Door in Oak Room, Red Lodge,
Mary Carpenter, Kitty, etc.
In a visit which I made to Red Lodge two years ago, I was struck by the improved physical aspect of the poor girls in the charge of our successors. The depressed, almost flattened form of head which the experienced eye of Sir Walter Crofton had caught (as I did), as a terrible “Note” of hereditary crime, was no longer visible; nor was the miserable blear-eyed, scrofulous appearance of the faces of many of my old pupils to be seen any more. Thirty years have, I hope and believe, raised even the very lowest stratum of the population of England.
Miss Carpenter’s work in founding the first Reformatory for girl-criminals with the munificent aid of that generous woman Lady Byron, has beyond question, contributed in no mean degree to thinning the ranks of female crime during the last quarter of a century. Issuing from the Red Lodge at the end of their four or five years’ term of confinement and instruction, the girls rarely returned, like poor Kitty, to their parents, but passed first through a probation as Miss Carpenter’s own servants in her private house, under good Marianne and her successors, and then into that humbler sort of domestic service which is best for girls of their class; I mean that wherein the mistress works and takes her meals with the servant. The pride and joy of these girls when they settled into steady usefulness was often a pleasure to witness. Miss Carpenter used to say, “When I hear one of them talk of ‘My Kitchen,’ I know it is all right!” Of course many of them eventually married respectably. On the whole I do not think that more than five, or at the outside ten per cent. fell into either crime or vice after leaving Red Lodge, and if we suppose that there have been something like 500 girls in the Reformatory since Lady Byron bought the Red Lodge and dedicated it to that benevolent use, we may fairly estimate, that Mary Carpenter deflected towards goodness the lives of at least four hundred and fifty women, who, if she had not stirred in their interest, would almost inevitably have spent their days in crime or vice, and ended them either in jail or in the “Black Ward” of the workhouse.
There is an epitaph on a good clergyman in one of the old churches of Bristol which I have always thought remarkably fine. It runs thus as far as I remember:—
“Marble may moulder, monuments decay,
Time sweeps memorials from the earth away;
But lasting records are to Brydges given,
The date Eternity, the archives Heaven;
There living tablets with his worth engraved
Stand forth for ever in the souls he saved.”