Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury(1801–1885)

Anthony Ashley Cooper was born at 24 Grosvenor Square, London, on the twenty-eighth of April 1801, eldest son of Cropley Ashley Cooper, 6th Earl of Shaftesbury, and Lady Anne Spencer, daughter of the 4th Duke of Marlborough. The boyhood was unhappy: his parents were absent, and he was raised principally by the family housekeeper Maria Millis, a working-class Methodist woman whose Christian instruction at the nursery established the religious foundation of his later humanitarian work. He was schooled at Manor House in Chiswick from seven to twelve, at Harrow from 1813, and at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1819, taking a first-class degree in classics in 1822.

He was elected Tory MP for Woodstock, the family pocket borough, at the May 1826 general election in his twenty-fifth year and held a Commons seat continuously for the next twenty-five years (Woodstock 1826 to 1830, Dorchester 1830 to 1831, Dorset 1831 to 1846, Bath 1847 to 1851), before succeeding his father in 1851 as 7th Earl of Shaftesbury and moving to the House of Lords. He served briefly as Commissioner of the India Board of Control 1828 to 1830 and as Lord of the Admiralty 1834 to 1835 under Peel, but his entire effective parliamentary career was the long humanitarian back-bench Commons-and-Lords campaign of factory and social legislation that ran from 1832 to his death in 1885.

He took up in 1832 the parliamentary leadership of the Ten Hours Movement from Michael Sadler on the latter's electoral defeat, and across the next fifteen years carried the campaign for the regulation of working hours in the textile mills against the determined opposition of the manufacturing and free-trade Whig interest. The Factory Acts of 1833 (Althorp's Act, drafted on his amendment, limiting child labour in mills under nine and restricting under-eighteens to twelve hours), of 1844 (extending the regulation to women), of 1847 (the Ten Hours Act under Fielden, the principal Cooper measure, restricting women and under-eighteens to ten hours), of 1850 and of 1853 (closing the relay loopholes) constitute the foundational corpus of Victorian factory legislation. His Mines and Collieries Act of August 1842, drafted on the strength of the 1840 to 1842 Children's Employment Commission he had chaired, prohibited the employment of women and children under ten underground in the coal mines and was the most important single piece of mid-nineteenth-century industrial-protective legislation.

He pursued in parallel the chimney-sweepers regulation that ended the climbing-boy practice of the cotton-broking pit-boys in the chimney trade (the Climbing Boys Acts of 1840, 1864 and the final Chimney Sweepers Act of 1875 that ended the practice); the Lunacy Commission reforms that he chaired from 1828 to 1885 and that established modern asylum regulation; the Ragged Schools Union (founded 1844, chairman to his death, three hundred thousand poor children educated through the Union's schools across the 1850s and 1860s); the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (founded 1884); and the British and Foreign Bible Society. He died at Folkestone on the first of October 1885 in his eighty-fifth year and was buried at St Giles's Church, Wimborne St Giles, on the Dorset family estate. The bronze statue of Eros (more properly Anteros, the Greek god of selfless love) on the fountain at the south end of Shaftesbury Avenue at Piccadilly Circus was unveiled by public subscription in 1893 in his memory and stands as one of the most-recognised public monuments in London. The Cooper name in modern British social history carries the weight of the fifty-three years of humanitarian legislation, 1832 to 1885.