Going Viral: Fraud, Personation, and Sensationalism in the Victorian Period and Today

ABSTRACTVictorian feminists faced a dilemma in their dealings with the state. This dilemma intensified in the years following the 1867 Reform Act. Radical feminist leaders (Josephine Butler, Lydia Becker, Elizabeth Wolstenholme) eagerly adopted an ‘equality before the law’ stance in order to link women's credentials for citizenship with conventional principles of liberal individualism. Yet the same leaders were recurrently angered and frightened by the sex-insensitive uses to which male politicians were prepared to put state power, even while claiming to be defending and improving a liberal social order. This article traces feminist responses to the dilemma from the high point of libertarian individualism accompanying the 1870s campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts to the more complicated appraisals of the potential of state agency made during following decades. The democratization of English political life, it is argued, may ultimately have persuaded feminists of the worth of the state as a sponsor of social change; but the half-democratized form of politics characteristic of the later Victorian period left key feminists with an ideologically entrenched suspicion of state intervention which even mid-eighties repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and ‘maiden tribute’ child prostitution revelations could not efface.

W. T. Stead (1849–1912), newspaper editor, author, social reformer, advocate for women’s rights, peace campaigner, spiritualist, was one of the best-known public figures in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. This a religious biography of Stead, giving particular attention to Stead’s conception of journalism, in an age of growing mass literacy, as a means to communicate religious truth and morality, and his view of the editor’s desk as a modern pulpit from which the editor could preach to a congregation of tens of thousands. The book explores how his Nonconformist Conscience and sense of divine calling infused his newspaper crusades, most famously his ‘Maiden Tribute’ campaign against child prostitution, and it considers his efforts, through forms of participatory journalism, to create a ‘union of all who love in the service of all who suffer’ and a ‘Civic Church’. The book considers his growing interest in spiritualism and the occult as he searched for the evidence of an afterlife that might draw people of an increasingly secular age back to faith. It discusses his imperialism and his belief in the English-speaking peoples of the British Empire and American Republic as God’s new chosen people for the spread of civilization, and it considers how his growing understanding of other faiths and cultures, but more especially his moral revulsion over the South African War of 1899–1902, brought him to question those beliefs. Finally, it assesses the influence of religious faith on his campaigns for world peace and the arbitration of international disputes.

From William Booth to William Ewart Gladstone, Victorian Britain had its share of political, social, and moral crusaders. W. T. Stead, the subject of Grace Eckley's biography, Maiden Tribute, is pe...

This book makes an important contribution to the historical study of homosexuality. Cocks begins, as others have done, by raising the Foucaultian question about the status of sexuality in Victorian society—a status marked by silence and negation. Foucault’s insight has already stimulated much scholarly enterprise, and Cocks joins an ongoing effort when he formulates his goal to ‘‘...examine the specific practices which led to the historical formation, institutionalisation and exploitation of this ‘namelessness’’’ (p. 3). Cocks stands out among the growing number of contributors to this field by creatively deploying a variety of methodologies to illuminate the development of the conceptualization of the homosexual during the course of the nineteenth century. The analysis proceeds through three stages. The first examines the increasing attention paid to homosexual transgression by the police and the judicial system during the early nineteenth century. The second assesses the role of the press reports of the trials of those charged with sodomy and indecent assault in creating a coded language that could transmit widespread and commonly understood knowledge while, at the same time, avoiding an explicit treatment of homosexual behavior. And the third focuses on how a small group of men living in the provincial town of Bolton at the end of the nineteenth century could create a same-sex community among themselves by drawing upon a culturally available discourse whose very vagueness allowed them the social and cultural space to create their own vision of masculine spirituality. To sustain this complicated argument, Cocks draws upon a large volume and wide range of primary source materials. In the first part of the analysis, he examines the increase in the number of prosecutions for sodomy and indecent assault during the first half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with 8,000 committals for these offenses and casting a wide investigative net utilizing court records, Home Office papers, and newspaper reports, Cocks manages to collect information about 750 of these cases. This laborious exercise in empiricism produced what Cocks calls an ‘‘unsystematic sample’’ of the prosecutions of homosexual conduct during the nineteenth century. Although only a small fraction of the total number, this represents a substantial advance in our knowledge about such cases, especially since close analyses of particularly notorious cases (e.g., Boulton and Park, Cleveland Street, the trials of Oscar Wilde) have dominated the literature on the subject of the prosecution of homosexuality during the nineteenth century. Those accustomed to social science statistical techniques might be disappointed in the small numbers of Cocks’ ‘‘unsystematic sample’’. But historians have to take numbers where they find them and cannot generate them to conform to the requirements of high-powered statistical methods that depend upon the rules of representativeness. Cocks presents his statistical analysis with caution, reminding the reader that it should be understood as ‘‘a digest of the available information’’ (p. 22) and never claiming more for the numbers than they can sustain. His explanations, supplemented by graphs and maps, clearly establish the significance of his findings. He shows, for instance, that the increase in prosecutions of sodomy and indecent assault that began in the late eighteenth century stemmed from a general increase in prosecutorial and police efficiencies and not from a targeted campaign against homosexuals. He also shows that such prosecutions involved men from across the social spectrum and that most such prosecutions were initiated G. L. Savage (&) Department of History, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City, MD 20686, USA e-mail: glsavage@smcm.edu

The sensational title trivialises what is in fact an in-depth study of homosexual lives in late nineteenth-century England, thoroughly documented by original archival research and engagingly told with humane good humour. Kaplan's traditional employment of historical narrative, or ‘storytelling,’ focuses on three main stories: the trials of the cross-dressers Frederick William Park and Ernest Boulton (a.k.a. Fanny and Stella) in 1870–71; the hothouse of pedagogic eros at Eton in the 1870s through the 1890s, featuring William Johnson Cory and Regy Brett (later 2nd Viscount Esher); and the West End scandals of 1889–90 featuring Lord Arthur Somerset, Equerry to the Prince of Wales, and the clients and staff of a male brothel on Cleveland Street. Kaplan's retellings of trials are especially compelling and dramatic, and his character sketches are perceptive and acute. These central stories are supplemented by the stories of two men with full homosexual self-knowledge, the cultural historian John Addington Symonds at the high end of the spectrum, and, at the lower end, the male prostitute Jack Saul, whose fictionalised autobiography fleshes out the action at which newspapers could only hint. Last comes the Oscar Wilde débâcle, a story perhaps too familiar to need retelling, but Kaplan's account is nevertheless an accomplished précis, based on secondary sources. The separate stories do not quite combine into a whole, despite some connections: the artist Simeon Solomon (some years before he would be arrested in a urinal) joined Boulton and Park for lunch during an interval of their trial; and Viscount Esher, the old Etonian, was a close friend of Lord Arthur Somerset, who exiled himself to France after the Cleveland Street affair in order to protect the reputation of Prince Eddy. The one solid link between all the stories is class conflict: Victorian society was heavily inflected with class antagonisms, and homosexuals were most severely reviled when they engaged in cross-class relations, which they regularly did. Kaplan rightly refrains from throwing weak bridges across the gaps between the hermaphroditic demi-monde of female impersonators, the underworld of telegraph boys and rough trade, and the romantic entanglements of schoolboys and their sentimental masters. Each group of self-identities remains distinct, testifying to the range of self-understandings available to Victorian men whose desires were misaligned with conventional sexual or gender identities. Kaplan's greatest virtue is to portray his subjects with affection and sympathy. He even succeeds in recreating the wistful nostalgia of boy-love by concentrating on diaries and letters without letting analysis intervene, allowing the language of love to speak for itself (however cloying we may find it) rather than reducing it to the language of lust or the discourse of theory. For his three central stories, Kaplan has carefully mined several archives of trial records and personal correspondence, supplemented with contemporary newspaper reports. The Esher Archives have never been tapped so deeply and effectively. However, Kaplan does not venture far from the narrow vein of his archives, not fully appreciating that his subjects continued to lead their lives beyond the archives. Boulton and Park simply disappear from his book when their trial ends, but a more determined historian would have pursued them to America, where they continued to appear on the vaudeville stage as female impersonators. Kaplan makes the occasional error when he ventures outside the Victorian period: for instance, in 1631 Lord Castlehaven was convicted, not ‘for buggering … his wife’ as well as his household servants, but for assisting one of his servants to rape his wife (as he liked watching his menservants in action), and for buggery with two of his menservants; Castlehaven was not a polymorphous libertine ‘willing to use anyone at his disposal to obtain sexual satisfaction’, but clearly preferred men. Several photographs of Boulton and Park in drag are very welcome and illuminating; illustrations of homoerotic statues by Hamo Thornycroft and Lord Leighton are also welcome, but the reader will be bemused by their presence, since neither man is ever mentioned in the text. In the introduction and epilogue, Kaplan pays an obligatory nod towards queer theory, but his historical narrative easily eclipses queer theory. Kaplan recognises that narrative challenges theory, and is far more nuanced and faithful to the historical evidence than theoretical discourse.

The Victorian Age: The rhetorical conflation of homosexuality and poor government in the Cleveland Street and Dublin Castle scandals

The apparently overstated claim of the newspaper editor W. T. Stead in 1886 that journalism not Parliament best represented and served the people of Britain was not simply a boast of a solitary individual subject.1 It was the outcome of a widely perceived growth of the power of the press throughout the century, spurred in 1855 by abolition of compulsory newspaper taxes, resulting in the development of cheap and numerous titles.2 Stead’s combative article was only its seal. That this first wave of the cocky new journalism was short-lived, a ‘moment’ before the advent of mass journalism germinated by the Daily Mail in 1896, will be shown by a comparison of two newspaper encounters with government produced towards the beginning and end of this six-year period. The first is Stead’s series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885 entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’3 and the second is the coverage of ‘the Cleveland Street affair’ in a number of papers in 1889–90.4 The first story launched a political campaign to raise the age of consent, while the second was occasioned by the discovery of a male brothel in Cleveland Street in London. I will argue that the discourse of gender is the crucial factor in the respective strength and weakness of journalism in influencing government at these junctures.KeywordsDaily MailNewspaper EditorContemporary ReviewNational VigilanceHomosexual CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviewed by: Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times Charles Upchurch (bio) Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times, by Morris B. Kaplan; pp. 314. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005, $35.00, £19.95. Morris Kaplan opens Sodom on the Thames with a first-person account of his decision to embark on this study of late-nineteenth-century homosexuality, interspersed with a discussion of the sources that he has brought together in order to make it possible. Many of the individuals, events, and themes touched on in these first pages will be familiar to scholars of the period and topic, but it is in their arrangement and interpretation that Kaplan stakes his best and ultimately successful claims for the originality and importance of his work. In the introduction Kaplan informs the reader that what follows will be a narrative history, and he expresses his hope that this "return to storytelling" will be welcomed by some readers "impatient with the obscurity of 'postmodern' theory" (7). The emphasis on narrative is evident in part one, which details the lives of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, two young middle-class cross-dressers arrested in 1870 and tried for conspiracy to commit sodomy. Kaplan's account brings together almost all of the major themes and events described in the surviving trial documentation, making it the most comprehensive overview of this well-known case in the secondary literature. In the narrative, the reader is introduced to the extravagant behaviors of these young men and their friends, the dresses they wore on and off the stage, and their flirtations with other men. The central ambiguity that drove the court case is also explored: whether, without direct evidence of sexual acts, their behavior proved "unnatural" intent. In part two, Kaplan follows a similar narrative strategy, but with less well-known subjects. Primarily through the use of personal letters, Kaplan constructs a detailed look [End Page 769] into the lives of a group of public school men associated with William Johnson Cory, a master at Eton dismissed in 1872 under a cloud of suspicion. As with Boulton and Park, the question of whether sexual contact between men occurred cannot be definitively answered by the sources, and Kaplan refrains from reading into his evidence explicitly sexual relationships, as at least one earlier author has done. Instead Kaplan follows several of these men from the time they were at Eton through their careers, marriages, and involvement with younger men. While most interested in exploring the complex desires that link them long after their school days, Kaplan is also willing to introduce evidence that complicates any simple reading of their actions, such as the passion with which Cory also embraced the education of women later in life (152–53). Yet for all the engaging and valuable detail provided, this first half of the work has its limitations. Aside from a few pages at the start of part two, we learn little here about the public schools themselves, or about just how far from the norms of accepted masculinity were the behaviors of the men Kaplan describes. Greater attention to these and other areas of context would have helped to alleviate the occasional narrowness of the first half of the book, where the focus is dominated by primary sources and unwavering from details of either one trial or one circle of friends. No such criticism can be made of the remaining chapters, though. Part three, on the "West End Scandals," is not limited solely to the 1889–90 Cleveland Street affair, in which telegraph messenger boys were recruited for a male brothel patronized by well-connected upper-class men. Here Kaplan also includes scandals centering on heterosexual desire, including W. T. Stead's "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" (1885) and several politically charged divorce cases from the following years. Citing the Cleveland Street affair within this larger frame allows Kaplan to bring into his analysis the feminists, working-class leaders, and radical journalists who campaigned against elite male privilege, "linking hostility toward the aristocracy to suspicion of deviant desires and practices" (179). Through Kaplan's analysis we learn how public reaction...