But, not content with this form of service, she visited among her poor neighbors, bent on actively doing good. She secured a large room belonging to an old house, opposite her own dwelling, and established a school for girls on the Lancasterian pattern there. Very quickly, under the united efforts of Mrs. Fry, the incumbent of the parish, and a benevolent young lady named Powell, a school of seventy girls was established, and kept in a prosperous condition. This school was still in working order a few years ago.
Plashet House was a depot of charity. Calicoes, flannels, jackets, gowns, and pinafores were kept in piles to clothe the naked; drugs suited to domestic practice were stored in a closet, for healing the sick; an amateur soup-kitchen for feeding the hungry was established in a roomy out-building, and this long years before public soup-kitchens became the rage; whilst copies of Testaments were forthcoming on all occasions to teach erring feet the way to Heaven. But her charity did not stop with these things.
An unsavory locality known as "Irish Row," about half a mile off, soon attracted her attention. The slatternliness, suffering, shiftlessness, dirt and raggedness, were inducements to one of her charitable temperament to visit its inhabitants, having their relief and improvement in view; while her appreciation of the warm-heartedness and drollery of the Irish character afforded her genuine pleasure. Proximity to English life had not refined these Irish; their houses were just as filthy, their windows as patched and obscured with rags, their children just as neglected, and their pigs equally familiar with those children as if they had lived in the wilds of Connemara. Shillalahs, wakes, potatoes, and poverty were distinguishing characteristics of the locality; whilst its inhabitants were equally ready, with the free and easy volatility of the Irish mind, to raise the jovial song, or utter the cry of distress.
The priest and spiritual director of "Irish Row" found himself almost powerless in the presence of this mass of squalid misery. That Mrs. Fry was a Quaker and a Protestant, did not matter to him, provided she could assist in raising this debased little colony into something like orderly life and decency. So he cooperated with her, and with his consent she gave away Bibles and tracts, vaccinated and taught the children, as well as moved among them generally in the character of their good genius. When delicate and weak, she would take the carriage, filled with blankets and clothes for distribution, down to Irish Row, where the warm-hearted recipients blessed their "Lady bountiful" in terms more voluble and noisy than refined. Still, however unpromising, the soil bore good fruit. Homes grew more civilized, men, women, and children more respectable and quiet, while everywhere the impress of a woman's benevolent labors was apparent.
It was the annual custom of a tribe of gypsies to pitch their tents in a green lane near Plashet, on their way to Fairlop Fair. Once, after the tents were pitched, a child fell ill; the distracted mother applied to the kind lady at Plashet House for relief. Mrs. Fry acceded to the request, and not only ministered to the gypsies that season, but every succeeding year; until she became known and almost worshipped among them. Romany wanderers and Celtic colonists were alike welcome to her heart and purse, and vied in praising her.
About this time the Norwich Auxiliary Bible Society was formed, and Mrs. Fry went down to Earlham to attend the initial meeting. She tells us there were present the Bishop of Norwich, six clergymen of the Established Church, and three dissenting ministers, besides several leading Quakers and gentlemen of the neighborhood. The number included Mr. Hughes, one of the secretaries, and Dr. Steinkopf, a Lutheran minister, who, though as one with the work of the Bible Society, could not speak English. At some of these meetings she felt prompted to speak, and did so at a social gathering at Earlham Hall, when all present owned her remarkable influence upon them. These associations also increased in her that catholicity of spirit which afterwards seemed so prominent. Some of her brothers and sisters belonged to the Established Church of England; while in her walks of mercy she was continually co-operating with members of other sections of Christians. As we have seen, she worked harmoniously with all: Catholic and Protestant, Churchman and Dissenter.
On looking at her training for her special form of usefulness we find that afflictions predominated just when her mind was soaring above the social and conventional trammels which at one time weighed so much with her. We know her mostly as a prison philanthropist; but while following her career in that path, it will be wise not to forget the way in which she was led. By slow and painful degrees she was drawn away from the circles of fashion in which once her soul delighted. Then her nature seemed so retiring, and the tone of her piety so mystical, while she dreaded nervously all approach to "religious enthusiasm," that a career of publicity, either in prisons, among rulers, or among the ministers of her own Society, seemed too far away to be ever realized in fact and deed. Only He, who weighs thoughts and searches out spirits, knew or understood by what slow degrees she rose to the demands which presented themselves to her "in the ways of His requirings," even if "they led her into suffering and death." It was no small cross for such a woman thus to dare singularity and possibly odium.