposals were adopted in the amended Acts of 1861 and 1866. In the prosecution of her philanthropic labours she visited India four times, had an interview with the Queen in 1868 in connection with her work; and in 1870 instituted the National Indian Association, whose journal she edited. She attended Darmstadt at a congress on women's work as a guest of the Princess Alice, and visited America in 1873. Her plan of day-feeding industrial schools in connection with school boards was adopted in 1876. She died June 14, 1877. Besides her reformatory writings she published Our Convicts (1864), a book which drew public attention to the treatment of young criminals; The Last Days of the Rajah Rammohun Roy (1866); and Six Months in India (1868). See Mary Carpenter, by J. E. Carpenter (1879).