No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
‘Knights of God’: Ellice Hopkins and the White Cross Army, 1883–95
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
A historiographer of recent literature on masculinity might be forgiven for assuming that nineteenth-century definitions of Christian manliness were solely the domain of male commentators. The shifting and often conflicting emphases of the manly ideal proposed by critics such as Arnold, Kingsley, Hughes, and Carlyle exerted a prevailing influence upon the Victorian ruling classes – this much is beyond doubt. That codes of manliness were also subject to considerable attention by women, however, is suggested by this preliminary study of the prescriptive writings of the High Churchwoman and leading moral reformer Ellice Hopkins, whose discourse of social purity emerged as a force in the search for regulation of male sexuality during the 1880s and 1890s.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1998
References
1 See Newsome, D., Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal (London, 1961)Google Scholar; Vance, N., The Sinews of the Spirit (Cambridge, 1985).Google Scholar
2 Bristow, E. J., Vice and Vigilance. Purity Movements in Britain Since 1700 (Dublin, 1977)Google Scholar, offers the only full-length account I have found on the contribution of the churches to anti-vice crusading. Mort, F., Dangerous Sexualities. Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London, 1987)Google Scholar, demonstrates the role of evangelical feminist purity discourse in regulating working-class immorality, although religion is not central to his analysis.
3 Hopkins was a key activist in the passing of the Industrial Schools Amendment Act of 1880, which advocated the removal of prostitutes’ children into industrial schools, and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent from 13 to 16, increased powers of police surveillance over brothels, and criminalized male homosexuality.
4 White Cross publications and transactions are located at the BL, the Fawcett Library in London, CUL, and the Church of England Record Centre at Bermondsey. This essay is indebted to Sherwin Bailey’s seminal article The White Cross League’, Moral Welfare (April 1952), pp. 2–13.
5 See David Thompson’s useful revision, The Christian Socialist revival in Britain: a reappraisal’, in Garnett, J. and Matthew, C., eds, Revival ani Religion Since 1700. Essays for John Walsh (London, 1993), pp. 273–95.Google Scholar
6 The CEPS was formed on 25 May 1883 at Lambeth Palace under the presidency of Archbishop Bensoa It formed a friendly but more circumscribed counterpart to WCA efforts, organizing on an exclusively Anglican diocesan basis. Sources as for the White Cross collections, plus series of its organ The Vanguard, July 1884 – Oct 1894, thereafter The White Cross, held at the BL.
7 Fout, J., ‘Sexual politics in Wilhelmine Germany: the male gender crisis, moral purity, and homophobia’. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2 (1992), p. 262.Google ScholarPubMed
8 See Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, pp. 114–19.
9 W. T. Stead, The maiden tribute of modern Babylon’, Pall Mall Gazette, 6–8, 10 (July 1885), cited in Walkowitz, J., City of Dreadful Delight (London, 1992), p. 269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 In 1874, George Butler had been shouted down at the Nottingham Church Congress for raising the issue of repeal of state regulation of vice.
11 Mason, A. J., Memoir of George Howard Wilkinson, 2 vols (London, 1910), 1, pp. 240–1.Google Scholar
12 Benson’s ongoing commitment to social purity, referred to in his farewell address at Wellington College in 1873 and in his enthronement sermon, is a feature of his career neglected by historians.
13 Cited in Barrett, R. M., Ellice Hopkins. A Memoir (London, 1907), p. 161.Google Scholar
14 Hopkins, E., A Plea for the Wider Action of the Church of England in the Prevention of the Degradation of Women (London, 1879), p. 9 Google Scholar. Hopkins had started her own rescue organization, the Ladies Assocation for the Care of Friendless Girls, in 1875.
15 Cited in How, F. D., William Dalrymple Maclagan, Archbishop of York (London, 1911), pp. 223–4.Google Scholar
16 Hopkins, Plea, p. 14.
17 Hopkins, E., Damaged Pearls. An Appeal to Working Men (London, 1884), p. 3.Google Scholar
18 Cited in Barrett, Ellice Hopkins, p. 157.
19 Anderson, O., ‘The growth of Christian militarism in mid-Victorian Britain’, EHR, 86 (1971), p. 66 Google Scholar. Anderson cites the emergence of the Salvation Army, Church Army, and Boys’ Brigade between 1878 and 1883 with military titles, ranks, and drilling procedures as examples of such para-militarism.
20 Hopkins, Damaged Pearls, pp. 5, 2, 7.
21 Hopkins, E., The Purity Movement (London, 1885), p. 17 Google Scholar. Many of the 15,000 men who had committed themselves to purity by 1885 were nonconformists. See Bristow, Vice and Vigilance, p. 104.
22 See Barrett, Ellice Hopkins, especially p. 181, for accounts of her gruelling itinerary between 1875 and 1888.
23 Hopkins, E., Ten Reasons Why I Should Join (London, 1885), p. 3 Google Scholar.
24 Hopkins, The Purity Movement, p. 14.
25 Topics included the perils of schoolboy masturbation, incest, sanitation, divorce rates, employment conditions of working women, marriage, and motherhood.
26 Cited in Barrett, Eliice Hopkins, p. 103.
27 Ibid., p. viii of Holland’s Introduction.
28 Ibid, p. 183.
29 See Hopkins, E., The Standard of the White Cross (London, 1885), pp. 5–6 Google Scholar for a summary of WCA administration. See also Bristow, Vice and Vigilance, pp. 136–8.
30 Hopkins, Standard, p. 29.
31 Ibid., p. 5.
32 Bristow, Vice and Vigilance, p. 137. Bristow cites nineteen diocesan branches of the White Cross Society in the 1890s with 120 affiliated parochial associations and 1,150 central subscribers.
33 Bailey, ‘White Cross League’, p. 6.
34 Figure cited in Barrett, Ettice Hopkins, p. 182. The White Cross League continued to promote purity amongst men throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, publishing books on topics such as contraception, divorce, and sex education for the young. In 1923 these issues were included in courses throughout theological training colleges. The League celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1933, and in 1939 its work was taken over by the Church of England Moral Welfare Council. See Bailey, “White Cross League’, pp. 10–13.
35 Hopkins, Standard, p. 32.
36 Figures cited in Bailey, ‘White Cross League’, p. 5.
37 Hughes, Thomas, Tom Brown at Oxford (London, 1889), p. 207.Google Scholar
38 See Bland, Lucy, Banishing the Beast. English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (London, 1995), pp. 70–91 Google Scholar for an extensive discussion of the ‘multivalency’ of Darwinian theories and their relevance to feminist moral reform.
39 E. Hopkins, Is it Natural? (London, nd), p. 6.
40 E. Hopkins, The Temple of the Eternal (London, nd), p. 2.
41 See Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot Chivalry and the English Gentleman (London, 1981)Google Scholar for the pervasive neo-medievalism of Victorian culture. See also Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, pp. 17–26.
42 ‘Address by the Dean of Gloucester at Trinity College, Cambridge’, CEPS Papers for Men (1885), p. 20.
43 Girouard, Return to Camelot, p. 16.
44 Hopkins, E., The Ride of Death (London, 1883), p. 3.Google Scholar
45 See Girouard, Return to Cameiot, p. 29; Johnson, D. G., ‘The death of Gordon: a Victorian myth’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 10 (1982), pp. 285–310.Google Scholar
46 E. Hopkins, The National Flag (London, nd), p. 16.
47 E. Hopkins, My Little Sister (London, nd), pp. 7–8.
48 Tosh, J., ‘Domesticity and manliness in the Victorian middle class: the family of Edward White Benson’, in Tosh, J. and Roper, M, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London and New York, 1991), p. 65.Google Scholar
49 ‘Let your little girl get up on your knee, and nestle her childish head close to your strong heart. No safeguard to a girl like a kind father’s love’: Hopkins, E, Little Kindnesses (London, 1885), p. 8.Google Scholar
50 Hopkins, E., Man and Woman; or, The Christian Ideal (London, 1883), p. 9.Google ScholarPubMed
51 Cited in Barrett, Ellice Hopkins, p. 22.
52 Hopkins, My Little Sister, p. 4.
53 Hopkins, E., The Man with the Drawn Sword (London, 1896), p. 8.Google Scholar
54 Ibid., p. 7.
55 Hopkins, My Little Sister, p. 5.
56 Hopkins, E., The Power of Womanhood (London, 1899), p. 88.Google Scholar
57 See Bristow, Vice and Vigilance, pp. 125–53.
58 See Mangan, J. A., Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: the Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar
59 Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, p. 189.
60 See Mangan, J. A., ‘Social Darwinism and upper-class education in late Victorian and Edwardian England’, in Mangan, J. A. and Walvin, James, eds, Manliness and Morality. Middle- class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1840 (Manchester, 1987)Google Scholar, for a portrayal of the adieistic austerity of the public-school system.
61 See Tosh, ‘Domesticity and manliness’, pp. 67–8.
62 In Memoriam, Canto IX.17. See Marion Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson (New York and London, 1988), p. 83, for this reference within the context of Tennyson’s ideal of manhood.