Mary Ann’s last letter to the Home Office, five years after the conviction of her husband, is the most revealing of them all. For the first time she admits that her husband “in a fit of drunkenness committed an unnatural crime” upon her son.84 She had likely known the truth of the matter from the start. Perhaps this was why, in this letter, she asked to be allowed to go to Bermuda herself. Her husband, she said, had been promoted to “Master Tailor” on the hulk ship Midway on which he was serving his sentence, and he was now earning enough money to support her and her remaining children. If he were granted a ticket of leave within the colony, she would be able to stay with him and resume their family life.85 Whatever anger Mary Ann Campbell felt toward her husband over what he had done to her son was overcome by her belief that living with him would provide the best future for her family.
The private decisions of Mary Ann Campbell, as well as the other examples given above, contrast with the typical public depictions of communities, families, and the women within them reacting to men who had sex with other men. The most commonly invoked example from this period relates to the 1810 raid on the White Swan, a molly house on Vere Street in London, where more than two dozen men were arrested and six convicted of having sex with other men. Newspaper and pamphlet accounts told of the convicted men being transported in an open cart to the pillory where they would serve a portion of their sentence. The route, it was said, was lined with thousands of individuals, who hurled insults and missiles at the convicted men. In front of the pillory where the convicted men were to be placed, “upwards of 50 women were permitted to stand in the ring,” where they “assailed them incessantly with mud, dead cats, rotten eggs, potatoes, and buckets filled with blood, offal, and dung.”86 The participation of women, and the invective they directed at the convicted men, was also reported at the execution of Captain Henry Nicholls, who had been involved not only in sexually assaulting young men but also in murdering at least one of them. It was recorded that among the large crowd that gathered, “a number of females also presented themselves, and by their shouts manifested their abhorrence of the criminal.”87
At other times, the punishment that working-class communities directed at men accused of sodomy exceeded that of the state. In 1817 the Rev. John Church was released after his detention on sodomy charges, but it was reported that local residents surrounded his London home that evening, burning him in effigy and throwing stones at his windows.88 A crowd of more than one hundred women and men banged pots and generated other forms of “rough music” in front of his house throughout the night. Primarily because of this community pressure, Church, his wife, and their children were forced to leave London. It was also reported that Percy Jocelyn’s home in Ireland was burned by an angry mob after he was arrested for unnaturally assaulting a soldier in London in 1822.89 After John Sugden, William Jones, George Hamon, and George Fennell were convicted of a conspiracy to commit sodomy after a molly-house raid, the Times reported that “the moment they left the Court, in custody of the gaolers, the reception they met with from the populace was such as they cannot easily forget, or even recover, for some time to come.”90 The report of another unnatural assault case in the Weekly Dispatch ended by noting that “it was with the greatest difficulty that a strong body of officers, in conveying the miscreants back to prison, could protect them, so strong was the indignation of the populace.”91 Finally, in 1810, nearly the whole of the coverage of George Rowell’s arrest for “detestable acts” was devoted to describing how “the Irishman” with whom he was locked up was angered at being detained with a man accused of having sex with men. The Irishman was in jail at the request of his wife for beating her, and he threatened to do the same to Rowell if he so much as spoke to him. It was also reported that the wife “appeared with angry countenance, and demanded [her husband’s] liberation, as she would sooner be bate by him every hour, than that he or his family should be disgraced by being shut up with such a fellow.”92
If in most histories working-class women and working-class communities are shown expressing anger toward men who had sex with men, upper- and middle-class women are usually represented as unaware of or shielded from knowledge of such acts. Women of high social status avoided the courtroom itself, and those who did appear at trials involving sex between men were reported to do so with reluctance. Robert Allpress, a footman, was in desperate need of a testimonial to his character from his employer when he became involved in a case of unnatural assault, but because both his employer and all the “other inmates of the house” were women, Allpress had to do without a character witness, as “he could not bring them forward in such a case.”93 Although Henry Walter’s aunt immediately went for a constable on seeing another young man sexually assault her nephew, she testified only “reluctantly” in the public courtroom when compelled to do so.94 In cases involving sex between men, female spectators were also sometimes cleared from the courtroom before testimony began.95 After George Cull was sexually assaulted on Marylebone Lane, he avoided asking another man passing by for help. “I should have mentioned what had happened to me if the gentleman whom I saw in Marylebone-lane had been by himself,” he later said, but “he had a lady with him, and I thought it too delicate a matter to speak of to him while he was in her company.”96
When confronted directly with evidence of this behavior, middle- and upper-class women were frequently represented as extremely unsympathetic. Frederick Buller, a retired colonial judge, tried to appeal to Mrs. Jane Humphrey’s sense of family in order to dissuade her from giving evidence against him related to his sexual assault on a young man in her parlor. Buller implored “Pray, my dear madam, consider before you make a charge . . . perhaps you have a family of your own. If you make this charge you will ruin me and my family too.” To this Jane Humphreys curtly said: “You should have thought of this before you came into my house.”97
The evidence of forgiveness within families does not call into question the idea that disapproval and condemnation were overwhelmingly the most common reactions toward men discovered to be engaging in sex with other men. Even if forgiveness might come in time within a family, and even if individuals still remained in a man’s life for reasons other than economic dependence, discovery of their actions still elicited shock and anger. The evidence does, however, provide some correctives to the conclusions drawn from the public statements of middle- and upper-class men, whose opinions are often taken as representative of those of the population as a whole. Although it is relatively easy to find a middle- or upper-class man profess in a courtroom, a newspaper report, or other published sources that sex between men is an “unspeakable crime,” the “worst of crimes,” and that to imply that a man was guilty of sex with another man was “worse even, than a charge of murder,” this intensity of language is not easily found within the family.98
This contrast between public and private views is related to what John Tosh and other scholars of masculinity in nineteenth-century Britain have revealed about the relationship between character, reputation, and the ideological system that supported the political and economic power of middle- and upper-class men.99 The qualities of these elite Englishmen were regularly contrasted with those of working-class men, of women, and of members of other races and ethnicities: the deficiencies supposedly found in the latter groups were used to help justify their exclusion from power. Although middle- and upper-class men defined respectability differently, both defined it by exclusionary criteria, making it difficult to achieve without the economic resources available to their social class. Working-class men also had a code of masculine honor that condemned sex between men, but being accused of it did not undercut their social power in the same way as it did for middle- and upper-class men. As George Mosse, Sean Brady, and others have argued, same-sex desire was seen as so antithetical to the qualities that defined good character among both middle- and upper-class