If the Unitarians of South Australia were not generally active in promoting social change, those in England were. Catherine Spence met a number of them during her year in Britain in 1865-66. Furnished with introductions from Emily Clark, and preceded by her reputation as the author of Clara Morison and a political pamphlet, she was welcomed into the circles of Emily Clark's cousins, Florence and Rosamund Davenport Hill, and those of her uncles Rowland Hill and Matthew Davenport Hill.

Matthew Davenport Hill joined Mary Carpenter in the campaign for changes in the punishment of juvenile delinquents and the establishment of reformatories in the 1850s. The Davenport Hill sisters were at work on a book about ways of caring for destitute children: Florence was to read a paper about boarding out children from workhouses at a meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science in 1869, and Rosamund was to become a member of the London School Board ten years later. They introduced Spence to the gentlemanly Frances Power Cobbe who, having subjected her generous Anglo-Irish warmth to a chilling stint as a teacher in Mary Carpenter's reformatory for girls in the 1850s, had moved on to philanthropic action over the care and education of pauper children, and to struggle in the campaign for female suffrage. Her Essays on the Pursuits of Women had appeared in 1864. At Rowland Hill's house, spence met the golden-haired philanthropist, feminist and artist Barbara Leigh Smith, on whom George Eliot modelled the character of Romola.