Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th earl of Shaftesbury was born in London, April 28, 1801. He was the eldest son of Cropley Cooper (a younger brother of the 5th earl of Shaftesbury) and of Anne, daughter of the 4th duke of Marlborough. He became Lord Ashley when his father succeeded to the earldom in 1811.
He was educated at Harrow and at Christ Church, Oxford, and entered parliament as Lord Ashley in 1826.
A member of the House of Commons from 1826, Ashley attacked the Reform Bill of 1832 for widening the franchise, but he favoured the political emancipation of Roman Catholics and the repeal in 1846 of the Corn Laws (import duties on grain). Becoming a lunacy commissioner in 1828 and commission chairman in 1834, he secured passage of the Lunacy Act of 1845, the first British statute to treat the insane as “persons of unsound mind” rather than social outcasts. He early was associated with the factory reform movement led by Richard Oastler and, in the House of Commons, by Michael Thomas Sadler. In 1833, after Sadler’s defeat in an election, Ashley replaced him as parliamentary leader of the movement for shortening the working day in textile mills to 10 hours. Although popularly known as Lord Ashley’s Act, the Ten Hours Act of 1847 was passed while he was temporarily out of the House of Commons (January 1846–July 1847). In his working for further factory reform legislation, he was accused by the radical reformer John Bright not only of ignorance of actual working conditions in factories but also of unconcern for rural labourers, including those on the Shaftesbury estates.
By his Mines Act of 1842, Ashley excluded all women and girls and all boys under the age of 10 from underground coal mine employment, in which he had found boys aged 4 or 5 years. During his 39 years as president of the Ragged Schools Union, that organization enabled about 300, 000 destitute children to be educated free at what were called ragged schools or industrial feeding schools. He also served as president of the British and Foreign Bible Society, founded numerous Young Men’s Christian associations and Workingmen’s institutes, and financially supported missionary societies for Nonconformist faiths as well as for the Church of England. He was lord of the admiralty from 1834 to 1835. He died at Folkestone, Kent on October 1, 1885.
His chief interests in parliament were factory legislation and the social betterment of the working class. He introduced legislation to restrict the employment of boy chimney sweeps (1840), to prohibit the employment of women and children in coal mines (1842), to provide for the care of the insane (1845), and to establish a ten-hour day for factory workers (1847). He also worked hard to improve the living conditions of the poor, obtaining passage of a bill to improve lodging-houses (1851) and promoting the construction of model tenements.
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. "
"It is the hardest thing in the world to be a good thinker without being a good self examiner. "
"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. "
"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. "
He was a member of the House of Commons. While serving as a member of the short-lived General Board of Health (1848–54) and afterward, Shaftesbury (who succeeded to the earldom in 1851) insisted that the government sponsor new low-cost housing projects for urban workers and carefully inspect housing that already existed. Lord Shaftesbury was a member of the Canterbury Association.
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 in 1830. This marriage, which proved a happy and fruitful one, produced ten children.
8th Earl of Shaftesbury
