The seeming similarity between the public discussion of sex between men at both ends of the nineteenth century led to a neglect of the serious study of the early to mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a distorted view of the period as a whole. This pattern is evident in books as diverse as those produced by Alan Sinfield, Neil Bartlett, and Jeffrey Weeks, each of which claims to account for patterns throughout the nineteenth century. Each of these works has played an important and influential part in moving the historiography forward in different ways. Weeks largely established the study of homosexuality within the academy. Bartlett’s work provided an engaging, influential, and highly personalized interpretation of the periodic “discovery” of male same-sex desire by the society at large, and Sinfield addressed the important and often-neglected task of separating the cultural understanding of effeminacy from that of sex between men. All three authors make claims about the nineteenth century, but very little of their information is focused on the years 1810–70. None of these authors emphasizes any significant break, rupture, or discontinuity during this time. Instead, a number of events are used to connect the Vere Street molly-house raid of 1810 and the more heavily analyzed period beginning in 1870.
Works as recent as Matt Cook’s 2003 study of homosexuality and the urban environment of London also replicate this pattern to some extent.13 Cook’s work focuses on the period between 1885 and 1914, but he opens his narrative with a survey of the British material related to sex between men from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. His account also moves rapidly from the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century material to the 1870 trial of Boulton and Park. Other recent works on male homosexuality in nineteenth-century Britain, by Sean Brady and Morris Kaplan, have also kept their focus on the final decades of the century and largely overlook events before the 1860s.14
The work that offers the most detailed examination of the first half of the nineteenth century is H. G. Cocks’s Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century. Cocks was the first scholar to call attention to the imposition of the two-year sentence for prosecutions of sex between men and the first to use parliamentary papers and court records to demonstrate the frequency of unnatural-assault and attempted-sodomy prosecutions throughout the nineteenth century. More than any other researcher, Cocks has helped to correct one of the most persistent and distorting misinterpretations in the secondary literature over the frequency of prosecutions for sex between men.15 Yet although Cocks discusses the changes in the law and patterns of prosecution in the 1820s early in his book, the subsequent chapters draw most of their examples from the later nineteenth century. Cocks uses his more fully developed view of the early nineteenth century primarily as a ground for developing his analysis of the later nineteenth century, providing both new interpretations of familiar material, such as the Cleveland Street Scandal and the Dublin Castle Affair, and extended analysis of new archival discoveries, including an exploration of desires and identities within a circle of male friends known among themselves as the Bolton Whitman Fellowship, who met at the end of the nineteenth century.
Because of Cocks’s greater interest in the later period, important changes that occurred between 1820 and 1850 are only lightly sketched. A survey of the extent of newspaper reporting of trials involving sex between men was not a part of Cocks’s project, and therefore the increase in unnatural-assault reporting from the 1820s through the 1860s, and what that reporting indicated about the public perceptions of sex between men, remains largely unexplored in his study. Although only a fraction of the thousands of court cases in these earlier decades left more than statistical information behind, taken together and combined with other sources, these fragments provide a unique picture of these transitional decades and demonstrate not only how men who had sex with men interpreted and acted on their desires, but also how members of their families and communities understood those behaviors.16
A better understanding of attitudes toward sexual behavior in these decades is especially important because the early nineteenth century witnessed a profound shift in the practice of law enforcement, from a system reliant on relatively rare but brutal displays of punishment on the offender’s body to one that sought to reform behavior through a system of observation and regulation. Part of this shift entailed a move away from the public use of death penalty and the pillory and toward more frequent and consistent punishment with lesser sentences. Over time this shift influenced how individuals thought of the relationship between the law and the regulation of individual behavior, including behaviors related to sex between men. This change must be explored not only through statistical analysis but also at a social and cultural level.17 Cultural context is just as important for explaining transitions in the understandings of sex between men for the early nineteenth century as it is for the final decades of the nineteenth century. For all the strengths of both the “new” and the “old” gay history, no work has yet paid sufficient attention to the changes of the early nineteenth century.18
Closer analysis of events in the earlier nineteenth century is also necessary in order to provide a link between the discordant narratives of the two ends of the nineteenth century. In both style and substance as well as in descriptive vocabulary, there is a substantial divide between the representation of the molly-house culture and general Georgian bawdiness of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the descriptions of conduct in the public and private spaces of London from 1870 onward. The degree to which the transformations of urban life influenced the availability of sex between men needs to be better defined, in relation to both the men who felt same-sex desire and those who engaged in such acts for other reasons. We know of a handful of men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were identified as “buggers by nature,” but what relationship do these men have to “the homosexual,” a type defined by his choice of sexual object?19 How did some men interpret their sexual acts with other men so as not to profoundly affect how they perceived themselves? Finally, with respect to controlling sexuality between men, how did the goals of the family, the law, and, eventually, medical theorists complement, conflict with, and shape one another?
Given the common assumptions about the role of economic and social change in the development of sexuality as social category, it is interesting that the understandings of sex between men in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century have remained so understudied. David Halperin has noted that both before and after Foucault, scholars have argued that “something new happens to the various relations among sexual roles, sexual object-choices, sexual categories, sexual behaviors, and sexual identities in bourgeois Europe between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Sex takes on new social and individual functions, and it assumes a new importance in defining and normalizing the modern self.” Halperin also observes that many scholars take it “as established that a large-scale transformation of social and personal life took place in Europe as a part of the massive cultural reorganization that accompanied the transition from a traditional, hierarchical, status-based society to a modern, individualistic, mass society during the period of industrialization and the rise of a capitalist economy.”20 For Britain, the most critical years in that trans- formation, and the years during which the threat of outright political revolution stemming from these changes seemed most acute, occurred between the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 and the European revolutions of 1848.
For any other topic in British society, attention to changes between 1815 and 1850 would be commonplace rather than controversial. The period overlaps what has been known to generations of British historians as the “Age of Reform,” and if the nature of the changes during this period has been called into question in recent years, most historians still agree that it saw fundamental alterations in the way the state, the society, and the economy were organized.21 The change in governing institutions especially was abrupt because fear of revolution at home had led the governing class to resist deviations from traditional political arrangements. An expansion of the franchise had been seriously considered in the 1780s, but most talk of such experiments was stifled after the September massacres of 1792 in France, which seemed to confirm that bloodshed and anarchy might accompany the modification of traditional institutions. Not until the 1820s, during the more liberal phase of Lord Liverpool’s long administration, did the government