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Charity was literally a matter of life and death for some destitute people. Many others, though, preferred to chance their luck and hang on to their freedom. Do-gooders were often heckled, ridiculed and accused of hypocrisy. The journalist William Cobbett said: 'A couple of flitches of bacon are worth 50,000 Methodist sermons and religious tracts.' The poet William Blake wrote of employer-philanthropists: 'They reduce a man to want and then give with pomp and ceremony.'
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There was truth in this, and yet philanthropists such as Thomas Coram, Jonas Hanway and Elizabeth Fry had a vision of a better world. In trying to bring it about, they did save the lives and alleviate the suffering of some of those who had been pushed to the very edge of existence. But their work probably also averted wholesale rebellion.
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