Cecil Dreeme
A Novel
Theodore Winthrop
With an Introduction by Peter Coviello
Washington Mews Books
an imprint of
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
Washington Mews Books
an imprint of
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
Preiviously published material in this volume © 2016 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
ISBN: 978-1-4798-0901-1 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-4798-5529-2 (paperback)
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Contents
A Note on the Fales Library
Marvin J. Taylor
Introduction: Peculiar Tendernesses: Cecil Dreeme and the Queer Nineteenth Century
Peter Coviello
Biographical Sketch of the Author: From the Original 1861 Edition
George William Curtis
Cecil Dreeme
1. Stillfleet and His News
2. Chrysalis College
3. Rubbish Palace
4. The Palace and Its Neighbors
5. Churm against Densdeth
6. Churm as Cassandra
7. Churm’s Story
8. Clara Denman, Dead
9. Locksley’s Scare
10. Overhead, Without
11. Overhead, Within
12. Dreeme, Asleep
13. Dreeme, Awake
14. A Mild Orgie
15. A Morning with Densdeth
16. Emma Denman
17. A Morning with Cecil Dreeme
18. Another Cassandra
19. Can This Be Love?
20. A Nocturne
21. Lydian Measures
22. A Laugh and a Look
23. A Parting
24. Fame Awaits Dreeme
25. Churm before Dreeme’s Picture
26. Towner
27. Raleigh’s Revolt
28. Densdeth’s Farewell
29. Dreeme His Own Interpreter
30. Densdeth’s Dark Room
About the Author
A Note on the Fales Library
The Fales Library, comprising nearly 350,000 volumes of book and print items, over 11,000 linear feet of archive and manuscript materials, and about 90,000 media elements, houses the Fales Collection of rare books and manuscripts in English and American literature, the Downtown Collection, the Food and Cookery Collection, the Riot Grrrl Collection, and the general Special Collections of the New York University Libraries.
We maintain a closed stacks reading room for scholarly access to our book collections, archival and manuscript collections, and media holdings. We also host public events and exhibitions, provide bibliographic instruction to class groups, and loan material from our collections for exhibitions and screenings worldwide.
Our mission is to acquire, preserve, and provide access to a wide range of primary research materials in their original formats, including books, manuscripts, media, archives, and other items in support of the educational and research activities of our various constituencies.
The Fales Library holds two copies of the 1861 first edition of Theodore Winthrop’s novel Cecil Dreeme and one copy of the 1862 fifth edition. The number of editions Cecil Dreeme went through indicates that the story found a fairly large audience in the mid-nineteenth century, which seems curious for a book with a cross-dressing main character. In general, the Fales Library has outstanding holdings for anyone interested in issues of gender and sexuality as represented through fiction.
—Marvin J. Taylor, Director, Fales Library and Special Collections
Introduction
Peculiar Tendernesses: Cecil Dreeme and the Queer Nineteenth Century
Peter Coviello
Earlyish in Cecil Dreeme, a novel written by a young man named Theodore Winthrop and published posthumously by the prominent Boston firm Ticknor and Fields in 1861, we are introduced to a minor character called Towner. He is for Robert Byng, our protagonist and narrator, a glancing acquaintance at best, the friend of a friend. But Byng himself needs all the friends he can find. Having returned only recently from travels in Europe, the young and rootless Byng—unmarried and underemployed, adrift as much in his fatherlessness as in the heathenish dens of lower Manhattan—spends much of the opening portions of the novel wondering over his ongoing attraction to the man who befriended him on his shipboard journey across the sea. This is the sinister and magnetic Densdeth, a figure of insinuating charisma and, we are given to know, resolutely bad intention. Once on shore, and housing himself in rooms at “Chrysalis College” (a thinly veiled New York University), Byng fortuitously encounters John Churm, an old family friend. Churm is, by contrast, avuncular, steadying, and solid of character, and promises precisely the sort of wholesome patriarchal tutelage that might oppose the dire influences of a scoundrel like Densdeth. It is Churm who introduces our young narrator to Towner, and he does so, we could say, to scare him straight. “He is lying perdu here,” Churm says of Towner,
hid from Densdeth and the world. He has been a clerk, agent, tool, slave, of the Great Densdeth. The poor wretch has a little shrivelled bit of conscience left. It twinges him sometimes, like a dying nerve in a rotten tooth. (ch. 5)
Toward the end of the book the victim of “the Great Densdeth” speaks in propia persona, and the portrait of a young man rotted out by depravity is complete: “The first time he saw me,” Towner confesses, “he laid his finger on the bad spot in my nature, and it itched to spread. I’ve been his slave, soul and body, from that moment” (ch. 26). Corrupted in soul and in body, the victim of a corrosive touch, “a bloodless, unwholesome being, sick of himself,” Towner acts here as a kind of living prophecy, a frightful harbinger of the horrors that might visit our uncommitted protagonist should he venture nearer to Densdeth than he already is. “No