philanthropist politician reformer
Anthony Ashley Cooper was born on April 28, 1801, and was known as Lord Ashley until he succeeded his father as Earl of Shaftesbury in 1851. His childhood was not happy, his father's relationship with him being both distant and harsh. He was the eldest son of Cropley Ashley-Cooper, 6th Earl of Shaftesbury and his wife Lady Anne Spencer, daughter of George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough, and older brother of Anthony Henry Ashley-Cooper.
Lord Ashley, as he was styled until his father's death in 1851, was educated at Manor House school in Chiswick (1812–1813), Harrow School (1813–1816) and Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained first class honours in classics in 1822, took his MA in 1832 and was appointed DCL in 1841.
After Lord Ashley's election in 1826 as a Conservative member of Parliament, his first important speech urged the improvement of laws governing the treatment of the insane. He became chairman of the Lunacy Commissioners, established in that year, and he continued in that office until his death. In 1845 he wrote parliamentary acts to strengthen the controls against unjust institutionalization, to protect patients, to extend facilities, and to professionalize public supervision. He conducted a similar campaign against the employment—often under horrifying conditions—of small boys as chimney sweeps, and he became chairman of the Climbing Boys' Society, a typical Victorian reform society. After repeated efforts he finally secured passage of an effective statute in 1875 that introduced public licensing of the trade.
In the 1840s Lord Ashley adopted the Ragged School movement as another cause. This movement involved the provision of rudimentary education and housing for thousands of homeless children in London. His Lodging House Act (1851) provided for public licenses and inspection of lodgings, and during the Crimean War he instituted the Sanitary Commission. These achievements arose from his conversion to the cause of public health and from his service, from 1848 to 1854, as a commissioner of the new Board of Health.
Lord Ashley's most important and most famous work was conducted as a member of Parliament between 1832 and 1850. He was the leader of the struggle for statutory intervention in the hours and working conditions of children in English textile mills and also of women and children employed in mines. He later recorded that he took up the first cause quite unexpectedly and became suddenly convinced of his duty by "meditation and prayer. " Over nearly 2 decades of deep social unrest he steadily fought for the limitation of the work of women and children to 10 hours a day, and he represented in Parliament a massive popular movement by the workers of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The victory in this cause was substantially won, after piecemeal acts in 1833 and 1844, by the famous Ten Hours Act of 1847. He had briefly withdrawn from Commons in 1846 and therefore could not lead the final effort. Earlier, in 1842, he had won a much quicker and more personal success with his Mines Act, which prohibited work underground by small boys and females.
Curiously, Lord Ashley's dedication was accompanied by a keen sense of the wearisome, thankless, and often inconclusive character of these reform efforts. Moreover, as a reformer, he was limited and even anachronistic in his outlook for his generation. He was antagonistic to political democracy and to trade unionism, to socialism and to public agitation arising from the lower classes, to secular education and to advances in scientific inquiry. His self-appointed career kept him aloof from politics, especially after 1846. When Lord Shaftesbury died, on Oct. 1, 1885, he had been much honored for his work, but he had also been bypassed by the political and social changes of the later Victorian era.
Although he was offered a burial at Westminster Abbey, Shaftesbury wished to be buried at St. Giles. A funeral service was held in Westminster Abbey during early morning of 8 October and the streets along the route from Grosvenor Square and Westminster Abbey were thronged with poor people, costermongers, flower-girls, boot-blacks, crossing-sweepers, factory-hands and similar workers who waited for hours to see Shaftesbury's coffin as it passed by. Due to his constant advocacy for the better treatment of the working classes, Shaftesbury became known as the "Poor Man's Earl".
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th earl of Shaftesbury was one of the most effective social and industrial reformers in 19th-century England.
The Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus, London, erected in 1893, was designed to commemorate his philanthropic works.
Lord Shaftesbury is honoured together with William Wilberforce on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church on 30 July.
For reasons not completely known, though partly through the influence of a family servant, Lord Ashley early became an Evangelical and always remained, as he put it, "an Evangelical of the Evangelicals. " This creed meant a fervent belief in Protestant Anglicanism; the orientation of his life and work by religion; hostility to modernism and secularism on the one hand and to Rome and Roman Catholic tendencies in his Church on the other; and, finally, infinite compassion for the poor, the helpless, and the unfortunate. "God had called me, " he wrote, "to labour among the poor. "
As a staunch evangelical, he viewed with alarm the growing ritualism in the Church of England and materially aided Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the passage of the Public Worship Act (1874), which checked the extension of Anglo-Catholic practices.
Ashley was elected as the Tory Member of Parliament for Woodstock (a pocket borough controlled by the Duke of Marlborough) in June 1826 and was a strong supporter of the Duke of Wellington.
Quotations:
"The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of the face; true proportions, the beauty of architecture; true measures, the beauty of harmony and music. .. ."
"True courage is cool and calm. The bravest of men have the least of a brutal, bullying insolence, and in the very time of danger are found the most serene and free. "
"To love the public, to study universal good, and to promote the interest of the whole world, as far as lies within our power, is the height of goodness, and makes that temper which we call divine. "
"It is the hardest thing in the world to be a good thinker without being a good self examiner. "
"The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth. "
"Men of sense are really all of one religion. But men of sense never tell what it is. "
"The heart is never neutral. "
"The greatest of fools is he who imposes on himself, and in his greatest concern thinks certainly he knows that which he has least studied, and of which he is most profoundly ignorant. "
"Nothing is more ridiculous than ridicule. "
He was a Member of the Canterbury Association.
He also served as president of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
Quotes from others about the person
One of his biographers, Georgina Battiscombe, has claimed that "No man has in fact ever done more to lessen the extent of human misery or to add to the sum total of human happiness".
Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, married Lady Emily Caroline Catherine Frances Cowper (died 15 October 1872), daughter of Peter Cowper, 5th Earl Cowper and Emily Lamb, Countess Cowper; Emily is likely in fact to have been the natural daughter of Lord Palmerston (later her official stepfather), on 10 June 1830. This marriage, which proved a happy and fruitful one, produced ten children, as cited in "The Seventh Earl" by Grace Irwin. It also provided invaluable political connections for Ashley; his wife's maternal uncle was Lord Melbourne and her stepfather (and supposed biological father) Lord Palmerston, both Prime Ministers.
(21 December 1768 – 2 June 1851)
She was the daughter of George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough.
(died 15 October 1872)
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