Soldiers' Institute, Portsmouth. After a year abroad, she made, at Freshwater, the acquaintance of Julia Margaret Cameron [q.v.], George Frederick Watts [q.v. Suppl. II], and Charles Tennyson Turner [q.v.]. During 1872 she met James Hinton [q. v.], under whose medical training and at whose request she embarked on her lifework—the endeavour to raise the moral standard of the community, and to secure the legal protection of the young from ill-usage.
At Hinton's death in 1875 she edited his 'Life and Letters,' and for ten years she arduously wrote and lectured through the three kingdoms on the theme of pure living. Engaged on what George Macdonald [q. v. Suppl. II] called her 'great sad work,' she addressed huge meetings of men in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland, Carlisle, Swansea, Cardiff, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, and Dublin, and of mill-girls in Halifax. Although personally frail and insignificant, she exerted over her audiences an instantaneous influence by virtue of her beautiful voice, spiritual intensity, and absence of self-consciousness or sentimentality. Among those who aided her work were Bishop Lightfoot, who said she did the work of ten men in the time, and Bishops Wilkinson, Maclagan, and Fraser. Of 'True Manliness,' one of her many pamphlets which appeared anonymously, 300,000 copies were sold in a year. Her efforts led to an amendment in 1880 of the Industrial Schools Act, which rendered the protection of children under sixteen legally possible, and they helped to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1886.
The aim of her work was preventive while that of Mrs. Josephine Butler [q. v. Suppl. II] was remedial. With Bishop Lightfoot's help she founded the White Cross League in 1886, and saw England and the Colonies dotted over with branches.
In 1888 failure of health compelled her active work to cease. During illness she wrote 'The Power of Womanhood; or Mothers and Sons' (1899), and in 1902 'The Story of Life' (2nd edit. 1903), a book of instruction for the young based on natural history and physiology, of which 7000 copies were sold in a year. She died on 21 August 1904 at Brighton, and was buried there.
Among her other writings are:
- 'An Englishwoman's Work among Workingmen,' 1876; 4th edit. 1882.
- 'Rose Turquand,' a novel, 1876.
- 'Notes on Penitentiary Work,' 1879.
- 'Christ the Consoler, Comfort for the Sick,' with introduction by the Bishop of Carlisle, 1879; 7th edit. 1904.
- 'Preventive Work, or the Care of our Girls,' 1881.
- 'Village Morality,' 1882.
- 'Legal Protection for the Young,' 1882.
- 'Grave Moral Questions addressed to the Men and Women of England,' 1882.
- 'Autumn Swallows, a book of lyrics,' 1883.
- 'The Present Moral Crisis, 1886.
- 'Girls' Clubs and Recreative Evening Homes,' 1887.
[Life by Rosa M. Barrett, 1907; The Times, 24 Aug. 1904; Guardian, 31 Aug. 1904.]
HOPWOOD, CHARLES HENRY (1829–1904), recorder of Liverpool, born at 47 Chancery Lane, London, on 20 July 1829, was fifth son, in a family of eight sons and four daughters, of John Stephen Spindler Hopwood (1795–1868), solicitor, of Chancery Lane, by his wife Mary Ann (1799–1843), daughter of John Toole of Dublin. After education successively at a private school, at King's College School, and at King's College, London, he became a student at the Middle Temple on 2 Nov. 1850, and was called to the bar on 6 June 1853. He joined the northern circuit and obtained a good practice. He took silk in 1874, and was elected a bencher of his Inn in 1876, becoming 'reader' in 1885, and treasurer in 1895. He edited two series of reports of 'Registration Cases'; the first series (1863–7), in which he collaborated with F. A. Philbrick, appeared in 1868, and the second series (1868–72), in which he collaborated with F. J. Coltman, appeared in 1872-9 (2 vols.).
In 1874, and again in 1880, Hopwood was elected member of parliament for Stockport in the liberal interest. He was defeated in the same constituency at the general election in 1885. In 1892 he was elected for the Middleton division of Lancashire and sat till 1895. During Gladstone's short ministry of 1886 Hopwood was appointed recorder of Liverpool.
Throughout his public life Hopwood supported energetically and with singular tenacity and consistency the principle of personal liberty. He was a loyal supporter of radical measures, but at the time of his death he was justly described as 'the last of those liberals who were all for freedom—freedom from being made good or better as well as freedom from worse oppression; freedom from state control; freedom from the tyranny of the multitude, as well as from fussy, meddlesome legislation.' In parliament he opposed unrelentingly the Contagious Diseases Acts and the Vaccination Acts, denying that it was justifiable to curtail the personal liberty
