Clara Collet

Clara Collet (10 September 1860 – 3 August 1948) was a British social reformer. She was pivotal in effecting many reforms which greatly improved working conditions and pay for women (and some men) during the early part of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most important thing that she did for posterity was her collection of statistical and descriptive evidence of life for working women and poor people in London and elsewhere in England.

Her Unitarian father, Collet Dobson Collet, sent her to the North London Collegiate School close to where she lived, which was one of the most liberated schools for girls at that time. On leaving school she worked as a teacher at Wyggeston Girls' School in Leicester, later to become Regent College. However, she did not find this work fulfilling enough, and after seven years she returned to London to enrol for a master's degree at University College London.

After completion of this degree she worked for Charles Booth helping in his great investigative work on the conditions prevailing in late nineteenth century London. To this end she took up residency in the East End during the autumn of 1888. She was working on a chapter on women's work in Booth's masterpiece Life and Labour of the People of London. As part of this investigation, Collet interviewed prostitutes and wrote a section covering their conditions and reasons for choosing such work. This was at the time Jack the Ripper killed at least five prostitutes.

Her family became acquainted with Karl Marx and Clara became especially friendly with his daughter Eleanor Marx.

Collet was a friend of George Gissing during the last ten years of his life, and offered to act as guardian to his two sons when it became clear his second wife, Edith, would find it hard to cope financially after his death. She may have been in love with Gissing, though this does not appear to have been reciprocated. At this time she also became engaged in a long disagreement with H G Wells over the foreword of Gissing's posthumously published novel Veranilda.

Collet joined the Civil Service and worked with the Board of Trade to introduce many reforms, including the introduction of the Old Age Pension and labour exchanges (employment bureaux). During these years she worked with well-known politicians such as David Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, William Beveridge and Winston Churchill.