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 views in 1851. Her book, and her interviews in London and the north with advocates of reformatory principles, prepared the way for a conference, which was held in Birmingham on 9 and 10 Dec. 1851. Mary Carpenter was the soul of the meeting, but did not speak in public; she was always somewhat slow to countenance any innovations on the recognised sphere of woman's work. A committee was formed to carry out the resolutions of the conference; but it soon appeared that there was a radical divergence of view on the question whether the disciplinary treatment of juvenile delinquents should be partly punitive or purely restorative in its aim. Mary Carpenter believed that certain theological ideas fostered the demand for an element of retributive dealing, which she was anxious to exclude. She resolved to establish a reformatory school on her own principles. Meanwhile she gave evidence (in May 1852) before the parliamentary committee of inquiry on juvenile delinquency. On 11 Sept. her reformatory was opened at Kingswood. The house (built for school purposes by John Wesley) was purchased by Russell Scott of Bath, and furnished by Lady Byron. In December 1853 a conference on a larger scale was held in the Birmingham town hall. At the beginning of 1854 the first report of her Kingswood school was issued. On 10 Aug. the Youthful Offenders Act legalised the position of reformatory schools under voluntary managers. On 10 Oct. a separate reformatory school for girls was opened by Mary Carpenter at the Red Lodge in Park Row, Bristol, an Elizabethan mansion which had seen many vicissitudes. It is no wonder that, with all these responsibilities accumulated upon her, her health suddenly failed. Just before Christmas 1854 she was seized with a rheumatic fever, which incapacitated her for six months. As she was recovering, she wrote a gently characteristic letter (3 June 1855) to Harriet Martineau, expressive of her religious trust, and received a severely characteristic reply. The intercourse of the two friends remained unbroken. Mary Carpenter's religion was as little satisfactory to the Somersetshire magistrates as to Miss Martineau. The quarter sessions at Wells, moved by the diocesan board, refused (March 1856) to take cognisance of the Red Lodge, though the government inspector was fully satisfied with the religious teaching. A year and a half after her mother's death Mary Carpenter left the old home in Great George Street to occupy (December 1857) a house in Park Row, bought by Lady Byron, who purchased also other property for the development of the Red Lodge plans. Meanwhile, Miss Carpenter was urging upon members of parliament the need of a measure such as the Industrial Schools Act, which became law in 1857, and the claims of existing ragged schools to participate in the educational grant. Among her best friends in the House of Commons were Lords Houghton [see ] and Iddesleigh. As if her hands were not yet full—she had resigned her Sunday school duty in 1856, but was still doing ‘the work of three people on the food of half a one’ —the difficulties in the working of the act induced her to undertake the establishment of a certified industrial school, mainly in order to show in what way the government provisions needed amendment. This school she opened (April 1859) in premises in Park Row purchased by Frederick Chapple, a Bristol boy who had made a fortune in Liverpool. Many of her proposals were adopted in the amended acts of 1861 and 1866. A third conference on ragged schools at Birmingham on 23 Jan. 1861 urged upon parliament their claims to further government aid. Although attacked by illness in the autumn of 1863, she planned and opened a workmen's hall in December of that year, and published a work on the convict system.

In the autumn of 1860 her sympathy with India had been rekindled by the visit of Joguth Chunder Gangooly, a young convert of the unitarian mission at Calcutta. The subsequent visits of Rakhal Das Haldar (1862), and of Satyendra Nath Tagore and M. Ghose (1864) convinced her that the condition of Indian women could be improved by judicious education. On 1 Sept. 1866 she left England for India, Ghose being among her travelling companions. Her plans and expectations were small, but no sooner had she arrived than her advice was sought by the Bombay government on the problems of education and prison discipline. At Madras and at Calcutta (where she interested herself in the monotheistic movement of Keshub Chunder Sen) similar calls were made upon her judgment and experience. Here she became for the first time a public speaker. Her general impressions were summed up in a communication (12 Dec. 1866) to the governor-general, Sir John Lawrence, on the subjects of female education, reformatory schools, and the state of the gaols. She left India on 20 March 1867. At home she took up again with zest all her old labours, but at once opened communications with the India Office, with a view to urge the home government to overcome ‘the incubus of Indian red-tapeism.’ In March 1868 she had the honour of an interview with the queen, and in October she