# Was Prime Minister Gladstone a Perv? \[corrected title\] **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 26, 2008, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-prime-minister-gladstone-a-perv-corrected-title/461268 "2008-08-26T00:53:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2008, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-prime-minister-gladstone-a-perv-corrected-title/461268/1 "2008-08-26T00:53:15Z")
The 19th Century British Prime minister was somewhat eccentric-he would troll the back alleys of London, picking up prostitutes. He would then bring them home, and pray for their reform.He would distribute bibles to them, and hold prayer servies in which he exhorted them to reject their sinful lives. Was this considered eccentric? How did Gladstone’s ploitical rivals deal with this? ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2008, 1:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-prime-minister-gladstone-a-perv-corrected-title/461268/2 "2008-08-26T01:03:15Z")
Well, he wasn’t a “perv”. He was a really religious moralist who, among other things, tried to reform prostitutes, and gave of both his time and his money for the cause. There’s no evidence he did anything improper with them. ---
**Author:** ![Mk\_VII](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2008, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-prime-minister-gladstone-a-perv-corrected-title/461268/3 "2008-08-26T20:43:37Z")
He was well aware that his enemies would misrepresent his motives (his wife helped him in his work) and there was at least one attempt to blackmail him (unsuccessful). Possibly on a subconscious level he was sublimating desire. We’ll leave that one to psychologists. ---
**Author:** ![Icarus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/icarus/32/72_2.png) [@Icarus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Icarus)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2008, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-prime-minister-gladstone-a-perv-corrected-title/461268/4 "2008-08-26T20:54:05Z")
[QUOTE=Captain Amazing] There’s no evidence he did anything improper with them. [/QUOTE] Well, that all depends on how you define ‘proper’ when talking about a prostitute. ---
**Author:** ![TWDuke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e495f1/32.png) [@TWDuke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TWDuke)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2008, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-prime-minister-gladstone-a-perv-corrected-title/461268/5 "2008-08-26T21:16:45Z")
Of course it really depends on how you define “perv” when talking about someone in a very different time and place. > [@](#): > > But it is also clear that for Gladstone rescue work became not merely a duty but a craving; it was an exposure to sexual stimulation which Gladstone felt he must both undergo and overcome. As he admitted to himself,he deliberately ‘courted evil’… His predilection for pornography has been noted above. In 1849 Gladstone began to scourge himself to counter stimulation from it. By 1851 he was also scourging himself after conversations with prostitutes during which he felt he had allowed himself to be excessively excited… So far as we know, and there is no evidence to the contrary, he managed to remain, in the end, self-controlled and self-critical… Gladstone analysed his feelings about both pornography and prostitutes in a series of remarkable passages, some in the diary, some on separate sheets of paper which were folded and enclosed with the diary… Notes of his self scourgings were kept first on the separate sheet, later in lists in the diary, and then day by day by signs in the diary entries… Gladstone’s self-analysis of an explicitly sexual topic was made in language which treated it implicitly. In this, despite the privacy of his diary and the various codes and foreign languages available to him, he remained within Victorian public conventions. Thus it is impossible to know the exact nature of Gladstone’s relationship with the prostitutes he visited… In 1840 he contemplated ‘voluntary periodical confession’, recognising that ‘for many consciences I should not think it necessary in any degree; but for mine it is a question to be pondered’. [http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/victorian/history/pms/gladwom.html](http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/victorian/history/pms/gladwom.html) Victorian Web may not be the most rigorously scholarly source, but other references to Galdstone’s use of the scourge are abundant if anyone wants to Google them. So it seems like the Victorian Gladstone may have considered his arousal by pornography and prostitutes, and scourging as the remedy, whereas many of us would in the 21st century would find it perfectly natural and normal to be excited by porno and prose and find the idea of self-flagellation more than a little odd. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2008, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-prime-minister-gladstone-a-perv-corrected-title/461268/6 "2008-08-26T22:32:53Z")
Anyone who’s excessively interested in the “scourge of prostitution” is a good bet to be just as magnetically attracted to the idea of getting it on with a prostitute. I wrote something similar last month in a thread on “white slavery” – as I read the book that started the panic, it became painfully obvious that the author was anything but repelled by the almost-certainly-bogus softcore subjugation porn he was proffering as social critique. I’ll also note that it’s a common pattern for a public official, etc., who gets caught soliciting to claim he was “investigating the problem of prostitution.” Maybe for some of them that rationalization really works. Since it appears from what’s been posted already that Gladstone kind of realized/admitted that his interest in prostitutes went well beyond altruistic concern for their well-being, the question of whether he was a perv seems to me to turn on (of course) how you define perv, and also how we interpret his motives. If he was just generically really interested in sex and wasn’t getting what he needed at home, it’s possible that in Victorian times, the seamy underbelly of the prostitute’s world was the only place where sex was openly on display – on this theory, he’d have been just as happy to look at naked ladies on Cinemax or hook up with a hot young intern from the office, except those options weren’t very practical back then – the world was somewhat more rigidly divided into good girls and bad girls, and the bad girls were the only easy way to have access to sexual titillation. Not so pervy. If on the other hand it was the seamy nature of their lives that drew him to prostitutes – if he was revelling in the fact of their degradation and the unspeakable acts they were willing to commit for money – then yeah, that’s a little pervier.