Margaret Fison, 1817-1866: Mid-Victorian Reformer

Abstract

This article explores the life of Margaret Fison, an English social reformer who championed workingmen and women and criticized the upper and middle classes for their indifference to working-class problems. Fisom's combined anti-Catholic evangelical Protestantism with her mid-Victorian enthusiasm for science and social reform. As well as being a writer, Fison was an activist who took to the field as an organizer for the related causes of health and temperance. Her life illustrated what a young widow from a provincial town could achieve. Her early death at age forty-eight helps explain her undeserved obscurity. This papers use of her published travel articles returns Fison to her place in history.