British queer history

New approaches and perspectives

Brian Lewis

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526101570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Takes stock of the 'new British queer history'. Topics range from newspaper reporting of sodomy cases, to homoerotic representations in art, to queer autobiographical accounts, to oral histories of Scottish lesbians, and much else besides.

1

Politics and the reporting of sex between men in the 1820s

Charles Upchurch

There is something of a paradox in the discussion of sex between men in Britain in the nineteenth century. For generations it was thought to have been unspeakable and unspoken-about in this period, and the discussion of it is almost entirely absent from nineteenth-century diaries, novels, parliamentary papers and other sources. Yet for most of the nineteenth century, sex between men was regularly discussed in the mainstream newspapers, primarily through articles about court cases ranging in length from one paragraph to multiple columns of text. These stories were carried in newspapers directed at the upper, middle and working classes, although the amount of detail and the frequency of coverage varied from paper to paper. Over six hundred substantial reports relating to sex between men were printed in The Times between 1822 and 1871 alone, with some years seeing as few as three or four reports and others having as many as thirty-seven or thirty-eight.¹ The Weekly Dispatch had about two-thirds as many as The Times, while the Morning Post had just under half as many. There was some coverage of court cases related to sex between men before 1822 and after 1871, but in those periods the number of reports dropped substantially, and the amount of detail in most reports was often only skeletal.

The volume of the discussion that occurred between 1822 and 1871 was largely forgotten by later generations of historians, but the events that led to it were not. The regular publication of the details of trials related to sex between men in London ended because of the 1870–71 Boulton and Park prosecution, which inadvertently revealed the way that large numbers of middle-class male cross-dressers and their admirers made use of the pubic and private spaces of the West End.² Fifty years earlier, it was the arrest and the failed prosecution of the Bishop of Clogher in 1822 that was the catalyst for the regular publication of such detailed coverage in the liberal daily newspapers.

The identification of these two well-known cases as transition points in the public discussion of sex between men has been made possible using full-text searching for dozens of newspapers, although accurate results for this type of analysis take time to establish. The Times is a unique resource for mapping the accuracy of full-text searching, since in addition to being full-text searchable within the Times Digital Archive, there also exists an index to The Times that was created over a forty-year period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the creation of the Palmer’s Index to the Times, individuals read every story, and categorised them under terms devised by an understanding of the meaning of the sentences and paragraphs. By contrast, full-text databases should be understood as possibly imperfect catalogues of the words appearing in the newspaper, which is not the same information, especially if journalists have used vague terms to discuss uncomfortable topics.³ Given these differences, it has taken years to piece together what seems like a reliably accurate understanding of how sex between men was reported for all of the decades of the nineteenth century, and only with such a picture do the Boulton and Park case of 1870–71 and the Bishop of Clogher prosecution of 1822 become distinct as transitional moments.

Also apparent from this more detailed understanding of what actually appeared in the newspapers is the political origins of this type of reporting. It was not just the hypocrisy of a bishop of the Church of Ireland being caught having sex with a soldier that made his case such a sensation in 1822, although that is the primary way it has been discussed in more recent scholarship. It was rather that when the events of 1822 were linked in the public sphere with an earlier trial that occurred in Ireland in 1811, as they were after just a few days in the major London newspapers, they showed in a shockingly graphic way the injustice perpetrated by the judicial system as it then operated in this area of the law. It was an injustice so galling, and so perfectly illustrative of the abuses of aristocratic government, that radical publications like Cobbett’s Political Register, Richard Carlile’s Republican and Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf seized on the issue and found ways to keep it before the public for months. Even more dangerous for the government than the anger of the radicals, however, was that the liberal middle-class newspapers, heretofore extremely circumspect in their reporting of trials related to sex between men, matched and then exceeded the radical press in the attention given to these events. Just as the murderous excesses of Peterloo in 1819 were the catalyst for The Times to move more forcefully towards supporting a liberal reform agenda, so too should the increased coverage of sex between men in The Times and other liberal newspapers be seen as a critique of the system of unnatural assault prosecutions as it had existed up to 1822, and an attempt to end the secrecy that created the potential for abuses of power.⁴

The evidence for this exists not only in the sustained level of increased reporting from that point forward, but also in the content of those reports in the months and years immediately after 1822. A greater willingness on the part of individuals to bring these cases seems evident in the volatile situation of 1822 and 1823, leading to an alteration of the law, in 1823 and again in early 1825, designed to strengthen the position of propertied men when accused of sexual advances by their social inferiors. This was followed by what seems like an aggressive reassertion of state authority in this area in 1825, when reported cases of sex between men and related extortion accusations reached a one-year peak not exceeded until the 1840s. Caught in this wave of new prosecutions were John Grossett Muirhead, Esq., and Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Archdall, both from aristocratic families, and both prosecuted for making sexual advances on working-class young men. The Muirhead and Archdall prosecutions are the two most prominent trials related to sex between men in the 1820s not yet discussed in any detail in the scholarly literature, and, as analysed in the final pages of this chapter, their divergent fates illustrate some of the effects of the greater newspaper attention to these cases. By the end of the 1820s the advantages of the wealthy in these cases were largely restored, but the abuses that could stem from those advantages were tempered by sustained and dispassionate publicity, spearheaded by a liberal press reluctant to publicise these events, yet obligated to bring the check of public opinion into even this area of the exercise of state power.⁵

To argue that 1822 represented a break requires first establishing what the earlier pattern had been. State statistics for prosecutions of sodomy and attempted sodomy became consistent only in 1810, putting the total number of cases before the criminal courts at around forty per year for England and Wales, with on average fifteen of those occurring in London and Middlesex. The number of cases increased steadily if erratically over the 1820s, so that by 1830 just over eighty cases were recorded per year for the criminal courts of England and Wales, with just over forty of those occurring in London and Middlesex.⁶

Given time and patience, the newspaper record can be reconstructed for a significantly longer period of time. Randolph Trumbach’s extensive search of the eighteenth century using full-text searching within the newspapers of the Burney Collection generally aligns in its findings with my own work with the Times Digital Archive, Palmer’s Index to the Times, British Newspapers, 1800–1900 and the names of the men gleaned from the HO 26 series of government documents housed in the National Archives.⁷ Incidents involving sodomy and attempted sodomy were recorded in eighteenth-century newspapers, but most often with only a line or two noting the occurrence, or the verdict if a trial was held. Before 1822 there was on average only one story with any amount of detail related to sex between men in The Times in any given year, with those stories most often involving libel or extortion charges. Radical or Ultra-Tory newspapers might publish rumour or innuendo pertaining to same-sex desire, as the New Times did regarding a political ally of Major John Cartwright, the True Briton did regarding the bibliophile and MP Richard Heber, and the Weekly Dispatch did regarding the Rev. John Church, but such references were most often fleeting, and were also primarily about critiquing the behaviour of individuals rather than recounting the actions of the state.⁸

There was one major exception to this pattern of minimal trial coverage before 1822, but more than anything it seems to show that sensationalism alone was not enough to change the approach of the liberal press to the reporting of these cases. On 8 July 1810 twentyseven men were arrested at the White Swan, a London molly house located on Vere Street. Most of the victims of the police raid were released or otherwise acquitted, but six of these men were sentenced to stand in the pillory for an hour, in addition to serving prison sentences of two to three years. The description of the violent anger and insults hurled at them both before and especially during their time in the pillory has become one of the most indelible images shaping our understanding of sex between men in the early nineteenth century.⁹

There were at least some significant parallels in the coverage of Vere Street in The Times and the patterns associated with the 1822 Bishop of Clogher coverage. Both led to a spike in coverage of other cases related to sex between men in the following months. Of the fourteen substantial reports related to sex between men present in The Times that year, ten related to individuals not connected to Vere Street, making 1810 the year with the largest number of these smaller stories, by far, between 1800 and 1822. Also as in 1822, the spate of short articles began only after the major event. Yet if the Vere Street incident initially led to The Times paying increased attention to a wide range of prosecutions involving sex between men, the former pattern of minimal coverage was re-established within a few months. Only two reports related to sex between men were detected in the following year, only one per year in 1815, 1817 and 1818, and none in 1812, 1813, 1814, 1816 or 1821.¹⁰

The reason Vere Street did not create a lasting change in the reporting of the law in this area was because the prosecutions and punishments showed the law operating in a way consistent with its own rules, and in alignment with public and popular opinion. In a time of war, economic hardship and government repression, the spectacle of the Vere Street prosecutions united the government and a large segment of the London population in a vengeful humiliation of these men. The reports that it took over two hundred constables to keep the crowd at bay, that the crowds packed the streets for the entire route to the pillory to taunt the convicted men and that the men became bloodied and nearly indistinguishable as human forms from the amount of mud, vegetables, animal parts and other objects hurled at them as they stood defenceless, all displayed a disturbing consensus on the issue of punishment of men thought to be sodomites.¹¹ Because of this it was a political asset for the government rather than a political threat.

The 1822 arrest of the Bishop of Clogher and related revelations concerning James Byrne had entirely the opposite effect. On the night of 19 July 1822 Percy Jocelyn, the Bishop of Clogher, was caught in the White Lion public house in London having sex with John Moverley, a twenty-two-year-old Grenadier Guard. The two had planned to meet there at nine o’clock that evening, each going separately to a back parlour. Moverley was in his military uniform, while Jocelyn, who had spent the day in the House of Lords, was wearing clothes that gave him ‘the appearance of a gentleman’.¹² It was the son-in-law of the landlord who first suspected the men, and saw them in the act through a window in the back yard of the public house. The landlord, a watchman and several other regular patrons of the public house all watched Jocelyn and the soldier through the window for some time before finally breaking in and making the arrest. A mob had formed around Jocelyn and the soldier on their way to the St James’s watch house, and, despite Jocelyn’s efforts to keep his identity secret, a letter in his possession soon revealed his identity.

News that a bishop had been arrested with a common soldier spread throughout the capital, fanned primarily by word of mouth and the radical press in the first days. Outrage over Jocelyn’s actions was augmented on the following day with the reports that he was allowed bail of only £1,000, an amount so low for a man of his fortune that it all but assured he would flee the country, as he almost immediately did. In the following days clergymen found themselves taunted in the streets of London, with the private secretary to the Home Secretary remarking that no event in the last one hundred years was potentially more damaging to the system of deference binding the lower and higher social orders.¹³ Yet despite this firestorm and the attention that the radical press and word of mouth was bringing to these events, the daily newspapers remained almost entirely silent in the first week.

By mapping the timing and the amount of press coverage stemming from Percy Jocelyn’s arrest, it become...