The Diaries of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury: Vol. 2, Part One

Lord Ashley (later the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury) is perhaps best known to social historians as the ‘Poor Man’s Earl’, the aristocratic philanthropist whose concern for suffering and the oppressed victims of Victorian ‘progress’ saw him champion a range of social, industrial, educational, and health reforms. The diaries contain detailed accounts of his labours, religious and philosophical reflections, self analysis, and descriptions and criticisms of contemporaries, and offer thereby a fascinating insight into Victorian politics and social change.

Vol. 2, Part One opens as Ashley loses his parliamentary seat in Dorset and faces an uncertain political future, yet he remained committed, as ever, to a variety of causes, not least factory and child labour reform, mental health care, housing, sanitary reform and public health, and the provision of meaningful education through ragged schools, while all the time advancing the cause of religion and the protecting the position of the Church of England. As famine struck Ireland in the mid-1840s and revolution shook much of Europe in 1848/9, Ashley confronted a world in flux in which political priorities and identities shifted, and his philanthropy acquired ever more important, yet contested, meanings.