Elizabeth Fry was a Quaker minister at the age of 29 and a most impressive preacher. She formed an association for the improvement of female prisoners in Newgate, broadened her reforming work to include other prisons, and succeeded in persuading the government to regulate the appalling conditions under which convicts were shipped to New South Wales. She instituted an order of nursing sisters, and she alleviated the miserable state of vagrants particularly those in London.