Anne's sister Harriet and her family. In 1838, Gilbert took his wife and toddler on a long trip to Italy, where he had lived as a young man. There, their daughter Jane Morris Gilbert (1838–1906) was born. In 1841, Gilbert's brother and sister, Joseph and Jane, both died of tuberculosis. Gilbert received some property owned by his sister and became a potential co-guardian to Joseph's two young sons, together with the Schwencks. In 1843, his daughter Mary Florence (1843–1911) was born. In early 1845, Gilbert decided to take custody of his two young nephews from their mother, Catherine, who had begun a relationship with an officer of the East India Company. She brought a custody lawsuit and her children were returned to her. Amid considerable publicity critical of Gilbert and the Schwencks, Gilbert fled with his young family to Boulogne, France, where his daughter, Anne Maude (1845–1932), was born. The family lived there for two years and returned to London in 1847, moving to Brompton. Gilbert and Anne "led an increasingly quarrelsome life" in London. Early writing career Gilbert began his writing career around 1857. He was concerned, throughout his life, with the welfare of the poor and served as honorary secretary of the Society of the Relief of Distress. His interest in the poor is evident in his writing, and one of his recurring themes was that poverty and alcohol, not genealogy, was the major cause of crime and the main factor in one's later fortunes. This theme would also be seen in his son's writing. One of the elder Gilbert's first pieces was a pamphlet entitled, "On the Present System of Rating for the Relief of the Poor in the Metropolis" (1857). In 1858, anonymously, Gilbert published Dives and Lazarus, or the adventures of an obscure medical man in a low neighbourhood. The book was a fictional account focusing on what Gilbert saw as the increasing disparity in the lives of the rich and the poor. A similar theme pervades another early Gilbert novel, The Weaver's Family (1860). This theme continued to concern Gilbert throughout his career including in Contrasts; dedicated to the ratepayers of London (1873) and in one of his fiercest attacks on social abuses, The City; An Inquiry into the Corporation, its livery companies, and the administration of their charities and endowments (1877), describing how 50,000 working-class people were evicted from their dwellings to make