The English social reformer and philanthropist Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885), was a leading exponent in Victorian England of reform of a multitude of social evils.

Anthony Ashley Cooper was born on April 28, 1801, and was known as Lord Ashley until he succeeded his father as Earl of Shaftesbury in 1851. His childhood was not happy, his father's relationship with him being both distant and harsh. For reasons not completely known, though partly through the influence of a family servant, Lord Ashley early became an Evangelical and always remained, as he put it, "an Evangelical of the Evangelicals." This creed meant a fervent belief in Protestant Anglicanism; the orientation of his life and work by religion; hostility to modernism and secularism on the one hand and to Rome and Roman Catholic tendencies in his Church on the other; and, finally, infinite compassion for the poor, the helpless...