Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality

A Sourcebook

Chris White, Chris White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134742806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality is a comprehensive collection which provides, for the first time in one volume, many texts unavailable outside specialised academic libraries. Chris White has brought together a wide range of primary source material, including prose, poetry, fiction, history and polemic from 1810 to 1914.
Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality includes writing on:
* trials and scandals
* censorship and homophobia
* cultural and personal history
* love and friendship
* lesbianism
* aestheticism and decadence
* sexual tourism and colonialism
* cross-class desire
* sodomy and sadomasochism.
Containing a general introduction, section headnotes, a bibliography of primary and secondary source material, this book is extraordinarily well researched.

1 The Mute Sin

DOI: 10.4324/9780203002407-1

This chapter gathers together a variety of texts which express hatred, contempt, mockery, outrage or a desire to string up on sight those who are variously termed the sweepings of Sodom, margeries, pooffs, detestable wretches and epicene. The genre of vitriol spans the ‘mere reporting’ of a mob’s attempt to lynch a group of men arrested for same-sex activities, through Gilbert and Sullivan’s parodic treatment of the perceived effeminacy of those surrounding Wilde and Water Pater, to the apoplectic spleen of O’Brien’s attack on Edward Carpenter and threat to denounce him to the police.

The phrase ‘the mute sin’ becomes a legalistic term (as can be seen in Deacon’s Digest, included in Chapter 2), but begins life as a religious term in Peccatum Mutum (the mute sin), a work on sodomy by a seventeenth-century theologian, Father Sinistrari. He, amongst prolonged discussion of what constitutes sodomy and how women might commit it with one another, asserts that ‘torture by fire against a Sodomite must be by all means practised among us’, and ‘one tempted with Sodomy, if he has no other way of avoiding it, can with impunity kill his tempter’.¹ Such sentiments are not so different from those of nineteenth-century pundits.

The Vere Street Brothel Case, 1810

The Times, 13 July 1810

The existence of a Club, or Society, for the purpose so detestable and repugnant to the common feelings of our nature, that by no word can it be described without committing an outrage upon decency, has for some time been suspected by the Magistrates of Bow-street; who cautiously concealing the odious secret, abstained from taking any steps on the information they had received, until an opportunity should offer of surprising the whole gang. About 11 o’clock last Sunday evening, three separate parties of the patrole,² attended by constables, were detached from Bow-street on this service….

The enterprize was completely successful. —We regret most deeply, that the information given at the office was found to be so accurate, that the Officers felt themselves justified in seizing no fewer than 23 individuals, at a public-house, called the White Swan, in Vere-street, Clare-market.

‘The Detestable Wretches', The Times, 30 September 1810

At the Middlesex Sessions, Clerkenwell, on Saturday the 22d, seven of the infamous and detestable wretches lately taken at the Swan, in Vere-street, viz. William Amos, alias Fox, James Cooke, Philip Ilett, William Thomson, Richard Francis, James Done, and Robert Aspinal, were tried, and all found guilty. Amos, having been twice before convicted of similar offences and punished, was sentenced to three years imprisonment, and to stand once in the pillory, in the Haymarket, opposite Panton-street. Cooke, the keeper of the house, Ilett, Thomson, Francis, and Done, were each sentenced to two years imprisonment, and the pillory in the same place; and Aspinal, as not having appeared so active as the others, to one year’s imprisonment only.

James McNamara, a low vulgar Irishman, seemingly a bricklayer’s labourer, and Thomas Walker, a squalid looking lad, about 17, a soldier in the first regiment of the Guards, were tried for a similar crime, at a public-house, in White Hart-yard, Drury-lane, on the 11th instant; and George Horiby, a cobler, and John Cutmore, a soldier, were indicted for a similar crime, at the Star and Crown public-house, in Broadway, Westminster, on the 21st July. — All four were caught in the fact. —Macnamara, Horiby and Cutmore were sentenced each to twelve months solitary confinement; and Walker to six months solitary confinement.

On sentence being pronounced on these wretches, they were all handcuffed, and tied to one chain in Court, and ordered to Cold Bath-fields Prison. On leaving the Court, a numerous crowd of people, who had collected at the door, assailed them with sticks and stones, which the constables could not completely prevent, although they were about forty in number, and told them to make the best of their way to prison, and they all immediately ran off to it, which they reached in a few minutes, and the constables, by blockading the streets, prevented the most fleet of their assailants from molesting them during their inglorious retreat.

‘The Pillorying of the Vere-Street Club', The Times, 28 September 1810

The disgust felt by all ranks of society at the detestable conduct of these wretches occasioned many thousands to become spectators of their punishment. At an early hour the Old Bailey was completely blockaded, and the increase of the mob about 12 o’clock put a stop to the business of the Sessions. The shops from Ludgate-hill to the Haymarket were shut up, and the streets lined with people, waiting to see the offenders pass…. Shortly after twelve, the ammunition wagons from the neighbouring markets appeared in motion. These consisted of a number of carts which were driven by butchers’ boys, who had previously taken care to fill them with the offal, dung, &c, appertaining to their several slaughter-houses. A number of hucksters were also put in requisition,³ who carried on their heads baskets of apples, potatoes, turnips, cabbage-stalks, and other vegetables, together with the remains of divers dogs and cats. The whole of these were sold to the populace at a high price, who spared no expence to provide themselves with the necessary articles of assault…. Cook received several hits in the face, and he had a lump raised on upon his eye-brow as large as an egg. Amos’s two eyes were completely closed up; and when they were untied, Cook appeared almost insensible…. It is impossible for language to convey an adequate idea of the universal expressions of execration, which accompanied these monsters on their journey; it was fortunate for them that the weather was dry, had it been otherwise, they would have been smothered. From the moment the cart was in motion, the fury of the mob began to display itself in showers of mud and filth of every kind. Before the cart reached Temple-bar, the wretches were so thickly covered with filth, that a vestige of the human figure was scarcely discernible…. In the name of decency and morality, for the sake of offended Heaven itself, we exhort our Legislators to take this subject into their most serious consideration in the ensuing Session. The monsters must be crushed, or the vengeance of Heaven will fall upon the land. Annihilation to so detestable a race can no otherwise be effected than by making every attempt of this abominable offence punishable with instant death, without benefit of clergy. The present punishment cannot surely be considered commensurate to an offence so abhorrent, and so shocking to human nature; besides, is it not dreadful to have female delicacy and manly feeling shocked, and the infant mind perhaps polluted by such disgusting spectacles, and the conversations to which they unavoidably give rise?

The White Swan, Vere Street, as Described in The Phoenix of Sodom, or the Vere Street Coterie. Being an Exhibition of the Gambols Practised by the Ancient Lechers of Sodom and Gomorrah, Embellished and Improved with the Modern Refinements in Sodomitical Practices, by the Members of the Vere Street Coterie, of Detestable Memory, Printed by Robert Holloway, 1813

The fatal house in question was furnished in a style most appropriate for the purposes it was intended. Four beds were provided in one room, another was fitted up for a ladies dressing-room with a toilette and every appendage of rouge &c &c. A third room was called the ‘Chaple’, where marriages took place, sometimes between a female grenadier, six feet high, and a petit maitre ⁴ not more than half the height of his beloved wife! These weddings were solemnized with all the mockery of bridemaids and bride-men; and the nuptials were frequently consummated by two, three or four couples, in the same room, and in the sight of each other! Incredible as this circumstance may appear the reader may depend it is all provable: —the upper part of the house was appropriated to wretches who were constantly waiting for casual customers; who practised all the allurements that are found in a brothel by the more natural description of prostitutes, and the only difference consisting in that want of decency that subsists between the most profligate men and depraved women. Men of rank and respectable situations in life might be seen wallowing either in or on the beds with wretches of the lowest description: but the perpetration of the abominable act, however offensive, was infinitely more tolerable than the shocking conversation that accompanied the perpetration; some of which, Cook has solemnly declared to me, was so odious, that he could not either write, or verbally relate. It seems many of these wretches were married; and frequently when they are together, make their wives, who they call Tommies, topics of ridicule; and boast of having compelled them to act parts too shocking to think of…. It seems the greater part of these reptiles assume feigned names, though not very appropriate to their calling in life: for instance, Kitty Cambric is a Coal Merchant; Miss Selina a Runner at a Police office;⁵ Black-eyed Leonora, a Drummer;⁶ Pretty Harriet, a Butcher; Lady Godina, a Waiter; the Duchess of Gloucester, a gentleman’s servant; Duchess of Devonshire, a Blacksmith; and Miss Sweet Lips, a Country Grocer. It is a generally received opinion, and a very natural one, that the prevalency of this passion has for its object effeminate delicate beings only: but this seems to be, by Cook’s account, a mistaken notion; and the reverse is so palpable in many instances, that the Fanny Murry, Lucy Cooper, and Kitty Fisher, are now personified by an athletic Bargeman, an Herculean Coal-heaver, and a deaf tyre Smith.⁷ Some of the parties came a great distance, even so much as 30 miles, to join the festivity, and elegant amusements of grenadiers, servants, waiters, drummers, and all the Catamite⁸ brood, kneaded into human shape, from the sweepings of Sodom, with the spawn of Gomorrah.

It may naturally be supposed that this vice is more expensive than any other, and is the vortex that engulphs the property of men, whose acquaintance are astonished at the mode of their getting rid of their fortunes. I remember a man, who had a place of great emolument, a considerable sum of ready money, and thirty thousand pounds, the fortune of an ill-fated woman whom he married; all of which vanished without a trace of its destination…. There is scarcely any description of men, but some individual is comprehended in the associates of this vice; even men in the sacerdotal garb⁹ have descended from the pulpit to the gully-hole¹⁰ of breathing-infamy in Vere-street, and other places for similar vice: but I must spare myself and my readers the ungracious task of pursuing, in detail, circumstances that almost chill the blood to think of, and afflict me with the same sensation that a crimping knife¹¹ on my side would create. — I will therefore briefly consider the origin and progress of this crime, which is so detestable, that the law of England blushes to name it…. From the best authority that can be gathered, this crime was first introduced into England about the year 1315, by a sect of heretics called Lollards;¹² whose intent it was, among other most damnable doctrines, was to subvert the Christian faith; for from a note on the Parliamentary Rolls it is said, ‘A Lollard has committed the sin not to be named among Christians’, which seems to be the first authentic account of it in England. Many years previous to the reign of Geo. I the sin was permitted without any exemplary punishment: —but about the 12th year of that reign a number of those wretches were apprehended, and convicted of the most abominable practices, some of whom were put to death; which gave a check to the evil for some time.

We will now come to the prevalency of the crime in the present age. About five and twenty years ago, there existed a society of the same order with the Vere-street gang, in the City of Exeter, most of whom were men of rank and local situation; they were apprehended, and about fifteen of them tried; and, though they were acquitted by the letter of the law, the enraged multitude was so convinced of their guilt, that, without any respect for their rank, they burnt them in effigy.

‘H.Smith' [William Dugdale],¹³‘A Few Words about Margeries—the Way to Know the Beasts—Their Haunts Etc.', from Yokel's Preceptor: or, More Sprees in London!, c. 1850

The increase of these monsters in the shape of men, commonly designated Margeries, Pooffs, etc., of late years, in the great metropolis, renders it necessary for the sake of the public, that they should be made known. The punishment generally awarded to such miscreants is not half severe enough, and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction Strategies for Liberation
• 1 THE MUTE SIN
• 2 LAW
• 3 SCIENCE
• 4 MODES OF DEFENCE
• 5 LOVE
• 6 SEX
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX