Cartoon of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, operating the vice extinguisher
Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801–85), operating the vice extinguisher, and surrounded by a crowd of souls who had succumbed to the evils he had fought against in his campaigns of improvement for the working classes: from miasma to malaria, ignorance, misery and cruelty. Lord Shaftesbury’s diary runs to more than 1 million words and provides an essential commentary on the great social reforms of Victorian Britain. Shaftesbury was the architect of measures addressing the evils of employment in factories and mines, the use of child labour and the treatment of lunatics, of social improvement alongside industrial expansion.
