The Inverted City: London and the Constitution of Homosexuality, 1885- 1914 Cook, Matthew David The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/1620 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] 1. The Inverted City London and the Constitution of Homosexuality, 1885-1914 Thesis submitted to the University of London for the degree of PhD by: Matthew David Cook Queen Mary and Westfield College, UTIp, University of London. 2. Abstract This thesis examines the ways in which male homosexuality came to be closely associated with urban life between 1885 and 1914. It focuses on London and argues that particular aspects of the city's history and reputation were integral to the social, sexual and political aspects of emerging homosexual identities. The thesis draws on literature, sexology, the largely overlooked diaries and scrapbooks of George Ives (an early campaigner for homosexual law reform), and previously unexamined newspaper reports. The first chapter outlines changes to London during the period, and examines the intensification of concerns about poverty, degeneracy, decadence and sexual profligacy. The chapters that follow show how these changes and concerns informed understanding and expressions of homosexuality. Chapter two looks at the history of homosexuality in London, and indicates the significance of urban change in shaping patterns of behaviour. Chapter three examines legislation, the ways in which men were policed and surveyed in London, and newspaper accounts of court cases. Chapter four shows how sexology strengthened and elaborated this connection between homosexuality and the city. The last two chapters consider material written by, and explicitly or implicitly concerning, men involved in homosexual activity. Chapter five discusses how the city provided an ideal locale for a decadent understanding of desire, and the final chapter focuses on writing that attempted to counter this decadence with an appeal to Hellenism and pastoralism. It shows how the city was envisaged as a locus for the formation of political and sexual identities that might initiate a process of social change. 3. Contents List of figures 4 Acknowledgements 5 Abbreviations 6 Introduction . 7 1.The Disorderly City: London, 1885-1914 23 2. London and the Cities of the Plain: Mapping Homosexuality in the Metropolis 59 3. The 'Grossly Indecent' City: Courts, Newspapers, and the Homo sexual' Criminal 90 4. The Inverted City: Kraflt-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Bloch and the Metropolis 126 5. The Decadent City: London, Paris and The Orient' 149 6. The Hellenic City: London, 'Greek love' and Pastoralism 187 Conclusion 217 Appendix: Arrest and conviction figures for 'sodomy', 'intent to commit sodomy', and 'gross indecency between males', 1880-1915 223 Bibliography 225 4. Figures i. George Ives in old age 22 ii. Ordinance survey map of the West End in 1870, before the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus 25 iii. Ordinance survey map of the West End in 1894, after the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus 26 iv. Ordinance survey map of Holborn in 1873, before the construction of Kingsway 27 v. Ordinance survey map of Holborn in 1914, after the construction of Kingsway 28 vi Frontispiece of The Lives of Boulton and Park 72 vii.'The West End Scandal Case: Severe Sentence on Mr Parke', The Illustrated Police News, Jan.25, 1890 107 5. Acknowledgements This thesis was funded in part by the British Academy. I am grateful to them and to Gwladys Cook and Nick Bridgmont who provided additional financial assistance. I owe special thanks to Daniel Pick and Comelia Cook for their expert supervision and for their unstinting encouragement and support. Sarah Waters also supervised the early stages of the thesis, and read a final draft. Her help and advice were invaluable. Gareth Stedman Jones and Katharina Rowild read parts of the thesis, and Nick Bridgmont, Anna Davin and Sadie Wearing read the whole thing; I am extremely grateful for their insights and comments. Discussions with Laurel Brake, Christopher Breward, Lesley Hall, Lynda Nead, Miles Ogborn, and members of the QMW postgraduate critical theory reading group all proved very helpful. The librarians and staff at the Bodleian Library, British Library, Colindale Newspaper Library, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (especially Pat Fox), London Library, London Metropolitan Archive, and Weilcome Institute all smoothed the research process. Ed Maggs at Maggs & Co. Booksellers allowed me extensive access to George Ives's scrapbooks before they were sold to the Beinecke Library. Finally, I have been very fortunate to have the support of Gwladys Cook, John Daniel, Amber Jacobs, Madeline Joinson, Allegra Madgwick, Matthew Weait and Sadie Wearing. Nick Bridgmont has been there for me throughout. 6. Abbreviations BLY Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University. HREIRC Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at AUstin. JJC The John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford. LCC London County Council Archive, London Metropolitan Archives, London. 7. Introduction This thesis examines the ways in which male homosexuality came to be closely associated with urban life between 1885 and 1914.1 It is in part a history of male homosexuality in London during this period, though its focus is more particularly on the way ideas of homosexual behaviour developed in dialogue with contemporary hopes and fears about the city. The figure of the male homosexual, the thesis argues, was positioned consistently within an urban framework in a range of different writings, from the newspaper press and sexology to fiction and poetry. As a result the city became integral to the social, sexual and political aspects of emerging homosexual identities. Raymond Williams has fhmously described the years 1880-1914 as an interregnum, the time between all that is associated with the term Victorian and all that went with the war and modernism. He notes of the writers of this period: 'We shall not find in them [...] anything very new: a working out, rather, of unfinished lines; a tentative redirection. Such work requires notice, but suggests brevity'. 2 Since this partial dismissal, however, and particularly in the last ten years, the period has attracted much critical attention, largely because it has been identified as a time of transition. It was, argues José Harris: a unique period in the development of British society, when opinion had been emancipated from an ancient Church-State establishment but in which the homogenising forces of the new mass media were still in their inuhncy. The result was a bewildering diversity of beiei and styles of life.3 These years have featured especially in the analysis of shifts in conceptions of gender and sexuality. Judith Walkowitz, for example, sees a change at this time in the ways women used public space,4 whilst Michael Roper and John Tosh identiIr a 'marked 1 This thesis centres on male homosexuality in order not to collapse the specificities of the relationship between men and the city with that between women and the city. For a discussion of women and the late-nineteenth century city see Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (London,1992); Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality:. Representation of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1988); Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Womea. Representation and the City (London, 1995); Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx and the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder. and Women (London, 1991). 2Raymond Williams, Culture and Society Coleridge to Orwell (London, 1987), p.161. José Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870-19 14 (Oxford, 1993), pp.38-39. 'Walkowitz, op.cit., ch.2. Lynda Nead has challenged Walkowitz's assertions by showing how women were using public space independently and confidently in the 1860s. Lynda Nead, '"The Rape of Glances": Men Women and Streets in Victorian London' (unpublished paper presented at the 'Viewing London' seminar series, BFI/Birkbeck College, 2 Mar.1998); Nead, 'Mapping the Se1f 8. shift in the codes of manliness' from 'the evangelicals and Dr Arnold to the respect for muscle and might at the close of the Victorian era'. 5 Catherine Hall describes a similar trajectory, and notes a concomitant late nineteenth-century repositioning within the middle class to a fuller embrace of ideas of order, hierarchy, and popular imperialism.6 Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks, Alan Sinfleld, Ed Cohen, Regenia Gagnier and Linda Dowling (amongst others) have meanwhile indicated significant changes in ideas about male homosexual behaviour, associated with the rise of sexology, changes in the law, the Wilde trials, the aesthetic and decadent movements, and the renewed interest in Hellenic social and sexual systems.7 During the same period greater London grew by around fifty per cent in terms of population, from 4.7 million to just over seven million. 8 During this time the city saw significant if piecemeal change. The suburbs grew dramatically and the West End was transformed with the development of leisure and shopping fhcilities, thoroughkes, and imposing public buildings. Urban poverty was meanwhile gaining extensive exposure in the work of the 'urban explorers'. As London became grander and more visibly imperial, it seemed that it was also becoming more cosmopolitan, more socially divided, more degraded and disordered. The changes in ideas about gender, sexuality, and class mentioned above can each be seen in the intensifring concerns about the state of the city and the condition of its residents.