In 1892 Herbert Asquith was appointed Home Secretary in William Gladstone's Liberal government. Change was in the air. The attitude of the informed public was moving away from negative, repressive deterrence, and was aspiring to something altogether more positive. They had read with horror the descriptions of ‘darkest England’ penned by the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, and many agreed with his condemnation of ‘the rude surgery of the Gaol’ which in its sheer punitiveness had ignored ‘the first essential of every system of punishment’ – reformation – and heeded his clarion call to reclaim the lost and transform the lives of the downtrodden. Those Christians whose faith had been dented by Darwin still adhered to the ethical imperative their upbringing had instilled. Liberals, many of whom had an evangelical background, were troubled in their consciences about what they heard or read of what went on behind prison walls. The extraordinary influence of the Idealist philosopher, the late Thomas Hill Green, was at its zenith, harnessing youthful enthusiasm for self-sacrifice and inspiring many Oxbridge graduates not just to devote their expertise to helping the working-class denizens of London but to engage with them by living among them. Many of their new ‘friends’ would end up in prison.

Asquith himself had been at Balliol when Green was a professorial fellow there, and was deeply attracted by his progressive and socially engaged political views. As a politician he had been disturbed by the somewhat overwrought description of a parliamentary colleague, John Burns, of his own experience of incarceration. Burns, an erstwhile firebrand who had participated in an illegal demonstration, had been imprisoned for a short time in Pentonville.