Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

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