Left to Themselves: The Subversive Boys Books of Edward Prime‐Stevenson (1858–1942)

Abstract

Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson. A name you are very unlikely to have heard of, although in his time he enjoyed a modest renown as a writer of some distinction. Using his entire name or some variant (such as E. I. Stevenson, Edward Stevenson, Edward Prime-Stevenson, E. Irenaeus Stevenson), he wrote many different types of literature, and enjoyed some success as an author of magazine fiction, poetry, literary and music criticism, travel essays, esoterica such as cartomancy, and the two areas which concern us today: boys books, which he wrote early in his career; and overtly homosexual works, which he penned later on, that place him among America's earliest gay authors. Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson. In spite of the fact that his books are difficult to get hold of-his two major gay works, Imre: A Memorandum (1906), and The Intersexes (1908), can be had only in facsimile copies; and his two boys books only by locating rare editions in a handful of libraries-in spite of this difficulty, his is a name, as critic Noel I. Garde put it, that ought not to be forgotten. And it won't, if I have any say in it. During the past summer I worked for Broadview Press on an edition of Imre: A Memorandum, the first overtly gay novel by an American that dared to present a happy ending in a period that allowed homosexuals recognition only if they came to punishment or suicide by the conclusions of the rare novels where they might appear. It is to be hoped that the return of this novel in an accessible and modern format will spark an interest in what critic Roger Austen calls the Father of Modern American Gay Literature. While researching-with some difficulty-- the life of this elusive author, I read whatever other works of his I could find, and his two boys books were especially fascinating, not only because they were successful in their day and clearly emulated the more visible Horatio Alger series of novels for boys, but also because Prime-Stevenson had named these books himself as having a definite homoerotic subtext. In The Intersexes, a monumental defense of homosexuality written in response to the nineteenth-century medical establishment's creation of gayness, Stevenson-- writing under the pseudonym of Xavier Mayne-- said in a somewhat coy aside: Fiction for young people that has uranian hints naturally is thought the last sort for circulating among British boys and girls. [Nevertheless] ... in White Cockades, a little tale of the flight of the Younger Pretender, by E. I. Stevenson, issued in Edinburgh some years ago, passionate devotion from a rustic youth toward the prince, and its recognition are half-hinted as homosexual in essence. The sentiment of uranian adolescence is more distinguishable in another book for lads, Philip and Gerald, by the same hand: a romantic story in which a youth in his latter teens is irresistibly attracted to a much younger lad; and becomes, con amore, responsible for the latter's personal safety, in a series of unexpected events that throw them together-for life. (366-68) The acknowledgment that he had written boys books and deliberately subverted or tweaked their agenda would be fascinating enough if such an admission were to be made by a present-day writer, but it becomes especially intriguing when we think of such an event occurring in the straitlaced Victorian Period, not one particularly known for its sexual openness. Boys books had their own agenda, to be sure. Such books were meant to be edifying, instilling in young boys notions of manhood, boyhood, morality, patriotism, patriarchy, goals, and ideals. For Stevenson to say that he was able to inject-apparently without detection or objection from the publishers-a portrait of gay boys in a genre unilaterally heterosexual, is to suggest that the genre itself was open to such usurpation. Horatio Alger's books provide a sterling model, and we realize that, once past the doubtless unconscious phallocentrism of such titles as Ragged Dick, Bound to Rise, Risen from the Ranks, Charlie Codman's Cruise, Struggling Upward, and Strong and Steady, the books are quintessentially male-oriented, any female characters always tangential to the plots. …