‘Sinful Sex and Demon Drink’ in the Wellcome Library

Image: Ian Hislop (BBC Press Office)

This week saw the broadcast on BBC2 of the concluding part of Ian Hislop’s Age of the Do-Gooders, a series which set out to restore the reputation of Victorian social campaigners and reformers.

The concluding episode – Sinful Sex and Demon Drink – featured a sequence filmed in the Wellcome Library. This discussed the work of the social purity campaigner Ellice Hopkins (1836-1904) and featured presenter Ian Hislop read from a copy we have of her instructional pamphlet ‘True Manliness‘, which promoted the virtues of male chastity.

The episode – along with the first two in the series – featured a wealth of material on health in the nineteenth century and is available through the BBC iPlayer to viewers in the UK until Monday 20th December.