In England, Harriet Martineau’s intervention — arranging the schooling that gave the Crafts formal education — reflected a personal decision by one of the most prominent public intellectuals in Victorian Britain to commit her connections and prestige to supporting two specific people. Martineau was not a peripheral figure in British public life; her books and journalism reached enormous audiences, and her endorsement of causes carried real weight. She could have done something else with her connections. She arranged school placement instead.
Wilson Armistead, who hosted the Crafts in Leeds when they first arrived in England, was a Quaker abolitionist whose networks extended through the transatlantic reform movement. His willingness to receive them immediately upon their arrival — when they were still, legally, fugitives from American law if not from British — reflected the specific commitments of the Quaker community to the abolitionist cause.
None of these people escaped the costs of their support. Parker was indicted for violation of the Fugitive Slave Act; charges were eventually dropped but the threat was real. Hayden kept a keg of gunpowder in his cellar with the explicit intention of blowing up his house rather than letting slave catchers take the people sheltered there. The people who helped the Crafts took real risks, and the Crafts’ ability to survive and eventually flourish depended on the choices those people made.
## Pompey and the Unnamed
The man named Pompey, who worked in the Charleston hotel and asked William not to forget to pray for him, appears in the narrative for a moment and then disappears. He is named; his situation is described, briefly; his request is recorded. Then the story moves on, because the story is the Crafts’ story and Pompey is not in it except as a moment of contact.