2-888-694 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Anniversary Meeting of the Charity Children in St. Paul's Cathedral, [London], Jun 6, 1850. '...never did the sunbeams which occasionally streamed through the vaulted dome seem so much like the golden ladder on which the "angels of God ascended and descended"...as when they shone for a few moments upon the heads of those thousands of children...It was a sight that went home to every heart, and made an Englishman proud of the land of his birth, to know that hundreds of those children, who were fatherless and motherless, were watched over and tended by the Angel of Charity....to see those thousands of clean and neatly-clad children...the girls...as if touched by the wand of some magician, raise or drop their thousands of snow-white aprons at the self-same instant of time, was like the sudden opening and folding of innumerable wings...'. From an article by Thomas Miller, in "Illustrated London News", 1850.