On the few evenings she would be free to see her own friends and those who were interested in her work and would help in it, she would take plenty of work with her, and get all those present to help in carrying out her plans. Old pieces of stuffs, paper, old drawings, scraps that seemed mere litter would, by her active and inventive mind, be turned to some good use.
Her day was closed, after her exhausting labours, by no return to a cheerful home where rest and welcome and sympathy, food and comfort, were waiting for her, but a lonely locked-up room, fireless and cheerless, dark and lonely, where all had to be done by her own tired hands. Her account books, her notes of her work, and the poor for whom she was fighting all the powers of evil, had to be written.
These account books, of every item of her expenditure, are now in the public library at Yarmouth. They record the name and career of every prisoner she visited, her experience of their character and development. And all this time she was living in the most absolute poverty, and yet of total unconcern as to her temporal support. She said, “God was my Master, and would not forsake His servant; He was my father, and could not forget His child.”
Meantime the Corporation had no expense for a chaplain or a schoolmaster. She supplied the place of both, but as time went on some members of the Corporation wished to make some pecuniary provision for her wants out of the borough funds, but they desisted in consequence of her most earnest opposition.
At last it was wisely intimated (as the Edinburgh Review writes) to this high-souled woman, “If we permit you to visit the prison, you must submit to our terms” (in spite of her earnest appeal, and her urging that her work, being known to be a voluntary work, had greater influence). And so these worshipful gentlemen, who were then making use of Sarah Martin as a substitute for the schoolmaster and the chaplain, whom it was by law their bounden duty to have appointed, converted her into their salaried servant by the munificent grant of £12 per annum.
Sarah Martin lived for two years in the receipt of this memorable evidence of Corporation bounty, but her health and strength was failing fast, and it was with increasing suffering and difficulty that she continued her work in the prison until April, 1843, when a most painful disease, increasing rapidly, prevented all exertion.
It is a triumphant sequel to a life of incessant self-denial and heroic exertion to find that this brave woman would cheer the sacred loneliness of her entrance into the dark valley of the shadow of death with songs of victory and triumph, and when the nurse told her that she believed the time of her departure was at hand, she, clapping her hands together, exclaimed, “Thank God! thank God!” and never spake more. It was once truly said, “A little faith will take you to Heaven; but a great faith will bring Heaven to you.”
Captain Williams, the Inspector of Prisons, before quoted, says of her, “Her simple unostentatious, yet energetic devotion to the interest of the outcast and the destitute, her gentle disposition, never irritated by disappointment, nor her charity straightened by ingratitude, presents a combination of qualities which imagination sometimes portrays as the ideal of what is pure and beautiful, but which are rarely found embodied in humanity. She was no titled sister of charity, but was silently felt and acknowledged to be one by the many outcast and destitute persons who received encouragement from her lips, and relief from her hands, and a higher and purer life from her influence, and by the few who were witnesses of her good works.”
We remember, as who does not, the noble faith of Mrs. Fry, who fought a like battle in the walls of a prison. Mrs. Fry was a woman of high education, of assured position, of practised eloquence, and supported by influential and important friends. But Sarah Martin was a poor lone woman, plain and little educated, endowed only by the magnificence of her faith and love with the energy of waging such a war.
The Edinburgh Review, in an eloquent article on the Life and Poems of Sarah Martin, closes with the following words: