Jane Senior

[3] Work with impoverished children in Surrey led to Senior's appointment in January 1873, as an assistant inspector of workhouses.

[5] When the Report appeared in 1875, the 1874 general election having intervened, it bore heavy criticism by Royal Navy senior officer Carleton Tufnell, acting in concert with The Times.

[6] A meeting called by the Reverend Thomas Vincent Fosbery (then chaplain to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce) in May 1874, at Lambeth Palace.

[7] Senior, with Caroline Emelia Stephen and her cousin founded instead, the rivalling Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants in 1876, to habilitate institutionalised and vulnerable girls in London.

Instead her successful organisation sought to de-institutionalise recruits, from such places as workhouses into becoming reliable, skilled servants.

[8][9] Senior, with the support of Thomas John Barnardo, had lobbied for MABYS, and similar bodies, to be automatically made guardians until the age of 20 for any child who had been in Poor Law care for over five years.

From 1860 they lived in Elm House, a villa with a small wooded estate on Lavender Hill, near Clapham Junction in Battersea, south London, taking lodgers.

Jane Nassau Senior, in an 1859 painting by George Frederic Watts . [ 1 ]
The county of Surrey , most of the metropolitan part of which is shown here south of the Thames, as the zone stood when joining the inceptive County of London in 1889. It contained in the part shown and three parishes beyond, to the east, many poor streets. These are shaded blue and black, by Charles Booth (social reformer) .