In the 19th century, Britain underwent a moral revolution.
Thanks to some extraordinary reformers and philanthropists,
a new set of standards for public life emerged.
Now, due to these "do-gooders",
the wellbeing of the poor and vulnerable was improving immeasurably.
But one area of life was to prove their toughest challenge yet -
the private behaviour of their fellow Britons.
Now sex and alcohol were in the campaigners' sights.
Yes! What went on in pubs, clubs and behind closed doors
was to many do-gooders
as dangerous and therefore as valid a target for their reforming zeal
as illiteracy, factory hours, or filthy water.
Britons liked to drink...
A lot. And not unconnected with this,
they were pretty keen on indiscriminate sex.
Some saw that this behaviour was not just lax, it was becoming fatal.
They determined that they would save their compatriots.
Not from greedy landlords or corrupt officials or exploitative bosses,
but this time, from themselves.
This was a bold ambition, but was it a foolish one?
Would Britain heed the warning?
Would its citizens learn the value of self-restraint?
What do you think?
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In the 1830s, the town of Preston in Lancashire
became the source of a national crusade.
It was led by Joseph Livesey, a man determined to convince all Britons
they'd be better off without booze.
Livesey was a self-made man
who'd made his fortune as a wholesaler of cheese.
His industry, however, was at odds with most of his working-class fellows.
He complained they got so drunk at the weekend
they habitually took what was known as "St Monday"
to sleep off their hangovers.
Preston had long had a heavy drinking culture.
But now it was getting worse.
These are pages from the trade directory
for Preston in the year 1828 to 1829.
And under "Taverns and Public Houses",
there are a stonking 86 separate establishments.
But only five years later, 1834,
the list has jumped up to 104 separate pubs
and there's a new category - "Retailers of Beer".
And under this new heading, there are an incredible 123 more names.
So if you add together those people selling beer,
the people selling beer in pubs,
there's more people selling beer in Preston than any other single item.
The problem was by no means limited to Preston.
In 1830, the government had passed the Beer Act.
This deregulated its sale nationwide.
Suddenly vendors selling ale were everywhere.
And they were not short of buyers.
For Livesey, this was a catastrophe.
Livesey declared, "To argue in favour of free trade
"in the article of intoxicating liquor
"is as absurd as requiring the druggist to leave the vessel
"containing poison without a label,
"or the toy shop to sell loaded pistols for boys' playthings."
Strong words.
Livesey was already a member of a society
which urged the people of Preston
to temper or reduce their alcohol intake.
But now he came round to the audacious view
that only a message of total abstinence could turn the tide of excess.
In the temperance hall, which used to be here,
Livesey got up and argued that the society should campaign
for the giving up of all alcohol.
Just six friends rallied to his cause.
So on Saturday night 1st September 1832, when presumably most other people in Preston
where down the pub, they met here and committed themselves to total abstinence,
by signing what came to be known as "the pledge".
"We agree to abstain from all liquors of an intoxicating quality,
"whether ale, porter, wine or ardent spirits, except as medicines."
Just over a year later, as legend has it, a friend of Livesey's,
Dicky Turner, said, "Nothing but the teetotal will do."
It marked the birth of teetotalism and the temperance revolution.
So what was it about Livesey that made the people of Preston listen to him
and made him such an effective campaigner?
He was a fantastic salesman, that was his strength.
Nowadays, he'd be very good at marketing.
He had a wonderful manner, a humorous manner,
and he was able to get the crowds in.
He was so successful that within one year after the pledge had been taken in 1832,
he had 1,000 people signed up.
And it was that droll Lancashire humour. Think Les Dawson.
Think Frank Randle. That's how he sold his message and had the crowds all laughing
and at the same time signing up for the pledge. Why is it so impossible now to imagine
the temperance movement being successful in, say, a place like this?
Yeah, I think it's the different attitude.
He was emphasising personal responsibility, and when things go wrong now,
sometimes we say, "Ah, well, it's the fault of so and so, it's social services that do it,"
or the police, or so and so. And he said, "No, it's not.
"You do it, you sort yourself out," which is quite a hard message.
This is tough love. Tough love. Yeah, tough love.
Livesey was taking on a huge challenge, but he had a plan.
He applied his wit to writing temperance propaganda,
and maximised the power of the pamphlet.
This is one of his best. It's a spoof advert for a pub,
not with a jolly name like the Lamb and Flag,
but the Spider and the Fly.
The brewery's called Death and Co,
and it's come up with a new drink called Maddlebrain.
If you haven't got the joke by now,
Livesey makes it even clearer by telling you that Death and Co
assure their customers that no establishment sells better poison,
breaks more hearts, or beggars more family than theirs.
'Challenging people about their drinking habits has never been easy.'
Good morning, I'm just handing out a few temperance leaflets here.
Take this, it's about the evils of drinking.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ... God bless you, my friend.
Have a leaflet. Jesus loves you very much.
Preston was known as a town that didn't booze.
Is it now a town full of boozers? Yes.
Any teetotallers left here? None.
IAN LAUGHS Not one?
Anyone here still drinking?
Yeah!
We've got the highest rate of alcoholism, drug addiction,
abortion, sexual disease in Europe and we're headed for big, big trouble.
Do you think there is a problem with booze? Yeah.
Yeah, I have a problem!
Livesey didn't stop with pamphleting.
He also devised a riveting lecture on the evils of malt liquor
that he toured from Preston around the North West,
and the lecture had an explosive message.
Livesey produced four ounces of proof spirit.
Which he said he'd distilled from two pints of beer.
He then took the proof spirit, and poured it into the bowl.
And then...
Livesey told the audience,
"That's what's happening to the coating of your stomach and to your liver."
Now we may find the science of that a bit dodgy, but at the time,
the audience were deeply affected.
A man from Burnley told him,
"I've had as much of that stuff as would light all the lamps in Manchester."
By 1835, it was estimated that 48,000 people had signed the pledge in England,
and that 2,000 hardened drunks had been reformed.
This was not nearly enough for Livesey.
He had set his sights on converting the entire country to abstinence
and anything less was failure.
To make matters worse, some who'd originally taken the pledge had already lapsed.
In 1837, Livesey wrote, "Of late it has been a matter of deep lamentation
"that so many temperance members have returned like the dog to its vomit,
"or the sow who has washed to wallowing in the mire."
Not exactly flattering comparisons.
But Livesey did believe that abstinence was a mark of social progress,
and the fact that the British were much more attached to alcohol than he'd believed
must have been very disappointing.
But he shouldn't have been so hard on himself.
He did start a national movement whose effects would be felt throughout the next century,
and he did it with humour, verve and conviction.
And what Livesey started, others took up enthusiastically.
By the 1840s, the teetotal campaign was developing an independent London base
with a new set of supporters.
One was the illustrator and comic artist George Cruikshank.
Livesey had applied wit and showmanship to promoting the temperance cause.
Now Cruikshank resolved to turn his artistic talents to pursuing its goal.
Cruikshank came late to temperance.
In his youth, he'd been a keen drinker.
Though he'd seen his own father die from too much alcohol,
George rarely said no to a glass...or two.
Berated by his family for his drinking, and often short of cash,
Cruikshank knew all too well the havoc
gin and beer could wreak on human lives.
It became a subject he returned to repeatedly in his work.
In 1847 he created The Bottle,
a cautionary tale told in pictures.
An overnight success, it even became a magic lantern show, the movies of its day.
The story tells the highly moral, if somewhat cliched tale,
of a prosperous married man who seems to have it all.
But as a love of drink takes hold, it corrodes his health,
his happiness and his family life.
Everything is subordinated to his desire for alcohol.
GASPING
Eventually his youngest child dies...
He kills his wife in a fight...
GASPING
And ends up a wreck,
shut up in an asylum.
So, murder, madness, and infant mortality.
Not exactly a feel-good film!
When the chairman of the National Temperance League saw The Bottle, he asked Cruikshank why,
given he was clearly aware of the evils of alcohol, he continued to drink himself.
Cruikshank realised he could no longer avoid the logic of his own images.
He signed the pledge.
Despite its success, not everyone thought that the message of The Bottle was a sound one.
One of the doubters was Cruikshank's own friend, Charles Dickens.
Dickens believed that it was circumstances
which drove the moderate drinker to become an excessive one.
And with The Bottle, a rift opened up
between the pragmatic Dickens
and the increasingly fundamentalist Cruikshank.
When it came to drinking, Dickens was a libertarian,
who despised the idea that anyone should tell him how to live his life.
He hated the temperance movement's increasingly absolutist stance.
Matters came to a head in 1853, when Cruikshank published a series of fairy stories
reinvented as morality tales to promote the temperance cause.
In his versions, the crimes of ogres, giants and bad parents
were all fed by a love of alcohol.
Dickens was incensed, and he retaliated in print
in an article he called Frauds On The Fairies.
Dickens raged against Cruikshank's didacticism,
arguing that charming, timeless fairy tales shouldn't be sullied
with references to contemporary moral or political issues.
Dickens goes on to compose a satirical fairy story.
Cinderella, who joins the Band of Hope, the young person's temperance movement,
gets visited by the Fairy Godmother, who insists that the pumpkin,
which is going to be turned into a coach,
comes from one of the American states where they've got prohibition.
And then when she gets to the ball, the handsome Prince turns out to be a temperance speaker.
Cruikshank wasn't amused.
And worse than that, he was hurt.
He thought he and Dickens were on the same side.
Weren't they both for the poor, against social injustice?
Now he was being made a figure of fun.
Dickens said it was treating the public like babies.
Why was that so effective as a counter argument?
Well, it's true, of course.
That's why it's effective. I mean, it is nannyish, it is intrusive.
It's intolerable. It's priggish on one level,
but on the other hand, alcohol is a very strong lure,
and by the 19th century there were so many poor drinking so much gin...
..that it was a pathetic sight,
and you can understand why people wanted to stop it.
The cliche of the man coming out of work
and spending the week's wages in the pub
before he got home to his wife and many children was true
and it was wrecking human lives.
Cruikshank was still convinced
that his art could sway the great mass of drinking Britons.
In 1859, he embarked on his magnum opus.
Nearly three years in the making, today it's held by the Tate gallery.
This is the most extraordinary, vast depiction of British society,
from top to bottom, corrupted by alcohol.
And the technique is to go from the bottom of the picture,
which is a scene of agreeable middle-class events,
a christening, a birthday, a wedding,
in which everyone's having a few but it's not out of hand,
and the excess rises up through the picture
until you end up with the nightmare vision of where this ends.
In the top right is a lunatic asylum. There's a man being hanged above the jail.
There's the workhouse,
the Magdalene homes, which were for unmarried mothers,
and the police station here, the Ragged School.
And what Cruikshank does in the picture is show you all the professions
setting a bad example.
So you've got a judge here, being shocked when a barrister's saying,
"This man has led a life of drink, and it's led to his downfall."
But just above, there's a happy scene
with the judge entertaining all the barristers and other lawyers. And what are they doing?
They're all getting sozzled.
Same is true just above.
There's a soldier being flogged for drunkenness.
What's happening in the officer's mess?
The officers, they're all getting pissed.
He does it again with clergymen. You've got the nonconformist ministers with a Hindu.
"The Mission to the Hindu." And the Hindu's going,
"I'm not quite sure about this, look at that drink you're putting away."
So you have all these scenes, and then the picture collapses
into the middle, which is a nightmare vision of drunkenness,
violence, debauchery and destitution.
The most violent image right in the middle
is a man thumping a naked woman, who's carrying a child, right in the throat.
And the violence is all around him.
There's a man shooting another man with a rifle. Just like that, bang.
And it's not just the men fighting, there's women here, more or less scratching their eyes out.
And the police, who are meant to be helping presumably restore
some sort of order, they're all drunk themselves.
And there in the centre of the picture is Bacchus himself.
The god of drink being worshipped.
And underneath there, there's a sort of bar, and the rabble
are handing over anything to get hold of the booze.
There's a man there offering, look, here's my child.
And the central worshipper, who embodies the madness of the whole society, is a madman.
And he's dancing, in a frenzy, dancing on a tomb. That's where you're going.
You lose everything to drink, all your friends, all your family,
everything you ever owned, and the end result of it is this!
The mob, violent, angry, dissolute, impoverished and eventually dead.
Despite Cruikshank's extraordinary efforts, "The Worship of Bacchus"
was not a hit with the public.
A friend of Cruikshank's did attend the exhibition
and described a really pathetic scene.
"There was a wild, anxious look in his face, when he greeted me.
"While we talked, he glanced once or twice at the door, when we heard any sound from that direction.
"Were they coming at last, the tardy, laggard public for whom he bravely toiled for so long?
"Yet it was near noon, and only a solitary visitor had wandered into the room."
Cruikshank had damaged his reputation.
The public did not want to be attacked in such a head-on,
strident way, and he now became to many a figure of fun.
He died here at his home in Camden in 1878.
He was 85.
But when his will was read, it revealed an extraordinary secret,
one that Cruikshank had concealed for over 20 years.
Despite his ostensibly happy marriage, it emerged that Cruikshank
kept a mistress and a family, less than two minutes walk from this, his official home.
Adelaide Archibald worked for the Cruikshanks as a housemaid, and
when she left their employ she gave birth to her former boss's child.
And then went on to bear him another ten!
On his death, Cruikshank left a trust for Adelaide but most
extraordinarily, left instructions that all his wines,
kept at her home, should be passed on to her.
Does this make Cruikshank a hypocrite?
Well, he never campaigned for sexual continence in the way he did for temperance.
But what about the wine?
Was it just a sound financial investment?
Or was he nipping up the road and drinking it on the quiet?
We just don't know.
Either way the revelations suggest that when the Punch obituary stated, "Never has there lived a simpler,
"purer, more straightforward or altogether more blameless man," they were pretty wide of the mark!
Temperance was not the only attempt by do-gooders to police personal behaviour.
Some also battled against an associated problem just
as intractable and destructive as heavy drinking - the vice trade.
The Victorians called it The Great Social Evil.
To them it corroded all society, tarnishing not just the physical
and moral health of prostitute and client,
but also wives infected with disease by errant husbands, and children
born out of wedlock into squalor and misery.
In London alone, according to contemporary estimates,
anywhere from 10 to 80,000 women were involved in prostitution.
The Victorian public imagination was very much captured by prostitutes.
On the one hand, they saw the prostitute as an agent of real
social contagion and chaos within the city.
She symbolised the evils of the industrialised world,
she represented the lustful sins of the flesh out there in the public domain.
But on the other hand she was also seen as a very innocent
suffering victim as well, of male sexual vice.
In the late 1840s, one man in particular became a familiar face amongst the local street walkers.
Night after night, he would scour the streets looking for a girl who caught his eye.
But he was not your typical punter.
He didn't want to sleep with the girls, he wanted to save them.
He called this "rescue work", and he pursued this mission for 40 years.
And it wasn't his only achievement.
He just happened to be the greatest reformer and statesman of the Victorian age.
He had a ministerial career that spanned 60 years,
four times Chancellor and four times Liberal Prime Minister.
He was William Gladstone.
Gladstone was a remarkable politician, but an even more remarkable man.
All his life, he made a concerted effort to live virtuously.
He once listed 39 reasons why it would not be incompatible
for a devout Christian to attend a ball.
Gladstone's religious motivation led him to believe that he should
regularly perform acts of private charity towards the neediest in society.
In 1848, he found a way of combining this with his late night sittings at Westminster.
As Gladstone walked home, he approached West End prostitutes.
Thanks to his scrupulous diary entries, we have some of the details of these encounters.
"2nd May 1850, conversation at a night with an unhappy woman."
"29th April 1852, saw a person at night who opened a new chapter in human calamity to me."
"28th May 1852, saw one late and advised - a broken creature."
"12th Feb 1853, gave one five shillings at night, to go home."
And don't forget that the morning after all those nights before,
Gladstone would get up and go and run the country.
When Gladstone arrived back late to this house, he sometimes had in tow
a prostitute who he'd offered a meal and a bed for the night.
And he was often greeted by his wife Catherine.
She's believed to have supported his efforts,
but exactly what she thought about this arrangement is not recorded.
However, she was a serious do-gooder herself.
And their shared opinion about active charity made theirs a strong marriage.
They were together for almost 59 years and had eight children.
But in the early days of their marriage, she preferred to live
at their Welsh home with the children. This created problems.
In Catherine's absence, Gladstone's rescue work "intensified".
And sometimes concern can grow into obsession...
In 1859, aged 49, Gladstone befriended Marian Summerhayes.
No street walker, she was a higher class of prostitute
and had at one time worked as an artist's model.
Gladstone now took the "unconventional"
step of commissioning her portrait.
He was immediately struck by her beauty and her loveliness.
He noted this in his diary in Italian, which was always when
he wanted to wax lyrical or indeed keep things a little more private.
And he became more and more obsessed, and there are numerous
comments in his diary which were, to us, highly suspect.
On 1st September 1859 he wrote,
"My thoughts of Summerhayes require to be limited and purged.
Whatever that meant, it obviously wasn't very successful, because a fortnight later
he spent four and a half hours with her reading Tennyson's epic poem The Princess together,
after which he wrote he was, "much and variously moved."
Gladstone himself was far from blind to the erotic potential of his encounters,
and he knew that sometimes he strayed into morally compromising territory.
In his diary he used to put this little mark with a whip sign next to days in which he'd had an encounter.
I think probably what he did, was he was given a whip by Dr Pusey,
the famous high church divine,
and I think what would happen, is, if poor old Gladstone got
a bit too excited talking to one of these girls he'd give himself six of the best.
There was certainly a darker side to Gladstone's rescue work,
but one of the problems was because he was so tempted
by some of these women, he felt that he should put himself more in their company to actually
fight off this temptation and show himself, and indeed God, that he was capable of resisting.
Today, despite the involvement of the state, it still seems we need
individuals committed to going out and offering a helping hand directly.
Diane Martin is now the Director of Trust, a Christian-inspired
project assisting prostitutes in South London.
Tell me why, when you started, you felt you had to do it.
Was it a religious impulse?
Religious impulse!
I didn't feel like I had to do it.
I think, for me, because I had been exploited through
prostitution as a young person, in the back of my mind
I felt that I wanted to respond in some way.
And when you started it, it was just you going out at night.
It started actually on Sunday afternoons, and there
was a group of us and it started off as a local church project, going out on Tooting Common looking
like stalkers or ramblers, with a back pack, coffee,
Hobnobs, contact cards with my mobile number on it.
Condoms in the backpack as well. You had condoms in the back pack?
Yes.
What sort of response do you get? They don't think, "Oh, ghastly do-gooders! We don't need any help!"
We've actually never had a negative reaction.
But quite early on in the early days, we did have someone see another woman and introduce us,
and I remember her saying,
shouting out across the Common, "Come and meet the Christian ladies!"
and I just thought I should be embroidering or wearing a pith helmet or something like that.
So is it a bit odd for a man to be going out
in the middle of the night, looking for prostitutes to help?
I'm thinking of Gladstone, obviously.
I like the thought of him being in Parliament, working till 12,
walking home and not turning a blind eye to what he saw.
And not just turning a blind eye but opening a wallet.
He opened his front door and took people home.
Now I love the idea of that, and I've always thought, in terms of
the church, if we all did that, wouldn't that be great?
But then what happens is you become a charity, you have to behave yourself a little bit more,
Health and Safety... All that kind of stuff gets in the way!
What's appropriate? You know. But I think...
That's the joy of the Victorians, isn't it? They just did it.
Yeah, they just went and did it.
Regardless of his sometimes complex motivations, Gladstone's commitment
to assisting London prostitutes lasted most of his adult life.
In that time he gave over £80,000 - that's the equivalent of roughly
£4 million today, to homes for them to stay in and to learn a trade.
Gladstone made time to become involved personally as well as
politically with people at the bottom end of the ladder, and in many ways
this great Prime Minister and great reformer epitomised all that was best about this age of philanthropy.
And how often nowadays do you hear about a politician trying directly
to help the poor without a camera crew or a press officer in tow?
In private Gladstone may have been committed to the welfare of prostitutes, but unfortunately,
as Chancellor, he voted for an extraordinarily draconian act of legislation affecting British women.
Faced with an escalation in sexually transmitted infections amongst the armed forces,
in 1864 the government passed the Contagious Diseases Act,
a law that ruthlessly targeted women as the problem rather than men.
In key garrison towns and naval ports, women suspected of being
prostitutes would have to register, submit themselves to an examination to prove that they were clean,
and if they failed the test, would be incarcerated in hospitals until they were pronounced cured.
It seemed a bold and pragmatic idea,
but when the act was put into practice it created a huge public outcry.
One problem was that the Contagious Diseases Act affected not just prostitutes but also ordinary women.
Under the legislation, women living within a ten mile radius of any army camp or naval port
which was specified in the Acts could be picked up simply on suspicion of being a prostitute,
which might simply mean they were walking down the street
at eight or nine o'clock at night when any respectable woman
either would have had a chaperone or been back in her home.
All women, whether they're found to be suffering a venereal disease or not, are registered,
and once you were registered as a prostitute,
whether or not there was any evidence for that, it had a
massively detrimental effect on women's lives in terms of their social standing and reputation.
It had become brutally apparent that society had one set of rules for men and another for women,
something some now dared say publicly.
But one pioneering woman went further,
and decided to try and tackle this problem at its core
by trying to persuade men of the error of their ways.
Ellice Hopkins was a do-gooder who lectured others about sex
without, as far as we know, ever having had any herself.
The bookish daughter of a Cambridge don, she began her good works as a feisty Christian evangelist.
And she once received two stems of Brussels sprouts from a labourer as a thank you for converting him.
When her father died, Hopkins settled in Brighton,
a town with its fair share of vice.
In the 1860s, the local police estimated that 350 prostitutes
worked here and that there were 97 brothels.
Hopkins now began to visit the local prostitutes to try to help them.
But after over a decade of hearing the poignant stories of the women,
she decided a different strategy was called for.
Hopkins came to think that prevention was better than cure.
In her own words, "better a fence at the top of a cliff than an ambulance at the foot."
In 1879 she wrote an essay throwing down the gauntlet.
She boldly criticised the Church of England for only dealing with the consequences of sexual immorality,
in its homes for fallen women, and failing to tackle the real problem -
the behaviour of the nation's men.
It was their money that allowed prostitutes to ply their trade,
and, she said, it was their false promises
that tempted good women to stray
and become prostitutes in the first place.
She declared, "My inmost soul yearns for some agency that could infuse in young men
"a strong and passionate sense of the pitiful meanness of it all,
"the utter unmanliness of crushing and degrading women,
"inflicting them with a curse which they do not share with so much as their little finger".
Four years later, she got her wish.
In 1883, along with the Bishop of Durham, she set up an organisation
with the ambitious aim of getting men to be chaste.
It was called the White Cross Army.
White stood for purity,
army for disciplined strength
and the cross for the overarching belief that the struggle was in the name of Christ.
And the rousing motto came from the words given by the poet Tennyson to Sir Galahad.
"My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure."
The White Cross Army was inspired by the late Victorian vogue
for the medieval idea of chivalry.
It was typified in tales where noble knights served and protected defenceless damsels.
The White Cross Army drew up its own chivalric code,
and like with the temperance pledge, urged its adherents to sign up.
And the promises were - "One, to treat all women with respect,
"and to endeavour to protect them against wrong and degradation.
"Two, to put down all indecent language and coarse jests.
"Three, to maintain the law of purity as equally binding upon men and women.
"Four, to endeavour to spread these principles amongst my companions and to try and help younger brothers.
"Five, to use all possible means to fulfil the command, 'Keep thyself pure.'"
Not much of an ask.
MUSIC: Onward, Christian Soldiers
To us nowadays, this seems deeply conservative, and quite funny.
But in the 1880s, what Hopkins was doing and saying was truly radical.
In a society run by men, where men made all the rules, she was daring
to say, "You need to think again about what being a good man is."
For the next four years, Hopkins tirelessly toured the country,
speaking on a subject few polite women would ever refer to in public...
..male sexual desire.
She addressed mass meetings of mostly working class or university men, urging them to join her cause.
Public speaking, however, was only one part of a two-pronged attack.
Hopkins wrote a series of little pamphlets for men.
And this one, True Manliness, was a bestseller.
It was published in 1883, and sold 300,000 copies in its first year.
It was reprinted again and again over the next 30.
It was even sent out to British troops in India, in order to give them pause for thought.
Basically, it's a fairly primitive sort of sex education for men,
trying to teach them about their sexual desires and how to control them.
And Hopkins uses the metaphor of a rider and a horse - the rider being man's intelligent life
and the horse being his baser instincts.
This will give you a flavour of it.
"There is nothing low or vile in the animal body in itself,
"just as there is nothing low or vile in the horse in itself,
"as long as the man is uppermost and the beast is undermost.
"It is only when the animal throws the rider and drags him through the dirt at his heels, only when the man
"obeys the beast rather than the beast obeying the man, that disorder and death ensue.
"The man or the maddened beast,
"which is it to be?"
Luckily, she gives some practical help in how to control that beast.
"Take plenty of exercise.
"Go in strongly for cricket, boating, athletics of all kinds, bicycling, tricycling...
"Break your nose if you like.
"Only don't break a woman's heart and smash your own manliness
"by making the weak suffer so that YOU may have a good time of it."
Unfortunately, Hopkins' immense productivity had a shattering impact on her health.
Eventually, she was forced to retire from public life.
She lived on as in invalid in Brighton for 16 years, still writing books on sex education.
Unlike those of many 19th-century do-gooders, Hopkins' former home is not adorned with a blue plaque.
In fact, she is barely remembered at all.
The White Cross Army has long since been disbanded,
and the idea of social purity doesn't really interest anyone any more.
But she should not be forgotten.
In an age where the moral responsibility for sex was assumed
to lie almost entirely with the woman,
she tried to change the cultural status quo.
She spoke out bravely on issues which were widely considered taboo,
and dedicated herself and ultimately sacrificed her health to try and improve women's lives.
She may seem an odd sort of feminist to us,
but in her time she was an original thinker and a powerful voice
in stirring up a complacent national male conscience.
Despite Hopkins' tireless contribution, erasing the sexual double standard was a tall order.
It took 20 years for Gladstone's government to repeal the notorious Contagious Diseases Act.
And even 120 years on,
that double standard is still something that educators find hard to address.
Daniel McMillan works for Brook Sexual Health Services,
and runs workshops for groups of young men and women on sex and relationships.
If Ellice Hopkins were around today, I think she'd have a mix of disappointment and hope.
Young men are opening up more. They are having conversations about love and trust and caring relationships.
But disappointment that the level of responsibility amongst young people seems to be dropping.
The men still rely on women to take on the caring role - not only at home but in their own relationships.
Sometimes they'll talk quite degradingly about girls in their peer group,
but if you say anything bad about a young man's mother or sister, he's ready for a fight,
but somehow fails to make the link between his mother or sister
and the fact that the girls he's talking about are somebody's daughter or sister as well.
I think it's a poor indictment on society, really, about how far we've moved on.
Back in mid-Victorian Britain, government was getting bigger,
and expanding into the realm of the do-gooder.
The public's strong reaction against the Contagious Diseases Act
demonstrated that sexual behaviour was a minefield for legislators and best avoided.
Nonetheless, Prime Minister William Gladstone was optimistic
that he might have more luck calling time on that other vice - boozing.
In 1871, his government introduced a controversial bill
to reduce pub opening hours.
The bill went down badly on all sides.
The staunch teetotallers who favoured abolition claimed it didn't go far enough.
Other social reformers, including Joseph Livesey, objected on the grounds that the bill
attacked the MEANS of providing drink rather than the causes of drinking.
Meanwhile, the brewers, the publicans and the drinkers were all furious.
800,000 of them signed a petition against the bill - which eventually appeared in a watered-down form.
But it was still too much for the spirit of John Bull.
When the police tried to enforce earlier closing hours,
there were riots - many of them accompanied by raucous choruses of Rule, Britannia!
with stress on the defiant words
"Britons never, never, never shall be slaves."
Gladstone lost the subsequent general election, and he declared,
"We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer."
MUSIC: "Rule, Britannia!"
It seemed Britons had strong opinions
about how far they were going to let their government intrude
into their private lives -
even if their behaviour WAS leading to poverty, sickness and an early grave.
But in the face of all evidence to the contrary,
some do-gooders still thought it was a fight that could be won.
One such uncompromising idealist was Frederick Charrington,
who when he was 20, in the 1870s, witnessed a scene which would change the course of his life.
Charrington was walking past an East End pub in a particularly miserable part of the city,
when he witnessed a young woman with two children in tow begging her drunken husband for help.
"Oh, Tom," she pleaded, "do give me some money.
"The children are crying out for bread."
He was deaf to her pleas, and simply thumped her.
She slumped to the ground. Charrington was appalled.
When he looked up, he saw his own family's name.
Charrington's family owned one of the biggest breweries in London,
and they'd always assumed
that he would one day take over the business.
But now he gave up his inheritance, worth £1.25 million,
and swore he'd devote his life
to expunging the worst vices of the poor.
Charrington waged war on what he considered the greatest moral danger
facing the people of the East End...
..the music halls, which he called "music hells".
# Will ya, won't ya, won't ya, will ya
# Won't ya buy some beer...? #
Their patrons found them a good place to forget your troubles after a hard day's work.
Not so Charrington.
To him they were a sleazy hotbed of intoxication and fornication.
# ..won't ya buy some beer? #
One of his key battlegrounds was Wilton's, a theatre
near the East End docks just off the notorious Ratcliffe Highway.
Charrington decided to go straight to the heart of the viper's nest.
In February 1877, he took over Wilton's on Sunday nights to put on
his own show, a religious service championing self-restraint and temperance, and offering redemption.
The audience was the usual mix of local lowlife, a lot of sailors
and "girls of loose character" associated with them.
But whilst they may have been drawn out of curiosity - even disbelief -
many of them left inspired by Charrington's vigorous Christianity.
Of course, weekly meetings, however successful, did little to dilute the popularity of the music halls.
Charrington turned to direct action.
He took to demonstrating outside theatres, night after night,
handing out leaflets aimed to dissuade patrons and prostitutes from entering the premises.
These were entitled This Way To The Pit Of Hell -
which is quite off-putting if you were hoping for a jolly night out.
When this failed, Charrington tried to co-opt the law.
He won a seat on the London County Council, now responsible for granting alcohol licences.
When any music hall requested one, he opposed it.
But his fellow councillors refused to back him.
They knew what their electorate wanted.
The case was summed up by one journalist who wrote,
"We do not want to be made moral
"by a paternal council, any more than we wish to be made sober by an act of parliament.
"And the sooner the council turns itself to its own business, the better we shall be pleased."
Unable to change society,
Charrington took the ultimate step for the do-gooder - and set out to build his own.
In 1903 he bought an island called Osea, only 40 miles from London,
off an estuary in Essex.
Here, he pursued his vision to create a temperance colony...
..and a home for recovering inebriates.
This is Rivermere, a large,
luxurious manor house in a prime south-facing location on the edge of the shore.
It had everything for a perfect English seaside holiday -
except, no beer after a bracing walk, no claret with supper,
and no port in the billiard room.
It was going to be fun... without drink.
Charrington had high hopes of spending time on the island himself.
He liked to quote the 18th-century English poet William Cowper, on the pleasures of island life.
"I am monarch of all I survey.
"My right, there is none to dispute."
But dispute it, they did -
and before too long, there was trouble in paradise.
Osea was meant to be entirely dry, but stories soon began to circulate
of recovering alcoholics bribing local fishermen to smuggle in booze.
One method was to tie bottles to trees and posts along the shoreline,
submerged, so that then when the tide went out,
they could scamper down, pick them up, and no-one would know.
Despite these setbacks, Charrington was still convinced that his utopia
had a glorious, popular future.
Osea was going to be a rival to Brighton or Southend, but without
the drunken excesses of the day-trippers who flocked to those resorts.
As it happened, the advent of the First World War
put a stop to Charrington's grander plans for Osea.
But it's doubtful that it would ever have lived up to his high expectations.
The problem was, and is -
that people always WANT a Brighton or a Southend.
There's only a certain amount of do-gooding that the country will put up with -
even from someone as well-meaning as Frederick Charrington.
"Drink is a terrible social evil, and I'm going to help you cope with the consequences."
"Yeah. OK."
"I'm going to stop you drinking anything ever again."
"Er...no, thanks. Not for us, no."
We may have rejected the likes of Charrington - but that doesn't mean, as with prostitution,
that we've yet found a solution
to the nation's desire to overindulge in booze, and its consequences.
I think there probably IS an epidemic
of excessive drinking in Britain.
The statistics would bear that out.
The cost to the health service would bear that out.
The drunks in the streets, the misbehaviour on Friday
and Saturday nights - I think that's probably the tip of the iceberg.
There are huge numbers of people
who would not for one second consider that they have an alcohol problem,
who are drinking excessively, and put themselves at risk of developing serious
and even fatal disease related to their alcohol consumption.
If temperance members visited the centre of most towns or cities in the country at the weekend,
I think they would be both amazed and distressed by what they saw.
And I think they would be rushing very rapidly to the nearest church
to find some divine inspiration as to what to do next.
Recently, Osea again became a dry island.
For five years, it operated as a centre which offered help to alcoholics and other addicts.
Society still has problems with excessive alcohol and devalued sex.
We still have problems with poverty, neglect and abuse.
And we are still suspicious of people who believe they can do something about it.
Like our Victorian ancestors, we bristle at the idea
of the authorities telling US how to live our lives.
And yet we demand that those very authorities step in and sort it out
the minute something goes wrong.
We say no to the nanny state, yet we expect the welfare state to protect everyone.
We look to professionals to make a difference - to teachers,
to policeman, to social workers - rather than doing it ourselves.
The great do-gooders haven't been fashionable for a long time now -
their achievements underrated, their absurdities accentuated.
But I think as time passes and we look at them again - less sure of ourselves in the 21st century -
we may be ready for the tide of opinion to turn.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk