(1726-1790)
[Illustration: John Howard.]
John Howard was born in Hackney, Middlesex County, England, September 2,
1726. The only existing record of this fact is the inscription upon his
monument in St. Paul's Cathedral, London. His parentage came through a
somewhat obscure family, his father being sometimes mentioned as an
upholsterer and sometimes as a merchant of moderate means. Of his mother
we know only her name--Chomley--and that she died when her second child,
and only son, was an infant. The father was a strict, sturdy, honest,
severe Puritan, the marks of whose character ever remained on the
character of the son.
The motherless boy seems to have passed unnoticed through the weary days
of a sickly childhood, and the usual martyrdom of the "dullest boy in
the school," under first one tutor and then another, to his sixteenth
year, when he left school and books, as he afterward testifies, "not
thoroughly knowing any one thing." How much does any boy or girl
thoroughly know of any one thing at sixteen? Surely not enough to
warrant his removal from school.
But not so reasoned the father of John Howard, for we find him at this
age apprenticing his only son to Alderman Newham, a wholesale grocer on
Watling Street, London.
That this was not a change made from pecuniary necessity is evidenced by
the liberal provision made for the boy. We are told that his father paid
£700 for his fee of apprenticeship, and provided him a separate suite of
apartments, a servant, and a pair of saddle-horses! The inference is
that young John's progress in school was not such as to warrant his
continuance at his books.
His letters and manuscripts still in existence reveal a lamentable
deficiency in orthography and the handling of the king's English.
Some of Howard's biographers attempt to attribute his methodical
businesslike habits in later life to the experience gained while in the
service of this wholesale grocer. But when we consider that his stay was
far less than one year, we may fairly be allowed to conclude that more
was due to an inherited temperament for slow methodical action.
Before reaching his seventeenth year, the death of his father released
him from the grocery business, for which he had evidently no affection,
and left him in possession of £7,000 in ready cash, beside land, plate,
house, etc.
This fortune was left under the management of guardians, it being his
father's wish that he should not control it until his twenty-fourth
year. But his course of life goes to show that he had wonderfully easy
trustees, as he immediately bought himself off the grocery business, and
made a long tour of the Continent for the benefit of his health.
Returning to England, he dropped into the little village of Stoke
Newington, a mere hamlet, where he had some possessions.
That a young man of wealth and free from all ties of family or business,
should have voluntarily chosen such a home, and been contented to remain
there, in a state of idle inactivity, for the space of seven or eight
years, can be accounted for only by remembering his feeble health.
When twenty-five, his health entirely failed, and he was prostrated by a
severe fit of illness, through which he was nursed by his landlady, Mrs.
Loidore. Upon his recovery he made her his wife, in testimony of his
gratitude, though history records that she had neither beauty, money,
nor health, having been an invalid for twenty-two years, and was
twenty-seven years his senior.
Two or three years after this seemingly ill-suited marriage, which,
strange to say, seems to have been a not unhappy one, Mrs. Howard died.
Immediately Mr. Howard, then twenty-eight or nine years of age, again
left England for a second extended tour. This being the year of the
great earthquake of Lisbon, he naturally turned his steps thitherward.
Setting sail from England for Spain, he was captured on the high seas by
a French privateer, and for two months suffered the hardships and
indignities of prison life in those times. Upon his release he used all
his influence to secure the exchange of the remainder of his vessel's
company, and was successful. This prison experience he never forgot.
Three years later (1758) he married Henrietta Leeds, a lady of fine
character, and one to whom he was sincerely attached. Indeed, so fearful
was he that their married life might not be entirely without jars, that
he made a bargain with her, in advance of their marriage, that on all
disputed points the adjustment should be according to his judgment. One
is at a loss which member of a couple the most to admire, the man who
could make such a proposition, or the woman who would bind herself with
such bonds! But, like his first marriage, his strange contract with his
second wife seems to have led only to happy results.
They settled in Cardington, upon the Howard estate, and for the next
seven years led the uneventful life of landed gentry of the times. The
husband and wife were united in their efforts to improve the morals and
general condition of their tenantry. Rightly believing that the
beginning of all reform was to improve the physical condition, Howard
spared no expense in rearing new cottages upon new and improved plans,
held his tenants removable at will, and through their improved
conditions ruled over them with an almost despotic sway, tempered and
made bearable in that all his restrictions and requirements were on the
line of their temporal and spiritual advancement.
How strange is the making of history! Had the gentle, loving,
well-governed, dependent Mrs. Howard lived on, this would no doubt have
been the continuation, the aim, and the end of John Howard's life--to
constantly advance and improve the interests and condition of his
tenantry, and to wisely govern and administer his estate. But it was not
so to be. The happy home must be broken up, and the man whom God needed
must, through the sting of his own sorrow, be sent out again upon his
wanderings to do the work reserved for him in the broad field not of his
own choosing. The birth of the only child, a son, preceded the death of
its mother by but a few days, and Howard was again alone. To the end of
his life he remained a sincere and constant mourner for the wife to whom
he owed the happiest, if not the most useful, seven years of his life.
It is said by some of his biographers that he always kept the
anniversary of her death as a solemn day of fasting and prayer.
Come we now to the point in his career where, all unknown to himself,
Howard took up the work which was to startle the whole civilized world,
and place his name in the roll of those whose memories die not.
But first let us remember the son whose life began where his mother's
ended, and ended where it was well his mother had not lived to see it.
It would seem that the loss of his beloved wife and the sad recollection
of his own motherless unloved boyhood, would have made of John Howard a
tender and pitiful, as well as devoted father. Such was not the case, if
we may judge from the vehemence with which some of his biographers deny
the charges of undue severity to the infant, and forgetfulness and
neglect of the growing-up boy, and the silence of others on the same
subject.
The real truth probably was, so far as we can judge, that the man had
nothing in his stiff nature and puritanical education, certainly nothing
in his own early life, to make him respond to the uninteresting
helplessness of infancy.
So we find him doing his duty by the crying infant of a few months, in a
manner which would be amusing if it were not pathetic. He takes him from
the nurse, lays him across his knees, and sits unmoved and unmovable
until the tempest exhausts itself, and the child is silent from
exhaustion, when he hands him solemnly back to the nurse, and feels
that, by so much at least, has he cast out of the young child the spice
of Old Adam, which is the birthright of us all! A few such experiences,
we are told, and the child would at once cease its struggles and be
silent. One would surely think it would!
But the silent, lonely man, bereft of the loving companionship of the
gentle wife, who would so differently have soothed and silenced the
crying infant, could not long bear the solitude of his broken home, and
so began the years of wanderings, which lasted as long as his life, and
through which he seems so largely to have lost sight of his young son at
his most impressionable age, save to provide for his material wants,
and to some extent, also, his education. When with him in later years he
appears to have enjoyed his society, or at least the evidences which he
gave of implicit, unreasoning obedience, illustrated by his remark, "I
believe if I told the boy to put his hand in the fire he would obey me."
At four the boy was put into a boarding-school, and the home was broken
up. The later glimpses which we get of his career are vague,
unsatisfactory, or decidedly bad, until the end came, and "Jack" was
incarcerated in a mad-house when but twenty-two, where his unfortunate
life went out after twelve years' confinement in a darkness that
darkened also the last years of his good, if injudicious, father, with a
sorrow beside which all common bereavements should seem like blessings.
In 1769, then, we see the Cardington home broken up, the boy placed in a
boarding-school, and John Howard setting forth upon what to him was but
an aimless journey, in search of consolation, amid new scenes, for the
shattered fortunes of his home. He travelled over large portions of
Italy, and returned again to England, where in 1773 he was elected High
Sheriff of Bedford. No sooner had he entered upon the duties of his
office, than he was struck with the gross injustice of the practices,
especially as affecting those prisoners held for debt. Many heads of
families were held for months and years, not for the original debt for
which they were incarcerated, which in many cases had been forgiven or
paid, but for an accumulation of fees due to jailer and divers other
officers of the prison, who drew their salaries from this source. Much
astounded by such a state of things in a Christian land, but supposing
it to be a peculiarity of his own county, he made a journey into some of
the surrounding districts, to learn from them, if possible, some better
method. It but augmented his indignation and distress to find their
condition and methods worse even than at home, since in some he actually
found the fees wrung from these unhappy prisoners to amount to so much
that the office of jailer was sold to the highest bidder, the sum paid
for the position often amounting to as much as £40 per annum.
On this tour Howard, now thoroughly awake on the subject, could not but
observe the miseries of the prisoners from other sources, besides
extortions. This might have been borne, but for the terrible crowding of
herds of men and women, without regard to age, sex, character, or crime,
into foul underground dungeons, damp, dark, unventilated, often
unwarmed, with insufficient and unfit food and clothing, without beds,
and many in chains. Such were the sights which met his gaze at every
turn, and moved his soul with shame for his country, and a slow but
deadly anger that, once kindled, died only with his life. Thoroughly and
systematically he continued his investigation of the jails and prisons
of England, until he had been over them all, which consumed nearly a
year's time (travel was a different matter a hundred years ago, from
now), and then made his report public, for which labor he was called
before the bar of the House of Commons and received the thanks of that
august body.
More satisfactory still, he had the pleasure of seeing two bills passed,
one making the office of jailer a salaried position, thereby abolishing
the whole iniquitous system of special fees from prisoners, the other
having reference to improvements in ventilation and other sanitary
matters.
The text of these bills he had printed in large bold type at his own
expense, and sent them to every jail and prison in England. A few months
later, being desirous of seeing whether or not the requirements of the
new laws were being put into execution, he made personal inspection,
riding by chaise or on horseback from city to city and from town to
town.
Toward the last of this year, 1774, Howard made his first and last
venture into the arena of political life. Being a man of strong, stern
political convictions, and feeling it his duty to stand by his
principles, he listened to the advice of friends, and made a stand for
the House of Commons. Fortunately for the world he was defeated by _four
votes_.
On such small hinges swing the doors of life. Had he been elected he
would doubtless have sunk out of sight and been forgotten, and his great
work would have been given to some other agent.
Though greatly disappointed at his failure, Howard's mind at once
returned to the question of prison reform, and his next journey led him
over Ireland and Scotland. The former he found worse and the latter
better than England.
Being desirous of publishing a book upon his investigations and their
results, he at the close of this year left England to examine the
prisons of France, Flanders, and Holland. It surprises us much to learn
that he found the prisons of Holland almost models, while France is
declared far in advance of England, although these were the days of the
Bastille! He also journeyed into Switzerland and again made a survey of
the jails of England and Wales. Feeling at last that he had sufficient
material he returned to England and began upon his book. For eight
months he labored incessantly upon this work, correcting proofs,
collating and arranging statistics, etc., although for the literary part
he was obliged to call in the assistance of some of his learned friends,
who, better than he understood the use of the king's English.
This book made a most profound sensation throughout the civilized world.
That it might reach a more extended circulation, it was sold at less
than the cost of production, and large numbers were given away among the
officials. All this expense was borne by Howard out of his own private
purse, as were at all times his immense and constant outlay in travel.
Not only his whole private income, but the fortune of £15,000 received
from his only sister at her death, was expended in the same manner.
Subsequently Howard published a second volume, in 1780, as an appendix
to the first, and in 1784 a third and last, which was a compilation of
the first two, with much added material acquired during his continuous
travels over every part of Europe.
[Illustration: Howard relieving a Prisoner.]
During the earlier and idler parts of his life, Howard had been pleased
to dabble somewhat in medicine, after the manner of the gentlemen of his
time. This stood him in good part upon his travels, and made him
familiar with the various forms of disease that especially afflicted
prisons and the people at large. For jail fever and typhus he rightly
judged that the sanitary and food conditions were sufficient cause and
attacked them from this basis. But having in a measure finished his jail
and prison work, to his mind, he became possessed with the idea that he
might search out and find a remedy for the dreadful _plague_ that was
filling all Europe with dismay. The methodical habit of the man's mind
is evidenced by noting that he followed exactly the same method in this
as in his former undertaking, namely, personal investigation and
experience. He left home in July, 1789, and it is surprising that for
six months he literally lived in the poisonous atmosphere of the
pest-houses, pest-ships, and lazarettos of Europe, and escaped
contagion. In January, 1790, however, in a little Russian village near
the Crimea, he was called upon to prescribe for a young lady, ill with
some low malignant fever, from which visit he contracted the same
disease. Being then sixty-four years of age, naturally frail, worn down
by sixteen years of hard, exhaustive toil, depleted by a diet that found
no place for meats or stimulants, he had nothing upon which to rally,
and rapidly sank into the long slumber which at last gave him what he
had so many years denied himself--_rest_.
His remains were buried there in Russia in the village of Dophinovka.
After his death a monument was erected to his memory, being the first
placed in St. Paul's Cathedral, London. This was appropriately inscribed
to his memory, although it was his latest expressed wish that he should
be left to sleep in an unmarked, unknown grave.
A just estimate of the character of John Howard can only be arrived at
by a careful consideration of the times in which he lived and the
peculiar circumstances of his life. The natural inherited sternness of
his character never felt the modifying influences of a mother's love or
the companionship of brothers or sisters. His ill health added to his
restless desire for travel and change, but unfitted him for close or
continued application to any special line of thought or interest, while
his early independence in the management of his fortune placed in his
way strong temptations to extravagance and idleness.
It is therefore more than an ordinary indication of an inborn principle
of humanity when we find him, upon his first settlement upon his
father's estates, devoting time, thought, and money to the amelioration
of the condition of his neglected and suffering tenantry. Model
landlords were not in fashion in those times, and a man who so
administered his affairs must have done so in the face of much
criticism, ridicule, and contempt among his peers.
But none of these things seem to have moved him from the even tenor of
his way. Yet there was no sentimentalism in his dealings with his
tenants, as we find him holding them to a strict accounting for the use
made of their improved conditions.
So of his prison work. It seemed to be all and altogether for the
masses, and not for individuals. No record is left of personal
almsgiving, save when resorted to as a ruse to obtain entrance to the
French prisons. That his interest was not in individuals is further
shown by the calm and deliberate manner in which he prosecuted his
investigations, taking years for the accumulation of materials and
months to their careful watching through the press. It was the principle
of justice ingrained in the man's deepest nature that forced him to
_know_ all that could be known or said upon both sides before speaking.
It was this thoroughness, this absolute fairness, that made of his work
and of his inartistically constructed books the tremendous and lasting
success which they were.
Deeply religious, he naturally reflected the spirit of the religious
teachings of the times, which savored more of the terrors of the law
than of mercy and forgiveness to evil-doers; that found more worship in
denying self the indulgences of soft living than in the partaking of the
harmless pleasures and sweets of life, giving a good God thanks for His
good gifts. Through all the life and writings of Howard one constantly
hears the minor chord of infinite sadness wrought into his life by his
motherless infancy, his unloved boyhood, his years of invalidism, his
ceaseless mourning for his wife Henrietta, the bitterness of death in
the cup held to his lips by his unfortunate son, and over and above all,
the constant atmosphere of crime, cruelty, sin, and suffering in which
he spent the last sixteen years of his life. Life to him came to mean
sin, suffering, and sorrow in the world about him, and for himself work,
work, incessant work, in the effort to do what one man could to lift or
lighten the burden under which the whole earth groaned. Death came to
him where he would have most wished it might, and took him directly from
labor to reward. And throughout the coming ages the world will be the
better because in the last half of the eighteenth century there lived,
labored, and died in the midst of his labors one _John Howard, the
Philanthropist_.
[Signature: Harriet G. Walker.]