ABSTRACT
One dark night in a Whitechapel alley, two prostitutes accosted 17-year-old James
Hinton, roughly demanding, “Which of us shall you have?” Hinton was profoundly
shocked by this crude come-on. As he told the story to Ellice Hopkins years later,
“his voice suddenly broke and he buried his face and wept like a child.” Why were
women forced to degrade themselves in this way? he asked Miss Hopkins. They
agreed that prostitution must be stopped. But this was a strange conversation, for
Ellice Hopkins was a delicate unmarried Christian lady, and James Hinton was a
wild-eyed doctor. He proclaimed that “Sexual passion is a force in nature like the
wind and sea, untamable and uncageable. For that very reason it should be like the
sun, transfiguring rather than destroying what it permeates.”
