Jonty Claypole

People didn't worry about prostitution so much.

They didn't worry about affairs so much.

It's partly because of the emergence of this really strong strain of evangelical Christianity in Victorian England and the sort of impossible standards that imposes on people.

Yeah.

Ah, building up, of course, to the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857.

So it's all there.

So the hysteria finds expression in the statistics which are given at the time of the number of sort of prostitutes or destitute women in London.

There are these insanely inflated figures which are doing the rounds.

And this largely comes back to a surgeon called William Acton, who was fascinated, obsessed.

with sex and prostitution.

He was the world's authority on masturbation in the 19th century.

I looked him up on Wikipedia and it says William Acton was a British medical doctor and book writer.

He was known for his books on masturbation.

I just thought it was a great Wikipedia.

He was also known for his opinions on prostitution.

And in 1857, he published a book about prostitution, saying it was this cancer that was eating into the heart of society.

And he came up with these wildly inflated figures.

He estimated there were 210,000 prostitutes in London.

which, considering London had a population of two million, meant that one in 10 people was a prostitute.

And there's a scene in the book where he positions himself on a street identifying women as prostitutes.