Tuesday, December 14, 2010

University academic to feature in BBC documentary on Victorians 10/12/10


A senior history academic at the University of Chichester will feature in the final part of a BBC 2 documentary series by Ian Hislop about the Victorians.


Dr Sue Morgan, Reader in Gender History, will be appearing on The Age of the Do-Gooders at 9pm on Monday 13 December, where the pleasures and perils of booze and sex are the focus for the final episode of Ian Hislop's series about Victorian reformers, campaigners and philanthropists.


Drawing on Sue's specialism in 19th and early 20th century gender history, she will be talking about how the Victorian imagination was challenged, appalled and intrigued by prostitution, as well as how the Contagious Diseases Act worked.


The TV appearance will mark the conclusion of a busy year for Sue – in May, she published her sixth book, a major edited collection entitled Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940 (Routledge), which was an international collaboration of British, US and Canadian scholars.


It was the publication of this book that led Wingspan Production to approach Sue to advise on the documentary. The series has examined a number of influential Victorian reformers and their attitudes to child welfare, sex and drink, re-evaluating their legacy for the 21st century. Sue's pioneering work on late-Victorian campaigns around prostitution and male sexuality, particularly the flurry of Church and State interventions on the subject during the 1880s and 1890s, formed the basis of the final programme in which Sue will appear.


Sue said: “It was a pleasure to be involved in this series as an advisor and as a talking head. My greatest delight was that a woman reformer, Ellice Hopkins, who led a huge populist movement on ‘social purity' in the 1880s, and who I had rescued from complete obscurity as a PhD student at the University of Bristol in the early 1990s, gets some major air-time in the final programme, where Ian Hislop reads from Hopkins's best-selling 1883 essay True Manliness. That was the most exciting and moving moment for me in the whole thing.”