Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, styled Lord Ashley from 1811 to 1851 and then Lord Shaftesbury following the death of his father, was a British politician, philanthropist and social reformer.
He was the eldest son of Cropley Ashley-Cooper, 6th Earl of Shaftesbury and his wife Lady Anne Spencer, daughter of George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough, and older brother of Henry Ashley, MP. Lord Ashley, as he was styled until his father's death in 1851, was educated at Manor House school in Chiswick, Harrow School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained first class honours in classics in 1822, took his MA in 1832 and was appointed DCL in 1841. Ashley's early family life was loveless, a circumstance common among the British upper classes, and resembled in that respect the fictional childhood of Esther Summerson vividly narrated in the early chapters of Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House.
G.F.A Best in his biography Shaftesbury writes that: Ashley grew up without any experience of parental love. He saw little of his parents, and when duty or necessity compelled them to take notice of him they were formal and frightening.
Even as an adult, he disliked his father and was known to refer to his mother as a devil. This difficult childhood was softened by the affection he received from his housekeeper Maria Millis, and his sisters.
Millis provided for Ashley a model of Ch
He was the eldest son of Cropley Ashley-Cooper, 6th Earl of Shaftesbury and his wife Lady Anne Spencer, daughter of George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough, and older brother of Henry Ashley, MP. Lord Ashley, as he was styled until his father's death in 1851, was educated at Manor House school in Chiswick, Harrow School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained first class honours in classics in 1822, took his MA in 1832 and was appointed DCL in 1841. Ashley's early family life was loveless, a circumstance common among the British upper classes, and resembled in that respect the fictional childhood of Esther Summerson vividly narrated in the early chapters of Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House.
G.F.A Best in his biography Shaftesbury writes that: Ashley grew up without any experience of parental love. He saw little of his parents, and when duty or necessity compelled them to take notice of him they were formal and frightening.
Even as an adult, he disliked his father and was known to refer to his mother as a devil. This difficult childhood was softened by the affection he received from his housekeeper Maria Millis, and his sisters.
Millis provided for Ashley a model of Ch
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