Emily Ronalds
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Emily Ronalds (25 September 1795 – 10 December 1889) was a British social reformer. She supported pioneering cooperative communities, and also had extended theoretical and practical involvement in early childhood education through the formative years of the infant school movement in England.
She was born at 11 Canonbury Place, Islington, to Francis Ronalds and Jane née Field, who were Unitarians and well-to-do wholesale cheesemongers in Upper Thames Street, London. Her brothers included the inventor Sir Francis Ronalds, and Alfred Ronalds, who published a classic book on entomology for fly fishing – Emily produced the painted plates for the fourth edition in 1849.[1]
The family later resided in Highbury Terrace; at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith; Queen Square in Bloomsbury; in Croydon; and on Chiswick Lane.[2] Ronalds also travelled extensively. She went to America in 1824 with the social reformers Richard Flower and Robert Owen to visit her brother Hugh, who had helped found the county town of Albion, Illinois.[3][4] She also spent considerable time in Germany and Switzerland, sometimes in the company of her nephew Edmund Ronalds.[5]
After her mother died in 1852, Ronalds lived at Earlswood Common in Redhill, Surrey, and then at 27 Clifton Terrace in Brighton.[6] At her death, her niece Mrs. Charles Flower recorded that she “leaves a much honoured name behind her”.[7]