Achieving this goal requires focusing greater attention on the examples of individuals like Frederick Samuel Lea, the sixteen-year-old servant of a London bookseller who, in January 1840, fended off three separate unwanted sexual advances from a male customer of the store. Lea had not told anyone after the first or even the second advance, but at the time of the third, which occurred outside the store, he confided in a fellow servant and asked for her assistance. It was not until several days later that Lea first told his story to a policeman, and then the officer did not act on Lea’s accusation; instead he told Lea to take up the matter with his master. The young man’s employer likewise did not want to act on the boy’s story, and instead told him to speak with his father. The father’s reaction was not recorded, but it had little bearing on the eventual arrest of the man making advances on his son. It was only when Lea saw the man walking down Great Russell Street at night in the company of another young man that he was able to convince a nearby police officer that he had a serious charge to make. The officer’s willingness to believe Lea was bolstered when the man ran away once he noticed he was being observed.2
Both Lea and the man making unwanted sexual advances toward him exhibited behaviors typical of men of their class. Lea’s economic status tied him to the public space of the bookshop in a way that made him vulnerable to an unwanted advance, and although Lea himself was not tempted by the offer of money for sexual acts, other working-class men in similar situations were. The individuals whom Lea asked for advice knew that they could resort to the law, but they also knew that this approach could be difficult and even dangerous, as prosecutions were expensive and the man making the unwanted advances was from an upper-class family. The newspapers regularly showed the many advantages that men of property could employ when confronted with charges of unnatural assault by poorer individuals, and Lea could easily find himself facing countercharges of attempting to extort money by making a charge of “an infamous crime.”3 Younger men like Lea could often ask their working-class fathers or brothers to accompany them in confronting a wealthier individual who had made an unwanted advance, and although Lea did not get this level of support, his willingness to seek help from his family and community network, facilitated by the fact that he had not instigated the contacts, was typical.
The class background of George Dawson Lowndes, the twenty-six-year-old man making the unwanted advances, also structured his engagement with the situation. His understanding of his desires was at least partially mediated by the texts he knew from his education. The first two advances began with Lowndes speaking to Lea in a secluded part of the store and showing Lea sexually suggestive material in the books of the collection.4 That Lowndes aggressively pursued an individual ten years his junior and of lower social status also showed him to be following a rakish form of masculinity typical of the upper-class men who ended up in the courtroom on these charges. Lowndes was also typical of the men of his class in his efforts to gain special consideration: he wrote multiple letters to the Home Office after his eventual conviction, in which he seems certain that he will be released once the right personal connection is made and in which he presents a version of the story formulated to discredit his lower-class accuser. Unlike Lowndes, most men who tried this approach were successful.
Working with hundreds of court cases provides the ability to discern the behaviors typical of upper-, working-, and middle-class men and to track those behaviors through the social, economic, and political changes that occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century and led to a distinctly new pattern of regulating sex between men. The years between 1815 and 1850 were some of the most tumultuous in modern British history: the threat of revolution was never more acute, and the economic hardships stemming from industrialization and urbanization were never more intense. The second goal of this book, and another not previously achieved in the secondary literature, is to connect the shift in how sex between men was regulated and understood in the early nineteenth century to these larger historical events.
Given that the evidence of sex between men from the eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries was so much more sensational and readily accessible, it is little wonder that historians initially neglected the intervening period. The exploration of the eighteenth-century cases was begun by historians in the 1970s, in part because the details of most of the eighteenth-century sodomy trials were readily accessible in the published Session Papers of the Old Bailey.5 The resulting scholarship established the association of certain public spaces in London with sex between men, indicating that some men strongly identified with their sexual desires for other men and were able to construct communities with other men of similar feelings. In addition, individuals such as John Cooper, the cross-dressing “Princess Seraphina,” were shown to have been visible over long periods in the working-class communities where they lived. The work of organizations, including the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, was also examined, as scholars demonstrated how occasional raids on molly houses were staged by private organizations beginning in the early 1700s, and reported in the press along with the stories of indignant crowds lining the streets to taunt the convicted men.6 The 1810 prosecution of the Vere Street Coterie, which met at the White Swan public house, is one of the most often recounted of these molly-house raids, and one of the last incidents to be cited in works that focus on the patterns associated with the eighteenth century.
Even more scholarly attention has been focused on the late nineteenth century. Almost from the time academics first began to turn their attention to issues of homosexuality in history, a handful of cases and events beginning in 1870 have been in the foreground. The popular work of H. Montgomery Hyde helped ensure that the Boulton and Park trial, the Cleveland Street Scandal, and the Dublin Castle Affair were known to modern scholars. Hyde also provided one of the most important early accounts of the Oscar Wilde trials and the Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, although many other writers, beginning with individuals such as Holbrook Jackson, had long kept Wilde’s story current.7 The first and most significant of the academic books to offer a broader historical interpretation of these trials was Jeffrey Weeks’s Coming Out, which historicized the development of homosexual identity and distinguished it from the more common and ahistorical phenomenon of homosexual behavior.8 The infamous trials of the later nineteenth century became important markers in the work of many scholars, and not simply because of the sustained level of national attention they received in their own day. Occurring at a time when middle-class values were increasingly challenged politically, socially, and intellectually by the working class, women’s organizations, avant-garde artistic experimentation, and new intellectual movements—including the growth of sexology as a scientific discipline—these trials were rightly seen by scholars as reflecting cultural transformations, and they became the subject of an increasing number of wide-ranging interpretations in a variety of disciplines.9 Assumptions about the links between middle-class social anxiety and the increased visibility of homosexuality in the late nineteenth century have become commonplace, and the connection is often invoked even in textbook accounts of the period.10
A great deal of important interpretative work came from the study of these cases, but the degree of attention focused on them brought its own problems. Because much of the work on these trials was outside the discipline of history, archival research and the search for precedents were not a priority. Moreover, contemporary statements in newspaper and trial documents reinforced the impression that such scandals were rare and that there were long periods of public silence between them.11 This pattern of silence and rupture seemed to be similar to the periodic eruption of the eighteenth-century sodomy prosecutions. It also seemed to coincide with a metaphor of the