In 1897, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an unmarried 40-year-old Irish heiress with radical ideas, wrote to an American friend she had met in Rome. Charlotte's financial wealth was matched by a rich resource of ideas about what she might do with her life, but she couldn't see any clear direction through these. She told her friend about her dilemma, which was typical of many middle-class women possessed of a social conscience at the time: ‘Now it has occurred to me,’ she wrote, ‘that those who try to remedy the terrible evils we see round us by healing individual wounds and patching individual sores, by philanthropy in fact, are like the doctor who tries to cure his patients by rule of thumb … the social evil has gone too deep for mere surface palliation. We must have something else … Is what is wanted a new science? Something like the science of medicine applied collectively, and which will consist of the study of these social horrors we are talking of from the point of view of recent discovery; the study, in fact, of sociology … It is a study which has barely been attempted yet … and what I hope to do is this: with all my power, physical, financial and intellectual to study sociology as I describe it and to help and encourage others cleverer than myself to study it.’

In Charlotte's diagnosis of what was wrong, and what mere philanthropy couldn't cure, was the whole social system: vast inequalities in the ownership of property; the dehumanising commercial system; the struggle between capital and labour; marriage and the impoverished status of women. She felt particularly strongly about the latter; indeed, her feelings on this, she wrote to her friend, went as far and were as extreme as it was possible for them to go and be. She described herself as an independent woman with no family ties, she was perfectly free to do as she chose and perfectly aware that an accident of birth and social position had given her advantages that many people lacked. She’d come to the conclusion that a life that didn't try to remedy this in some modest way would be degrading. But what exactly should she do? She had made two ‘small beginnings’ she told her friend.