Something in the ideal of the British character had to change. ibid.
He [William Wilberforce] became the conscience of the nation and inspired a generation of eccentric, obsessive yet remarkable individuals. Ian Hislop’s Age of the Do-Gooders I, BBC 2010
Wilberforce could be seen as the godfather of the do-gooders. ibid.
In 1813 an essay was published in a series called A New View of Society. it was dedicated to Wilberforce as the nation’s leading reformer, and it offered up a radical vision ... The key to creating human happiness was to change human character ... Robert Owen. ibid.
Owen’s first step was the improvement of workers’ homes. ibid.
What happens when people don’t want to be done good to? ibid.
The do-gooders were busy social engineering. ibid.
George Dawson’s radical message came to be called the Civic Gospel. ibid.
The public ethos was a Victorian invention, and perhaps the greatest one of all. ibid.
Hill went from strength to strength. By the early 1880s, 378 families were living in homes run by her. ibid.
In 1848 a popular new hymn for children, All Things Bright and Beautiful, portrayed a life that was almost feudal ... This was a divinely ordained universe in which everyone knew their place. Ian Hislop’s Age of the Do-Gooders II: Suffer the Little Children
God was the great driving force in Shaftesbury’s life. He believed we are all children of God. ibid.
Shaftesbury was a man looking for a mission. And when in 1832 he read a series of articles in The Times about child labour he floundered. The industrial revolution was changing Britain as never before, and it seemed the inevitable price of progress that children worked oppressive, long hours for meagre wages in unregulated workplaces. And few people cared. ibid.
The MP for Bolton, who was a mine owner, argued that it would unjustly deprive children of their honest livelihood, and would drive them and their families into the workhouse. Others suggested that working from a young age was good and developed useful industrious habits ... Others said that the entire mining industry would collapse if it wasn’t allowed to use child labour. ibid.
Ragged schools: run by volunteers they took children off the streets, taught them the Bible and if they were lucky to read and write. ibid.
In 1862 [Charles] Kingsley wrote the book he’s most famous for – The Water Babies ... He campaigned for improved sanitation and against the pollution of rivers. ibid.
Kingsley’s vision for a perfect childhood included a decent education ... Compulsory education for all children was finally introduced. ibid.
Barnardo is perhaps the most famous of all the Victorian do-gooders. ibid.
Philanthropic abduction was hugely controversial. It repeatedly landed Barnardo in hot water. ibid.
Juvenile prostitution was rampant in London. Girls as young as nine worked the streets ... The age of consent was raised to sixteen. ibid.
During Queen Victoria’s reign over a hundred acts of parliament for the benefit of children were passed into law. ibid.
The achievements of our do-gooders remain extraordinary. ibid.
But one area of life was to prove their toughest challenge yet: the private behaviour of their fellow Britons. Now sex and alcohol were in the campaigner’s sites. Ian Hislop’s Age of the Do-Gooders III: Sinful Sex and Demon Drink
Britons liked to drink. A lot. ibid.
There’s more people selling beer in Preston than any other item. ibid.
In the Temperance Hall which used to be here [Joseph] Livesey got up and argued that the Society should campaign for the giving up of all alcohol. Just six friends rallied to his cause ... It marked the birth of teetotalism and the temperance revolution. ibid.
He [Livesey] applied his wit to writing temperance propaganda ... What Livesey started others took up enthusiastically. By the 1840s the teetotal campaign was developing an independent London base with a new set of supporters. One was the illustrator and comic artist George Cruikshank ... He signed the pledge. ibid.
A rift opened up between the pragmatic Dickens and the increasingly fundamentalist Cruikshank. ibid.
The vice trade: the Victorians called it the Great Social Evil ... In London alone according to contemporary estimates anywhere from 10 to 80,000 women were involved in prostitution. ibid.
He [Gladstone] didn’t want to sleep with the girls, he wanted to save them. He called this rescue work. ibid.
In 1864 the government passed the Contagious Diseases Act, a law that ruthlessly targeted women as the problem rather than men. ibid.
Charrington waged war on what he considered the greatest moral danger facing the people of the East End: the music halls which he called music hells. ibid.
England was already the leading manufacturing nation. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 8/13: The Drive For Power, BBC 1973
The railways – they were made possible by Richard Travithick. ibid.
It cannot be an accident that the Theory of Evolution is conceived twice by two men living at the same time in the same culture – the culture of Queen Victoria in England. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 9/13: Evolution: The Ladder of Creation
Brunel himself was knocked unconscious and washed all the way back to the tunnel of the central shaft. Jeremy Clarkson, Great Britons: Brunel BBC 2002
The Greatest Britain of all time. ibid.
At the heart of this extraordinary transformation is one man, Isambard Kingdom Brunel ... The Clifton Suspension Bridge ... The Great Western Railway … the Bristol & Exeter Railway … Taff Vale … South Devon … Cornwell … the Bristol & Gloucester ... Brunel built modern Britain. ibid.
Enormously bold and heady engineering ... He combined form and function to completely transform our landscape. ibid.
He realised he was running the greatest show on Earth. ibid.
He wanted to give Bristol something exotic … Designing it was one thing, but building it was something else. ibid.
Brunel was left dangling two hundred feet above Avon ... He had cheated death for a second time. ibid.
In London he was building another suspension bridge over the Thames, the tunnel underneath it was inching along, he was also doing the docks in Sunderland, designing his first ship, and he got married … ibid.
He began work on what was to become the Great Western Railway. ibid.
Brunel wanted his tracks seven feet apart ... The larger the wheel the less the friction ... Fit the big wheels and then put the carriage between them ... A lower centre of gravity, you’ve got better dynamics ... and something that changed the world – more speed. ibid.
A bridge with two enormous hundred-and-twenty-foot arches ... All the experts said it would collapse ... It’s still the widest, flattest brick arch in the world: a beautiful bridge. ibid.
He proposed a tunnel: two miles long ... He built this exquisite, elaborate and very expensive facade but inside it was unlined ... The opening of the Box Tunnel meant a straight and level run from London to Bristol in four hours – thirteen hours faster than the mail coach. ibid.
Brunel’s Temple Meads Terminus. It is impossible to over-stress the importance of the Great Western Railway ... Brunel’s railway changed our expectations, it changed our aspirations, it changed everything. ibid.
Crossing the Atlantic: he’d had an idea, a big one as usual: he wanted people to catch the train in London, get off in Bristol, and then board a steam-ship bound for New York. ibid.
He came up with this – the SS Great Britain – the biggest ship the world had ever seen. Not just the biggest either, she was the first ocean-going liner to be made from iron, and the first to have a propeller instead of paddle wheels. ibid.
Everything about the Great Britain was gigantic ... You should see his idea of a spanner! ibid.
On just her fifth trip to New York she ran aground off Ireland ... She was sold ... Dumped on the Falkland Islands ... This was the most advanced ship in the world and look what they did to her. ibid.
A modern propeller designed by a computer in the twenty-first century is only five per cent more efficient than this propeller which was designed by a Victorian bloke in a tall hat. ibid.
1843 ... He was still only thirty-seven. The crowing glory of the Great Western Railway: Paddington Station. ibid.