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Anthony Ashley Cooper
7th Earl of Shaftesbury
Baron Cooper of Pawlett,
Baron Ashley of Wimborne St. Giles
born April 28, 1801, London, Eng.
died Oct. 1, 1885, Folkestone.
One of the most effective social and industrial reformers in 19th-century
England. He was also the acknowledged leader of the evangelical movement
within the Church of England. 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, was educated at Harrow and Christ Church
College, Oxford, and succeeded his father as earl in 1851. 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). |
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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). |
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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. 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. |
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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. As a staunch evangelical he viewed
with alarm the growing ritualism in the Church of England and materially
aided Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the passage of the Public Worship
Act (1874), which checked the extension of Anglo-Catholic practices. |
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