ABSTRACT
The greatest impetus to reform in the first half of the nineteenth century was given by Mary Carpenter of Bristol, who did much to improve the treatment of delinquent children. About 1831 she became interested in poor children and in the Ragged Schools which had been founded by John Pounds in 1818. In 1846 she opened her own Ragged School in Lewin’s Mead. It was a day school for twenty boys, where some of the children were fed and where all were trained. The object of the movement was to draw in the restless wandering street children and to civilize them. Some of the children were already notorious thieves when she took them in: imprisonment had done nothing to reform them, and although she found that she could turn a few of them from their lives of crime, she soon realized that the Ragged Schools were inadequate. She studied the whole question of the treatment of young offenders.
1846
