Likewise, prostitutes in central London, once thought to epitomize the isolation of the urban individual divorced from family networks, retained their ties to working-class families and communities to a much greater degree than previously assumed. They did so by separating their work both temporally and spatially from their family lives. The number of prostitutes in the West End of London was never higher than in the nineteenth century, yet many of these women lived elsewhere, mainly in the working-class communities south of the Thames. After engaging in prostitution for a number of years, often as a part of a calculated strategy to avoid more onerous employment in an economy that offered few desirable options to young women, these individuals often became wives and mothers. Scholars such as Judith Walkowitz have shown that the sentimentalized literary depictions of fallen women (replete with remorse, social ostracism, and tragic early death) cannot be taken as a guide to social experience in the early nineteenth century.7 For prostitutes as for new urban migrants, family ties have been shown to be more persistent and durable than previously assumed.
The effects of urbanization and economic change were also tempered by the persistence of many earlier forms of employment. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the single largest occupational category in London by far was domestic service, which was structured by social relationships that carried over from the eighteenth century. In many trades and professions, especially those catering to the luxury trades of the capital, the small workshop, the live-in apprentice, and the patriarchal relationship between employers and employees remained strong. As Raphael Samuel has argued, the persistence of labor-intensive building techniques extended long into the Industrial Revolution. Although the Crystal Palace was intended as a symbol of the new modern age and built at the midpoint of the century, it was realized largely with labor-intensive techniques such as hand-puddled iron beams and hand-blown glass window panels.8
If such a spectacular argument for the modern world as the Crystal Palace was made in 1851, it was in part because only three years before, it seemed as if the lower orders might finally engage in a full-scale revolt against that modern industrial world, which up to that point seemed far more detrimental than beneficial to them. The disputed five million signatures on the Chartist petition of 1848, and the threatened march of tens of thousands of workers on Westminster in that year to demand political inclusion, challenged the viability of the current political structure in Britain and of the laissez-faire relationships that were eroding the previous social forms. That no revolution actually occurred should not diminish our appreciation of the political tensions of those years. There was nothing inevitable about the triumph of the new economy in the first half of the nineteenth century and the new forms of social organization that came with it; many, even in the middle class, argued against its worst aspects.
The protected space of the family was consistently invoked as a bulwark against the abuses and excesses of the modern world. The middle-class home, as celebrated in the late eighteenth-century poetry of William Cowper and embraced by the Evangelical middle class, was seen as a refuge from the complexities and immoralities of the modern world. The home preserved the religious and moral values that were under threat elsewhere in society. A properly constituted family, sanctioned by the state and the church through marriage, and secured by the income earned through diligent work in the world, could insulate itself from outside intrusions.
The concept of the home was less private and less inviolate for the working class, but working-class families aggressively resisted attempts by outside authorities to impose regulation on them. Lacking the financial resources that would have allowed more social functions to occur within the home, they placed a higher value on community, with celebrations such as Christmas and Easter being community rather than private family rituals. Yet the working class also invested in rituals of the home, such as the creation of the parlor, when resources allowed.9 The workhouses were seen as egregious in part because they broke up families, an action justified by the state on the grounds that when individuals abrogated the responsibility of supporting themselves, they lost the right to a private family life as well.
The right of a family to protect its members from the intrusions of the law was also enshrined for the upper classes. The most prestigious families in the realm were entitled to special treatment before the law. Their debts were treated differently from those of others, and their other transgressions before the law might be heard before special juries, drawn only from men of similar status. All levels of society, therefore, in some respects manifested the idea that belonging to a functioning family accorded the individual a degree of protection from the intrusions of the state. The ideal of English liberty was strong: that ideal included the conviction that the power of the state should be limited, and that a wide range of behavior, especially within families, was outside its purview. This was an era long before the extension of state regulation into the sphere of the functioning family, such as in the Education Act of 1870, which sent inspectors into working-class homes. In the first half of the nineteenth century the state was only just beginning to regulate even the level of violence in society that fell short of grievous bodily injury. Involving the state in physical assaults within the family was rare, and most domestic abuse within a marriage was not recognized as criminal. Many of the physical disputes and moral transgressions that happened within families stayed within them and were settled within them.
Because so little attention has been given to the families of the men who engaged in sex between men, it is worthwhile to work through a number of examples. Doing so not only shows the variation between reactions of families of different classes but also illustrates the divisions and conflicts that arose over how to respond once sex between men was brought to light. Sometimes fathers and sons were united in their responses; at other times their reactions were starkly different. At many points wives, mothers, or sisters took the lead in resolving these crises, which seemed to undermine masculine status and power.
These differing responses both within and between families of different class backgrounds can be seen in the series of letters left by the Franklin and Geldart families, written in the months before and after the state ended the relationship between their sons. Thomas Franklin was a railway inspector, and, like many fathers of the time, he attempted to ensure that his seventeen-year-old son Henry would be placed “in an honorable way of getting a living.”10 Thomas had great difficulty in finding a position for his son, though, and could ultimately do no better than obligating him to serve aboard a merchant ship for five years. Henry Franklin was apparently very dissatisfied with this arrangement, and within a short time he had deserted his ship, sold his clothing, and taken to living on the streets in London. Friends of the family reported this outcome to Henry’s parents, who had recently moved to Scotland. The father especially felt that it would be best “to leave him a little time in adversity to see if it would bring him to a sense of duty.”11 It came as something of a shock to the parents when they heard again from London friends that their son was seen to be very well dressed and enjoying a comfortable life. This sudden improvement in Henry’s circumstances “created serious suspicion” in the parents, and Henry’s mother set off for London to discover what exactly was going on.
The fact that their son seemed to be living beyond his means made his parents “fear evil has befell him, and he has become badly associated.” Although they may have worried that he had fallen in with a band of thieves or other rough individuals, the mother’s fears were not allayed when, after some effort, she found Henry, and he told her that it was “a gentleman [who] had taken compassion on him.” She told her son that “all this looked suspicious, [and] she would not be satisfied until she had seen this gentleman.” When the two actually came face to face, the mother’s attitude toward the man, Joseph Geldart, mingled cordiality and suspicion. She asked him for his full name, occupation, and address, saying that “if a gentleman, [he] will give me credit for my duty as a caring mother, it carries with it a great suspicion.”12
Before she left