Before Wilde
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
Before Wilde
Sex between Men
in Britain’s Age of Reform
Charles Upchurch
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley•Los Angeles•London
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2009 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Upchurch, Charles, 1969–.
Before Wilde : sex between men in Britain’s age of reform / Charles Upchurch.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-25853-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
eISBN 9780520943582
1. Gay men—Great Britain—History. 2. Gay men—Great Britain—Social conditions. 3. Men—Sexual behavior—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Homosexuality—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Sex—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Great Britain—History—19th century. 7. Great Britain—Social conditions—19th century. I. Title.
HQ76.2.G7U632009
306.76'62094109034—dc222008034391
Manufactured in the United States of America
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This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
For Fred
Contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE. UNDERSTANDINGS
1.Families and Sex between Men
2.Class, Masculinity, and Spaces
PART TWO. EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHANGES
3.Law and Reform in the 1820s
4.Public Men: The Metropolitan Police
5.Unnatural-Assault Reporting in the London Press
PART THREE. IMPLICATIONS
6.Patterns within the Changes
7.Conclusion: Character and Medicine
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Tables
1.Comparison of reporting on sex between men in the Weekly Dispatch and the Times, 1820–1870
2.Comparison of reporting on sex between men in the Morning Post, the Times, and the Weekly Dispatch, selected years
Acknowledgments
This work has benefited from a number of readers whose comments and suggestions have made it a markedly better book than it would have otherwise been. John Gillis’s encouragement to think about this material within the framework of family, class, and community was the single greatest influence on what was originally a much narrower project. His suggestions were reinforced by the community of scholars at Rutgers University, where Bonnie Smith, Jennifer Jones, and Ed Cohen provided the comments that helped link the implications of this study to questions that were originally outside my area of interest. Randolph Trumbach’s close readings of many chapters over the years and insistence on the importance of eighteenth-century precedents improved this work in numerous ways, as did my participation in the New York Gay and Lesbian History Seminar, which he ran for four years.
The final stages of this project were carried out with the funding and support of the Florida State University Department of History, during which time George Robb, Anna Clark, Ed Gray, Sean Brady, Niels Hooper, and Erika Büky each gave insightful comments on the final drafts of the work. Research assistance was provided by the staffs of the National Archive in London, the British Library, Bobst Library in New York, and Perkins Library in Durham, North Carolina. This work is also indebted to Bruce Kinzer, Kathleen Berkeley, Andy Dowless, Max Likin, and Joe Merieux, each in different ways.
Fred Bernstein provided invaluable help in the final stages of this project, as well as at many other points along the way.
Introduction
This book explores how sex between men was understood within British society in the first half of the nineteenth century. It does so by examining hundreds of public reports, many from newspaper and courtroom accounts, of sex between men in the years 1820 to 1870. Analysis of these narratives calls into question key elements of earlier scholarship on how these acts (real or alleged) were understood and discussed in early-nineteenth-century Britain.
It has long been assumed that the discussion of sex between men in the public sphere in mid-nineteenth-century Britain was minimal. A shift in public morals beginning in the late eighteenth century had severely limited official documentation of this behavior and its legal repercussions, as the state curtailed its record-keeping of trials involving sexual crimes. Overt and even oblique references to sex between men also disappeared from literature and popular writing. The silence on this issue began in the late Georgian period and is generally thought to have continued with only limited interruptions until the late nineteenth century.
In the late Victorian period, public anxiety over sex between men was fueled by fears of declining middle-class values and perceived threats to Britain’s place in the world. A series of sensational trials—including those related to middle-class cross-dressers in 1870, upper-class men paying for sex with telegraph delivery boys in 1889–90, and an internationally known playwright defending his honor against charges of sodomy in 1895—made sex between men a topic of sensational newspaper reporting. This material was often read in the context of the contemporary effort by some European physicians to define the nature and origins of male same-sex desire in medical terms, and together these factors have spawned a great deal of work by modern scholars on the origins of the modern homosexual identity. Almost all the secondary literature and most guides to the nineteenth-century British sources, including both print and electronic newspaper indexes, leave the impression that sex between men was not a topic of regular public discussion.
But mainstream newspapers ran hundreds of articles pertaining to sex between men in the years after 1820. The coverage was not primarily of sensational court cases but rather of the legal tribulations of ordinary men. Statements from the time indicate that men who read the newspapers regularly were assumed to be aware of this reporting, and the scope of this newspaper coverage makes it clear that sex between men, and its fallout, was a part of regular public discourse.
Uncovering much of this material has meant using the names, trial dates, and trial locations preserved in nineteenth-century state records in conjunction with the full text of multiple newspapers,