Episode 65. Ellen Ranyard: Pioneer Social Worker

SYNOPSIS

The social innovations of Mrs Ellen Ranyard (1810-1879) have been somewhat obscured by the Christian cosmology out of which she operated. Driven by the desire to see a Bible owned by all poor London households, Ellen adopted a common-sense, but novel strategy that established her as the pioneer of social work and district nursing in London.

Mark K Smith the co-founder and editor of infed.org - the online encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education - picks up the story of Mrs Ranyard’s new approach: the employment of working-class women to combine Bible-selling with basic household advice and the provision of clothes and furniture to the near-destitute. Having moved back to central London with her family in 1857, Ellen Ranyard (writing of her experiences as ‘LNR’) set about recruiting ‘Marian B’, her first paid worker, to address the severe social problems near Covent Garden in the Seven Dials district.

With extraordinary rapidity the social programme mushroomed. By 1867 234 working-class Bible women were employed in the poverty-stricken areas of central London in which they lived, under a command structure controlled by middle-class ‘lady superintendents’. Buoyed by this progress in 1868 Ranyard launched effectively the first district nurses in London, still equipped with Bibles, to link up the poor to London’s hospitals through this second network of paid women .

GUESTS

Since 1995, when he took advantage of the burgeoning internet, Mark K Smith has, with colleagues, developed infed.org as a website to explore education, pedagogy and community action to the point where every year it has more than 1 million users. This episode about Mrs Ellen Ranyard draws upon the work of two historians: Frank Prochaska’s Women and Philanthropy in 19th Century England and Ellen Ross’s Slum Travelers.

Simon’s interview with Mark Smith was recorded online on 21 April 2025.