Although I made my annual inspection of this prison on February 18th, 1847, as a date upon which to form my report, yet I have had very many opportunities of seeing it during past and former years, in my duties connected with my superintendence of the convict department.  The visitors may see many changes in the faces and persons of the prisoners, but no surprise can ever find a difference in the high and superior order with which this prison is conducted.  The matron, Mrs. Rawlins, upon whom the entire responsibility of the interior management devolves, was selected some years since, and sent over to this country by the benevolent and philanthropic Mrs. Fry, whose exertions in the cause of female prison reformation were extended to all parts of the British Empire, and who, although lately summoned to the presence of her Divine Master, has nowhere left a more valuable instance of her sound judgment and high discriminating powers than in the selection of Mrs. Rawlins to be placed at the head of this experimental prison, occupied alone by females; and so successful has the experiment been, that I understand several other prisons solely for females have been lately opened in Scotland, and even in Australia.  In this prison is to be seen an uninterrupted system of reformatory discipline in every class, such as is to be found in no other prison that I am aware of.

The matron alluded to in the above extracts gratefully acknowledged that Mrs. Fry’s plan had completely succeeded in every respect, while she was equally grateful in owning that to her instructions and wise maternal counsel she herself owed her own fitness for that special branch of the work.

The testimonies to her success not only came in from official quarters, but from the prisoners themselves.  This chronicle would scarcely be complete without a specimen or two of the many communications she received from prisoners at home and from convicts abroad.  True, on one or two occasions the women at Newgate had behaved in a somewhat refractory manner, for their poor degraded human nature could not conceive of pure disinterested Christian love working for their good without fee or reward; but even at these times their better nature very soon reasserted itself, and penitence and tears took the place of insubordination.  To those who had sinned against and had been forgiven by her, Mrs. Fry’s memory was something almost too holy for earth.  No orthodoxly canonized saint of the Catholic Church ever received truer reverence, or performed such miracles of moral healing.

The following communication reached her from some of the prisoners at Newgate:—­