Felicia Skene in St Michael's Street - geograph.org.uk - 1323889

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ceridwen

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https://dewiki.de/b/21d251

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Felicia Skene in St Michael's Street Despite a cosmopolitan, upper-class background Felicia Skene became keenly interested, and involved, in contemporary social problems. While still a young woman she gave assistance in a cholera epidemic and got to know Florence Nightingale. The first woman in England to be appointed Prison Visitor, she pleaded for prisons to be places of reform and believed in individual counselling. She played the harmonium and organ in the prison chapel and would meet released prisoners at the prison gates at 6 a.m. to provide breakfast and other practical assistance. She rescued prostitutes and promoted the idea of a more liberal regime in penitentiaries.

She was also a writer and her novels dealt with the same issues. She wrote to raise money for her favourite charities, one of which was to support 'fallen' women. In her novel 'Hidden Depths' the independent heroine's journey takes her into the unknown territory of London's brothels and madhouses; both institutions are graphically portrayed. The terrible conditions in which women live while their seducers go unpunished prompts the question 'Shall it be ever thus?' 'Shall its hideous wickedness still be ignored, glossed over made light of, as regards the destroyers, while the destroyed are branded with dishonour and driven to deeper evil by the blackest injustice that ever disgraced a Christian land?'

She was buried in St Thomas’s churchyard and there is a memorial plaque to her in the cathedral. She was regarded as a local saint by Oxford people of all conditions but remarked in old age: "I am like the Martyrs’ Memorial: everyone knows me and no-one is interested in me".

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From geograph.org.uk

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