In this instance and in many others, men within the privileged classes treated sex differently when it occurred exclusively among men of similar backgrounds. These men had long-standing ways of settling disputes among themselves without involving the police or the courts, and rarely did any of them feel so aggrieved as to appeal to a more public forum, as the parents of some of the Carshalton students did.
It is difficult to know exactly what occurred at Woolwich and Carshalton. No police reports exist. Many of the sources describing similar cases refer only to “brutal” or “beastly” acts, without actually defining these terms.37 Some slightly more specific evidence of what happened comes from a statement printed in the Weekly Dispatch, which indicated a hope that “youths guilty of such offences, before they even know the opprobrium or the criminality to which belongs to them, may grow up to be manly citizens.”38 But outside the protected space of the public schools, behaviors as benign as “spooning” beside another boy in bed or mutual masturbation could be grounds for criminal charges of indecent assault or attempted sodomy. Similar ambiguity surrounds the practices related to hero-worship of older boys, and the romantic or excessive language in their conversations or letters, all of which might occur between two pupils away from home for the first time, forming new kinds of intense attachments with others.
If few rigorous efforts were made to prevent or stamp out sexual contact between youths, this was in part due to the idea that some early sexual experimentation was acceptable. Nineteenth-century medical literature argued that sexual acts between males were worrisome only after the teen years. As late as the 1880s, Richard von Krafft-Ebing argued that homosexual acts before puberty were not significant; it was those occurring afterward that were dangerous to a man’s development.39 Havelock Ellis, almost two decades later, also observed that many in his own day still held that undifferentiated sexual feelings were normal in boys in the first years of puberty.40 Lesley Hall’s examination of the purity literature of the late nineteenth century also finds no fear in Britain that “adolescent homoerotic experimentation” would lead to permanent sexual inversion.41 Undifferentiated sexual urges were thought to be more common in the less mature as well as the less civilized. Masturbation was the more serious threat to the young, because as a solitary activity it was more difficult to observe and detect, and thus it was more likely to encourage the habit of vice and sexual excess.
As the reforms at Rugby spread to other institutions, the public schools cemented their high standing among both the middle and upper classes. They were places where men could find their own position among their peers, and they fostered a fierce loyalty in those who passed through them. The public schools were, therefore, to borrow a phrase from James Scott, off the stage of the performance of power in society. For their pupils, the public schools offered a break from the power relations enacted in the regular face-to-face communications between the “lower ranks” and their “social betters.” They were in preparation for the future politics of Britain, not fodder for the current version of it.42 The privacy of these spaces was protected by the same code of behavior that assured elite men that their behavior in the clubs of the West End would not be used against them.43
The political power of sexual issues made public had been demonstrated in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the morality of George IV sparked the enormous popular protests associated with the 1820 Queen Caroline Affair. The sexual impropriety of the governing elite evident in this and earlier events, such as the Mary Anne Clarke Affair of 1809, were seized on by middle- and working-class radicals and others as examples of the abuses of “Old Corruption” and further evidence of the need for political reform.44 Attitudes toward sexuality also played an implicit political role in parliamentary reform, when, for the first time in generations, the line was being redrawn between those who deserved to be citizens, with the right to participate in parliamentary politics, and those who would remain subjects. It was not at all clear where that line would fall in the years before 1832, and, as Dror Wahrman, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, and Anna Clark have argued, the rhetoric of morality was central to the justifications of upper-, middle-, and working-class men for their respective visions of the political future.45
While the middle class questioned the morality of the upper classes in order to bolster their own access to the vote, they also denigrated the morality of the lower classes in order to justify the continued exclusion of them from the franchise. The improvidence of working-class masculinity was characterized as one of the causes of poverty. Working-class male pub culture was denigrated as demonstrating a lack of thrift and self-control, and working-class tolerance of sexual relations with a prospective spouse before marriage was not recognized as any less promiscuous than casual forms of extramarital sexuality.46 The physicality and violence of working-class masculinity were interpreted as pointless brutality. These and many other issues were framed by middle-class men in a way that justified denying working-class men the right to greater political participation.
This criticism of working-class men’s masculinity was part of the ideological armor that allowed the middle class to push forward with an economic program which, by eighteenth-century standards, was itself of questionable morality.47 By shifting the focus of morality away from the economic obligations between the higher ranks and lower orders and instead upholding personal and family conduct as the measure of the moral, the middle class was able to seize the rhetorical high ground even as its actions seemed to lead to widespread impoverishment through a laissez-faire implementation of wage labor and the factory system. The stakes were raised in this contest of moralities with sweeping changes to the system of poor relief in 1834. This abolition was justified not only in terms of economics, as part of an effort to free up underutilized labor, but also as a moral reform that would encourage self-reliance among the poor and break the degrading habit of dependence.48 Yet this was not how the New Poor Law was seen by the working class, for whom the previous system of relief might have sustained a family through a temporary factory closing or a slump in the business cycle. In the name of fostering moral and responsible behavior, the newly reformed Parliament removed what many in the working class considered a central pillar of social justice in Britain, and one that a large percentage of working-class families had drawn on. It was a brutal clash of competing definitions of morality that had ramifications for decades to come.
Because it was the form of morality on which they themselves chose to be judged, accusations of sexual impropriety by middle-class men became a powerful weapon for the working class. Anna Clark has shown that within working-class popular culture, the threat of sexual violence for working-class girls, especially household servants or factory employees, was most often represented as coming from middle-class men. This belief persisted even though legal records demonstrate that the majority of sexual violence inflicted on poorer women was perpetrated by men of their own class.49 Representations of middle-class sexual impropriety were powerful because they could reverse the power dynamic between the classes, allowing working-class men to present themselves as the defenders of women against rapacious and uncontrolled outsiders. Such representations later had resonance in arguments for the family wage in working-class politics. In arguing that they should be paid enough to keep their wives at home and protected from the dangers of the workplace, working-class men turned the arguments of the middle class, centered on the sacredness of the family, to their own ends.50
As for men of other classes, full masculine status for working-class men came with the establishment of a household and the fathering of children, although the achievement of this ideal was constrained by economic circumstances.51 Working-class households depended on the wages of all family members of working age. To dampen the shocks of periodic economic dislocations, members of the working