Article from the Christian Examiner, January, 1846.
It is with a feeling of deference that we welcome Miss Dix's "Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline." Her peculiar labors for humanity, and her renunciation of the refined repose which has such attractions for her sex, to go about doing good, enduring the hardships of travel, the vicissitudes of the changing season, and, more trying still, the coldness of the world, awaken towards her a sense of gratitude, and invest her name with an interest which must attach to anything from her pen.
The chosen and almost exclusive sphere of woman is home, in the warmth of the family hearth. Rarely is she able to mingle with effect in the active labors which influence mankind. With incredulity we admire the feminine expounder of the Roman law, illustrating by her lectures the Universities of Padua and Bologna,—and the charities of St. Elizabeth of Hungary are legendary in the dim distance; though, in our own day, the classical productions of the widow of Wyttenbach, crowned Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Marburg, and most especially the beautiful labors of Mrs. Fry, recently closed by death, are examples of the sway exerted by the gentler sex beyond the charmed circle of domestic life. Among these Miss Dix will receive a place which her modesty would forbid her to claim. Her name will be enrolled among benefactors. It will be pronounced with gratitude, when heroes in the strifes of politics and of war are disregarded or forgotten.
"Can we forget the generous few
Who, touched with human woe, redressive sought
Into the horrors of the gloomy jail,
Unpitied and unheard, where misery moans,
Where sickness pines?"