Tom Holland

So his first campaign, which he launched in 1883, it drew on a Congregationalist pamphlet titled The Bitter Cry of Outcast London.

He pushed this very, very hard to highlight the squalor and indignity and horror of London slums.

And it played a massive role in encouraging the government to embark on the program of slum clearance that by 1888 was kind of lapping at the borders of Spitalfields and ironically had served to make lots of people homeless, to displace people from their homes and had added to the overcrowding in Whitechapel.

So that's one way in which Stead has impacted on events in Flarendine Street and Thrall Street and Dorset Street and so on.

Then in 1885, he'd launched his most famous campaign, which we've already briefly mentioned.

And this was a series of four articles headlined The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.

And it detailed how members of the British elite were preying on young working class girls, how these girls were, and I quote, snared, trapped and outraged.

And Stead was

kind of ramped up the horror of this in brilliantly melodramatic terms so here here is do the girls cry out of course they do but what avails screaming in a quiet bedroom and his most spectacular his most notorious stunt was literally to buy a 13 year old girl yeah for five pounds from her mother eliza armstrong her name was yeah a massive scandal that he did this and he took her didn't he

And he actually ends up being prosecuted for it, which just kind of compounds the publicity effect of the whole campaign.

And the impact of this is both immense and immediate.

And it leads directly in the same year of 1885 to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which is a very momentous piece of legislation.

So it raises the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16.

But it is also the act which led to the closure of brothels, which we mentioned in the first episode, which had seen prostitutes evicted from their rooms.

and sent again out into Whitechapel.

So this again is part of what is making Whitechapel even more of a hotbed of overcrowding and vice than it had been before.

And just to add one other impact that it has, it makes gross indecency between male adults illegal.

Yeah, and which I think will stay on the statute book until the 1960s.

Yeah, until 1967.

So it has a huge effect on the kind of the law governing sexual crimes in Britain, but it also has a massive influence on the cultural climate.