HOWARD, John (1726-1790), “the philanthropist,” was born in 1726, most probably on September 2, and at Enfield, where his father, a moderately wealthy retired London merchant, had a country house. His childhood was spent at Cardington near Woburn, Bedfordshire, where his father had a small estate; for seven years he was under the tuition of the Rev. John Worsley of Hertford (author of a Latin grammar and of a new translation of the New Testament); and he was afterwards placed for a short time at a private academy in London under Mr John Eames, F.R.S. At the close of a very imperfect school education he was apprenticed by his father at a considerable premium to a firm of grocers in the city; but on the death of the elder Howard in September 1742, by which he inherited considerable property, he bought up his indenture and devoted more than a year to foreign travel, during which he acquired some knowledge of French. Never constitutionally strong, he on his return to England settled in lodgings at Stoke Newington as a confirmed valetudinarian, his days being spent for the most part in hypochondriac idleness (for little importance can be attached to what have sometimes been called his studies in medicine and meteorology). Having been nursed through an acute illness by an attentive landlady, a widow of some fifty-three years of age, he felt that he could offer no adequate return short of marriage for her motherly kindness, and they were united accordingly in 1752. Left a widower in less than three years, Howard broke up his establishment at Stoke Newington in 1755, and resolved to go abroad, the recent occurrence of the earthquake at Lisbon attracting him to Portugal. The ship, however, in which he sailed was so unfortunate as tobe taken by a French privateer, by whom both crew and passengers were carried to Brest, where they were treated with great harshness and almost starved. At Morlaix and at Carhaix Howard had further opportunities of observing the treatment to which prisoners of war were usually at that time subjected; and when permitted on parole to return to England to negotiate an exchange for himself, he not only accomplished his personal object, but also successfully represented the case of those who had been his fellow-captives. Abandoning for the time his Lisbon scheme, he now retired to his property at Cardington, where he continued to interest himself in meteorological observation, for some slight notes on which he obtained publication in the Transactions of the Royal Society, of which he had been admitted a member in 1756. After his marriage (April 1758) to Henrietta, eldest daughter of Edward Leeds of Croxton, Cambridgeshire, he continued to live a secluded life, partly at Cardington and partly on another property which he had purchased at Watcombe, Hampshire. In both places he distinguished himself as a kind landlord, and at Cardington especially he displayed a highly enlightened philanthropy in his efforts to raise the condition of the poor by the construction of model cottages and by the erection of schools. In March 1765 his home was again desolated by the sudden and unexpected death of his wife, a few days after she had given birth to a son, her first and only child; and soon Howard’s drooping health and spirits imperatively demanded a change of air and scene. After visiting Bath and London, he in the spring of 1768 crossed to Holland; and another brief stay at Cardington was followed by a prolonged tour in France, Switzerland, and Italy as far as to Naples, whence he returned in 1770 by Germany and the Rhine. Having resumed his former course of life at Cardington, he was in 1773 named high sheriff of Bedford, an office which, although as a nonconformist he was unable to take the usual tests, he resolved to accept. The characteristic work of his life may be said to have now begun. When the assizes were held he did not content himself with sitting out the trials in open court > his inquisitiveness and his benevolence alike impelled him to visit the jail to which the prisoners had been condemned. Howard found it, like all the prisons of the time, wretchedly defective in all its arrangements; but what chiefly astonished and shocked him was an almost incredible abuse arising out of the circumstance that neither the jailer nor his subordinates were salaried officers, but were dependent for their livelihood on fees which they rigorously exacted from the prisoners themselves. He found it to be a fact that some whom the juries had declared not guilty, others in whom the grand jury had not found even such appearance of guilt as would warrant a trial, others whose prosecutors had failed to appear, were frequently detained in prison for months after they had ceased to be in the position of accused parties, until they should have paid the fees of jail delivery. (See Introduction to The State of the Prisons in England and Wales.) His prompt application to the justices of the county for a salary to the jailer in lieu of his fees was met by a demand for a precedent for charging the county with such an expense. This he undertook to find if such a thing existed. He went accordingly from county to county until his journey had extended to every town in England which contained a prison, but the object of his search eluded inquiry. He could find no precedent for charging the county with the wages of its servants, but he did find so many abuses in prison management which imagination had never conceived, and so many sufferings of which the general public knew nothing, and of which the law took no account, that he determined to devote to the exposure of those wrongs and the reform of those abuses whatever time and money might be needful. The task cost him a fortune, and the best remaining years of his life. The subject of prison reform, indeed, had not previously been wholly absent from the public mind. As early as the year 1728 the House of Commons had appointed a committee to inquire into the state of Newgate, the Marshalsea, and other London prisons, where abuses had come to light which had caused the house to order the arrest of several governors of jails, who were tried for high misdemeanours (see Reports of the Committee Appointed to Inquire into the State of the Gaols, 1729). Much more recently Popham, member for Taunton, had forced the unwilling legislature at least to discuss the propriety of paying fixed salaries to jailers out of the county rates; but in February 1773 the bill after passing the second reading had been withdrawn with a view to its being again brought forward in an amended form. The way had thus been prepared for a friendly reception to anything Howard might have to say as the result of his investigations; and at the close of his first rapid survey of the English prisons he was, through the influence of the supporters of Popham’s bill, cited to appear before a committee of the whole house in March 1774. After his report had been received and he himself examined upon it, it was moved and carried, on the house resuming, “that John Howard, Esq., be called to the bar, and that Mr Speaker do acquaint him that the House are very sensible of the humanity and zeal which have led him to visit the several jails of this kingdom, and to communicate to the house the interesting observations which he has made on that subject.” Almost immediately an Act was passed which provided for the liberation, free of all charges, of every prisoner against whom the grand jury failed to find a true bill, giving the jailer a sum from the county rate in lieu of the abolished fees. This was followed in June by another requiring justices of the peace to see that the walls and ceilings of all prisons within their jurisdiction were scraped and whitewashed once a year at least; that the rooms were regularly cleaned and ventilated; that infirmaries were provided for the sick, and proper care taken to get them medical advice; that the naked should be clothed; that underground dungeons should be used as little as could be; and generally that such courses should be taken as would tend to restore and preserve the health of the prisoners. It was highly characteristic of the man that, having caused the provisions of the new legislation to be printed at his own private cost in large type, he sent a copy to every jailer and warder in the kingdom, determined that no one should be able to plead ignorance of the law if detected in the violation of its provisions. He then set out upon a new tour of inspection, from which, however, he was brought home by the approach of a general election in September 1774. Siding with those who objected to the American policy of the Government, he had consented to stand as one of the anti-ministerial candidates for Bedford; although, however, he was returned by a narrow majority along with his friend Whitbread, he was unseated after a scrutiny on account of the alleged disqualification of some of those voters who had supported him. He was thus left entirely free for the vigorous prosecution of the special task which he had assigned himself; and he began to have thoughts of publishing the immense mass of facts which he had so industriously collected, and which was still so rapidly accumulating. But after a tour which had extended to Scotland and Ireland, it occurred to him before going into print that his notes would be much enhanced in utility if supplemented with the regulations and arrangements of the more important Continental prisons. In April 1775, accordingly, he set out upon an extended tour through France, the Low Countries, and Germany. At Paris he was at first denied access to the prisons; but by recourse to an old and almost obsolete law of 1717, according to which any person wishing to distribute alms to the prisoners was to be admitted and allowed to dispense his charity with his own hand, he succeeded in inspecting the Bicêtre, the Force l’Évêque, and most of the other places of confinement, the only important exception being the Bastille. With regard to this last, however, he succeeded in obtaining possession of a suppressed pamphlet, which he afterwards translated and published in English, to the unconcealed chagrin of the French authorities. At Ghent he examined with special interest the great Maison de Force, then recently erected; its distinctive features—useful labour, in the profits of which the prisoners had a share, and complete separation of the inmates by night—drew from him the exclamation that it was a “noble institution.” At Amsterdam, as in Holland generally, he was much struck with the comparative absence of crime, a phenomenon which he attributed to the industrial and reformatory treatment there adopted. In Germany he found little that was useful and much that was repulsive; in Hanover and Osnabrück, under the rule of a British sovereign, he even found traces of torture. Returning to England in autumn with his copious notes, he determined, before finally reducing them to order and sending them to press, to undertake another tour of England. This lasted for seven months (November 1775 to May 1776), and yielded results so important by way of correction and supplement that he resolved to give his Continental experience the benefit of a similar revision. On this occasion he extended his tour to several of the Swiss cantons. At last in 1777 appeared The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons (Warrington). It met with a very favourable reception, although its author was fully justified in his statement in the preface tiιat as the journeys were not undertaken for the traveller’s amusement, so the results of them were not published for general entertainment. It consists principally of a mass of minute statistical details, somewhat pedantically accumulated and very unmethodically arranged; its most important section —that relating to “proposed improvements in the structure and management of prisons ”—constituting less than a tenth part of the whole. One portion of his subject, indeed,— that relating to the ships used for transportation of convicts, —had been to some extent taken out of his hand by the passing in 1776 of the Act authorizing the hulk system; but even in this connexion the appearance of his work was highly opportune. Following within a few years the publication of Beccaria’s work On Crimes and Punishments, it called public attention to the practical question of the treatment of criminals in a manner which compelled the adoption of remedial or at least of palliative measures, although the full difficulty and delicacy of the problem had not as yet been thoroughly appreciated. One of the most immediate results was that Sir W. Blackstone and Mr Eden were requested to draft a bill for the establishment of penitentiary houses, where by means of solitary imprisonment, accompanied by well-regulated labour and religious instruction, the object of reforming the criminal and inuring him to habits of industry might be successfully pursued. New buildings were manifestly necessary in order that the provisions of such an Act might be carried into effect; and as no one seemed to know how to set about their construction, Howard volunteered to go abroad again and collect plans and other information. On this errand (April 1778) he first went to Amsterdam, and carefully examined the “spinhouses” and “rasp-houses” for which that city was famous; next he traversed Prussia, Saxony, Bohemia, Austria, and Italy, everywhere inspecting prisons, hospitals, and workhouses, and carefully recording the merits and defects of each. In the course of this tour he was received with marked consideration and respect at more than one court; but the personal incident of greatest consequence was one which befel him on a voyage along the Tuscan coast. A sudden and violent storm had compelled the master of the small vessel in which he had taken a passage for Leghorn to seek the shelter of land; cold, wet, and exhausted, passengers and crew reached a little island harbour, but only to find that through fear of the plague (they having sailed from a port supposed to be infected) a landing was refused them. Driven backagain upon the storm, they were carried by its violence to the coast of Algeria, where a similar experience was encountered, permission to enter the harbours there also being peremptorily denied. It was this occurrence which first directed Howard’s attention to the subject which engrossed his attention in after years, and in the investigation of which he ultimately lost his life. Leghorn at last reached, he hastened northwards through Lombardy, France, and Flanders, arriving in England in 1779. The information he had obtained having been placed at the service of the House of Commons, a bill was introduced and passed for building two penitentiary houses in Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, or Essex (as might be afterwards determined), and Howard was appointed first supervisor (19 Geo. III. cap. 74). The scheme, however, did not proceed without friction too trying for his patience: and after much time had been lost in interminable discussions with his colleagues as to the sites of the proposed buildings, he in January 1781 wrote to Lord Bathurst resigning his post before anything practical had been achieved. In 1780 he had published a quarto volume of 220 pages as an appendix (the first) to his State of Prisons ; about the same time also he caused to be printed his translation of the suppressed French pamphlet on the Bastille; but on obtaining release from his employments at home his passion for accumulating statistics urged him to new and more extended Continental tours, as far as to Denmark, Sweden, and Russia in 1781, and to Spain and Portugal in 1783. The results of these journeys (which were full of curious and romantic incidents) were embodied in 1784 in a second appendix, with the publication of which his direct labours in connexion with the subject of prison reform may be said to have ceased. The five remaining years of his life were chiefly devoted to researches on a different though cognate subject, that of the means which ought to be used for prevention of the plague, and for guarding against the propagation of contagious distempers in general. Having at the suggestion of his medical friends provided himself with a list of queries to be put to the physicians in attendance at the lazarettos he proposed to visit, he in November 1785 sailed for Holland, and thence travelling through France inspected the great lazaretto at Marseilles, though with considerable difficulty, owing to the unfriendliness of the authorities. He next passed through Florence, Rome, and Naples to Malta, whence he sailed by Zante to Smyrna, where his reputed medical skill opened all the prisons and hospitals to his inspection, and where he had ample opportunities of studying the plague in its most fatal form. He then went to Constantinople, where the fame of his skill had preceded him, and where some further fortunate practice greatly added to his prestige. Declining the hospitalities of the British ambassador, however, he devoted himself entirely to the care of the neglected poor, and persistently forced his way into infected caravanserais and pest-houses whither physician and dragoman alike declined to follow him. At length his researches seemed to be complete; and with a great accumulation of papers and memoranda, he was preparing to return homewards by Vienna, when it occurred to his scrupulous mind that he still lacked one essential qualification for practically dealing with the matter which he had taken in hand; he had not as yet had any personal experience of quarantine discipline. Altering his plans accordingly, he returned to Smyrna, and, deliberately choosing a foul ship, took a passage to Venice that he might there undergo the usual confinement. A protracted voyage of sixty days, during which an attack by pirates gave Howard an opportunity of manifesting in a new form that personal bravery which was one of his characteristics, was followed by a weary term of confinement which enabled him to gain, though at the cost of considerable hardship and suffering, the experience he had desired. While imprisoned in the Venetian lazaretto he received two pieces of intelligence which from very opposite causes gave him acute pain. One was the announcement of a proposal that a statue should be erected commemorative of his services in the cause of humanity; to Howard as “a private man with some peculiarities,” desirous to retire into obscurity and silence, it presented itself as a “hasty and disagreeable measure,” “a distressing affair.” The other was the information that his only son, a youth of twenty-two years of age, after a course of flagrant misconduct, had lost his reason and had been put under restraint. Returning hastily by Trieste and Vienna (where he had a long and singular interview with the emperor Joseph II.), he reached England in February 1787. His first care related to his domestic concerns; after these had been put into such order as they admitted, he set out upon another journey of inspection of the prisons of the United Kingdom, at the same time busying himself in preparing for the press the results of his recent tour. The somewhat rambling work containing them was published in February 1789 at Warrington, under the title A n Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe: with various Papers relative to the Plague, together with further Observations on some Foreign Prisons and Hospitals, and additional Remarks on the present state of those in Great Britain and Ireland. In the conclusion (p. 235) he committed with some solemnity the result of his past labours to his country, and announced his intention of again visiting Russia, Turkey, and some other countries, and of extending his tour in the East, adding these words, “I am not insensible of the dangers that must attend such a journey. Trusting, however, in the protection of that kind providence which has hitherto preserved me, I calmly and cheerfully commit myself to the disposal of unerring wisdom. Should it please God to cut off my life in the prosecution of this design, let not my conduct be uncandidly imputed to rashness or enthusiasm, but to a serious, deliberate conviction that I am pursuing the path of duty, and to a sincere desire of being made an instrument of more extensive usefulness to my fellow-creatures than could be expected in the narrower circle of a retired life.” The execution of the purpose he had thus expressed was delayed for some time by the necessity for making special arrangements with regard to his private affairs in consequence of the confirmed insanity of his son; but early in July 1789 he finally embarked in what proved to be his last journey. Travelling overland from Amsterdam by Hanover, Berlin, Königsberg, and Riga to St Petersburg and Moscow, and so southwards, and visiting in passing the military hospitals that lay on his route, he reached Cherson in November. In the hospitals of this place and of the immediate neighbourhood he found more than enough to occupy his attention while he awaited the means of transit to Constantinople. Towards the end of the year his medical advice was asked in the case of a young lady who was suffering under the camp fever then prevalent, and in attending her he himself took the disease, which terminated fatally on January 20, 1790. “Give me no monument,” he had said, “but lay me quietly in the earth; place a sundial over my grave, and let me be forgotten but a life like his had made such a burial even in a foreign land impossible, and his remains were followed, respectfully and sorrowfully, by many thousands to the grave, where they now lie near the village of Dauphigny on the road to St Nicolas. A statue by Bacon with a suitable inscription was afterwards erected to his memory in St Paul’s, London.
In personal appearance Howard is described as having been short, thin, and sallow,—unprepossessing apart from the attraction of a penetrating eye and a benevolent smile. “There was an animation in his manner and a quickness in his gait which corresponded with the activity of his mental powers. In his address he was dignified, kind, and condescending, always adapting himself to the persons with whom he conversed; as free from a cringing servility amongst his superiors in station as he was from arrogancy towards those of lower rank” (Field). In point of intellectual ability he cannot be said to have been possessed of more thin the ordinary endowments; nor had education done all that was possible for the development of those which he had. That he was of a deeply religious temperament is abundantly shown by the meagre remains we have of his letters and diaries; while the greater part of his life shows that his enthusiasm of humanity was the unusual yet normal outcome of the sincerest piety. His benevolent impulses were sustained by a rare degree of energy and determination, while they were guided by a remarkable delicacy of tact and an equally remarkable vigour of practical common sense. It would be idle to speculate how far Howard’s work could have been done when it was, and as it was, by a man differently endowed. Doubtless the reforms which he inaugurated were reforms urgently called for by the spirit and enlightenment of his age; but this fact rather enhances than diminishes the imperishable glory which belongs to him of having been the foremost to give an articulate voice to that demand. “In the scale of moral desert the labours of the legislator and the writer are as far below his as earth is below heaven. His kingdom was of a better world; he died a martyr after living an apostle” (Bentham).
See Anecdotes of the Life and Character of John Howard, written by a Gentleman (1790); Aikin, View of the Character and Public Services of the late John Howard; Memoirs, by Baldwin Brown (1818), Taylor (1836), Hepworth Dixon (1849), Field (1850), and Stoughton (1853); and Correspondence of John Howard, with brief Memoir and Anecdotes (1855).
