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CHAPTER 2

Class, Masculinity, and Spaces

Circumstances played a large role in how men understood their sexual activities with other men. The class backgrounds of the participants, the relative ages of the individuals involved, and the spaces in which those sexual acts occurred were all important. How men felt about their male sexual partners differed if the other man was met in a public school, known as a family friend, or encountered in Hyde Park at night. Sexual pickups in front of shop windows, lingering in certain sections of city parks, and suggestive stares in and around public urinals were recurring themes from the early eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, as was the existence of certain public houses and commercial spaces where “mollies” or “pooffs” congregated.¹ These relationships were also shaped by the exercise of power, resulting in more or less overt forms of influence, coercion, and violence. Many of these aspects of sexuality between men during this period have been identified by other scholars, but they have not been differentiated according to class and geographic location.

One model for differentiating patterns of behavior and motivation between groups of men, grounded in the concerns of the early nineteenth century, is provided by Anna Clark’s analysis of the diaries of Anne Lister. Lister’s diaries are one of the few detailed autobiographical narratives from the early nineteenth century whose author specifically identifies and describes in detail her same-sex desire. In analyzing the diaries, Clark isolates three main areas to understand how an individual might have constructed an identity that positively incorporated same-sex desires: the desires that originate within the individual, the material conditions that structure an individual’s options, and the available cultural texts through which that person can interpret experience.² Lister’s narratives provide excellent evidence of all three factors, but the usefulness of Clark’s approach is not limited to such fortuitous circumstances. Even when the internal desires of individuals are less well documented, it is possible to gain considerable insights from categorizing evidence of material resources and available cultural texts. I draw on this approach to demonstrate the forms of sex between men most typically associated with the working, middle, and upper classes, respectively. The resulting analysis demonstrates that the state was involved most heavily in situations where those acts had the greatest political consequences.

As Clark demonstrates in the case of Anne Lister, positive representations of same-sex desire in the ancient Greek and Roman texts carried great cultural authority among the upper classes. An upper-class young man’s education in the early nineteenth century would have incorporated such texts by Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, Tibullus, Martial, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Petronius.³ From the military prowess of the Sacred Band of Thebes to the example of the Roman emperor Hadrian and his beloved Antinous, the ancient world provided a counterpoint to the condemnation of sex between men in the Christian tradition.⁴

Upper-class men also had knowledge of the contemporary Mediterranean world, where some cultures allowed more open expressions of sexual desire between men than was allowed in Britain. Michael Rocke has demonstrated that patterns of age-structured sexual relations between older and younger men associated with ancient Greece and Rome persisted on a wide scale into the early modern period.⁵ The work of Graham Robb and George Mosse indicates that into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mediterranean cultures continued to make allowances for certain forms of sexual contact between men. This aspect of Italian society was sometimes encountered or sought out when upper-class British men undertook a grand tour of Europe as the culmination of their education. According to at least one visitor to Naples, “Love between men is so frequent that one never expects even the boldest demands to be refused.”⁶

Upper-class men looking to ancient literature or to the contemporary Mediterranean found cultural texts and practices that demonstrated that such acts did not have to damage a man’s masculine status or reputation. Within the ancient world, sexual acts between men were not effeminizing, provided that a man was not seen to be submitting to the desires of another man. He asserted his own desires primarily by pursuing younger men and by always playing the penetrative role. Within this model of masculinity, only some men can achieve full masculine, or vir, status, and their success is based on their economic, social, and sexual domination of others.⁷ Evidence of a similar pattern of male sexuality and masculine status, based on the domination of a partner rather than on the sex of that partner, has been discussed for early modern England by Alan Bray and for eighteenth-century England by Randolph Trumbach, and it is within this tradition that the acts of same-sex desire exhibited by early-nineteenth-century upper-class figures, including Lord Byron, seem best explained.⁸ Although often eclipsed by the passions Byron felt for women, the homoerotic allusions in his writings and his sexual interest in younger men both conform to this pattern.⁹

Upper-class British culture also demonstrated a tolerance for extramarital sexuality, so long as the indiscretions did not lead to a public scandal. This tolerance applied to the sexual affairs of men and, to a lesser degree, women in the eighteenth century, although the allowance for women’s sexual indiscretions diminished as the century progressed. In their sexual affairs with other men, individuals such as George Dawson Lowndes seem to have been breaking the rules of decorum as much as the laws, and Lowndes consequently faced a great deal more ostracism than other men of his own class, like Richard Heber (see chapter 1), whose behavior became more discreet after the initial exposure of his affair with a younger man, thus allowing him to recoup a significant portion of his reputation by the time of his death.

As John Tosh observes, reputation was a pillar of an upper-class man’s masculine status. With their incomes secured by ownership of property, upper-class men did not regard hard work as a status marker. The upper-class focus on reputation placed the emphasis on sociability. This view derived in part from the need to temper the martial values of the upper class in order to avert internal conflicts like those that had erupted in the seventeenth century. Sociability among men was cemented in multiple ways, including drinking, hunting, gambling, demonstrations of sexual prowess, and a willingness to aggressively defend one’s honor.¹⁰ The focus on reputation thus had direct political consequences, fostering conviviality among the English upper class that secured their hold on political power.¹¹

The strength of the upper-class identity, and the power that it had to shape the perception of upper-class men’s actions into the late nineteenth century, can be seen in the work of Morris Kaplan. Through his careful analysis of the public statements associated with the 1889 Cleveland Street Scandal, Kaplan shows that even when charges of sex between men were involved, the overriding public concern was their abuse of class position rather than disapproval of sodomitical acts. Kaplan’s analysis of the rhetoric associated with W. T. Stead’s campaigns in relation to both the 1885 “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” stories and the Cleveland Street Scandal shows that the dominant theme in both instances was the abuse of upper-class privilege as it related to sexuality. Whether the victims were working-class girls or young men in the employ of the Post Office, the criticism by radicals like Stead, as well as by feminist and working-class allies, was directed at an upper class that made its own rules and was allowed to evade the laws that constrained people of lower classes.¹²

If radical, feminist, and working-class critiques of upper-class masculinity became strongest in the late nineteenth century, it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that middle-class men put forward their most sustained challenge to the norms of upper-class masculine behavior. As Linda Colley notes, even though the French Revolution did not topple the English upper class, the privileged were nevertheless affected by the pressures of a generation of warfare.¹³ In order to safeguard their social position, the British upper ranks, led by the example of men such as William Pitt the Younger, responded to middle-class criticism of an idle aristocracy and worked to reform the government system of sinecures and other elements of “Old Corruption”; but they did so only to improve their own governing ethic, not to replace it. Upper-class men continued to argue for aristocratic leadership on the basis that the men of the middle class, insecure in their new personal wealth, could not be trusted to govern in the interests of the society as a whole. In both their distinct political values and their assertive rejection of the middle-class values of hard work and restraint, upper-class men remained distinctly different from their middle-class rivals long after the two groups began to share political power in 1832.

Middle-class men were also confident in and assertive of their distinct form of masculinity. In response to upper-class arguments for the merit of economic independence, middle-class men countered that it was precisely because they were self-made that they were fitted to participate in running the state. Aristocratic leisure could too easily become destructive self-indulgence, and the upper-class models of patron and client could easily turn a man into a sycophant. From Thomas Carlyle’s famous critique of the 1830s dandy in Sartor Resartus to the popular celebration of distinctly middle-class masculine values in the 1850s in Dinah Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman, middle-class men prided themselves on their independence, and their criteria for success and respectability were very different from those of the upper class.¹⁴

As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have demonstrated, middle-class identity also depended on religion and domesticity, virtues that were mutually reinforcing. Stricter adherence to religious principles gave the middle class a positive means by which to define itself against a hedonistic upper class and an improvident lower class.¹⁵ In consequence, the middle class placed a greater emphasis on marital fidelity and took a far more skeptical attitude toward the pursuit of pleasure. Education was also focused on practical pursuits rather than ancient literature and other forms of high culture. For all these reasons, the cultural texts and practices available to upper-class men, the ones that with work and care a man might fashion into a limited justification of the sexual pursuit of other men, were largely absent from middle-class male identity. Although it might make allowances for the indiscretions of youth, no elements of middle-class masculine identity in the early nineteenth century could be refashioned or realigned to justify sexual desire for other men (see chapter 6).

The rigidity of the middle-class masculine code stemmed in part from its rejection of the upper-class ideal of reputation as the central pillar of masculinity and its alternative emphasis on character. Middle-class men were uneasy with the degree to which reputation rested on the opinion of others. Following the pattern of Evangelical religion, they believed, in John Tosh’s words, that “instead of being guided by the opinion of others, the serious Christian was urged to listen only to the inward monitor of conscience, and to appear to the world as he really was.”¹⁶ Such a distinction has implications for the ways a man might interpret and justify his actions to himself, including sexual acts with another man. Discretion could enable an upper-class man to avoid reproach from his peers and retain his reputation, but it was of much less value to a middle-class man in preserving a sense of his own character: for him, the most important judge of a particular action was his own conscience.

Although upper-class and middle-class masculinity were distinctly different in these ways, they were not mutually exclusive. Many of the early prominent leaders of the Evangelical movement were members of the upper class; marriages between the daughters of the upper middle class and the younger sons of the upper ranks were common; and younger sons of the upper class had long gone into business and the professions, where they mixed with middle-class men. These contacts led to the erosion of certain contrasting characteristics, although it never entirely erased them. As the nineteenth century progressed and the middle class shared political as well as economic power with the upper class, it became necessary for at least some middle-class men to enter into some of the upper-class forms of sociability.

The main sites for incorporating young men from both the middle and upper classes into the upper ranks of society were the public schools. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, there were only nine public schools in Britain, all of which were dominated by the upper class. As in the eighteenth century, the public schools existed primarily to teach the sons of the elite how to function in the world of men. The emphasis was placed not on deference to authority, as the masters were well below their pupils in social rank, but rather on the boys’ establishing relationships and reputations among their peers. The links and sociability forged in these locations carried over into men’s adult lives in politics and society, as well as into some areas of commerce associated with the upper classes, including long-distance trade, banking and finance. Even though, according to Roy Porter, many families “mistrusted the public school . . . with its diet of birch, boorishness, buggery and the bottle,” the schools were considered a critical element in the forging of upper-class masculine culture.¹⁷

The assimilation of middle-class sons into the public schools altered those institutions. Between 1830 and 1860 more than thirty new public schools were established, and reforms in the curriculum and the culture of the schools reflected a stronger focus on academics, testing, religion, and team sports. Appointed as headmaster at Rugby in 1828, Thomas Arnold instituted such reforms; he also strengthened the system of peer supervision. Arnold’s widely copied model improved the academic seriousness of these institutions, although at their core they remained fundamentally rooted in upper-class values.¹⁸

Unfortunately for the administrators, reforms in the public schools could not end their association with homosexual acts, at least at the level of innuendo, supposition, and after-the-fact memoirs. Men like Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Carlyle, and John Addington Symonds wrote of both the intimate and the brutal contact between young men that took place in these schools, but such behavior was almost never discussed in the newspapers. A wealthy Briton living in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century wrote of allegations that had spread in the newspapers twenty years before concerning the unnatural propensities of the boys at Harrow, but the fact that he had to reach so far back indicates the rarity of such reports.¹⁹ Many seemed willing to hint privately that vice at the public schools was rampant, and yet the sexual acts alluded to were rarely recounted explicitly. Understanding why this was so highlights how age, class, and space could alter the distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable acts.

Compared to other schools for boys in the period, in fact, the public schools were less frequently associated with homosexual acts. English education for boys outside the public-school system in the early nineteenth century was a hodge-podge of small day schools and boarding schools, many run by a single master and catering to a small group of pupils. It was these institutions whose masters appeared most frequently before the courts and in the newspapers in connection with the sexual abuse of pupils. John Spencer, a “tall, respectable-looking man, grayhaired, and about 60” was charged with “infamous conduct” with several of his pupils at his school in Hackney.²⁰ A few years later, Neville Plumer was charged with assaulting four of his students at his school at 14 Charles Street.²¹ Twenty years earlier, the Times had printed a story about the alleged sexual assaults of Edward Caston on pupils under his care.²² John Wall’s “abominable conduct” toward the boys in his school was said to have been so persistent “that it became the general subject of conversation amongst boys from other schools.”²³ Thomas Anderbon, a forty-five-year-old schoolmaster, described as “of superior education” in the Weekly Dispatch, was indicted for having committed an indecent assault upon one of his pupils on more than one occasion.²⁴ These and many similar incidents were crimes of opportunity, in which older men took advantage of their positions of authority to abuse those younger and more vulnerable.

One of the few public-school cases reported in the press also involved the abuse of boys by an older individual, but not a schoolmaster. In 1842 Patrick Leigh Strachan, about thirty-eight years old, “of gentlemanly appearance, and who has since been discovered to be a man of considerable property,” was known to have gone to Harrow and Sandhurst College on at least three occasions and persuaded young men to accompany him back to his chambers in London, at which point “he proceeded to conduct himself in such a manner as to leave the criminality of his intentions beyond a doubt.” Based on the courtroom testimony, the authorities had “been making inquiries at other large establishments of a similar description, and there was every reason to believe that the prisoner had formed a deep-laid system of attack upon the youth of many of the public schools in the country.”²⁵ Strachan had access to the boys at public schools because he himself had attended one, and he used his background as a pretext for his interest in these upper-class young men. His method on one occasion, it was said, was to “introduce himself into a respectable family [and make] arrangements for the youth to remain with him a few days in London, previous to going home.” The magistrate in the case observed “that at present he believed the extent of the prisoner’s proceedings had not been ascertained, but it was to be hoped that what had already occurred would operate as a sufficient warning to parents not to allow their children to make such visits for the future.”²⁶

Strachan’s sexual acts with public-school students were publicized because he was essentially a predator from outside the school system, taking advantage of the trust that families extended to a member of their own class. The public disclosure of his activities was seen as a warning to other parents. Situations involving individuals within a school were more likely to be dealt with internally, as when William Johnson Cory, a master at Eton, was dismissed because of his romantic relationships with a small circle of his students.

This incident highlights the way in which allegations of sex between men wholly internal to the public schools often remained shrouded in ambiguity, even in the better-documented cases. In this instance, letters that seem highly suggestive of sexual desire between men survive. The language the correspondents use with each other, the jealousies that developed, and the male companions they took later in life all point to homoerotic desires.²⁷ Yet it is impossible to say conclusively even whether allegations of sex between men were the cause of Cory’s dismissal from Eton, because the school did not make public or keep a record of its reasons, and the individuals involved never explicitly identified any sexual act between men in their copious correspondence. Instead they point to an environment of privilege and privacy, where disputes were settled among gentlemen without resorting to the law.²⁸

The ability of those in elite schools to resolve these matters discreetly among themselves can be better understood by looking at one instance in the mid-nineteenth century when this practice broke down. The events of 1850 involved both the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, founded in the eighteenth century to train commissioned officers for the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers, and at the Carshalton Academy, started only in the mid-1840s as a preparatory academy for potential Woolwich students. The incident began when “three boys, who had recently been draughted in a lot of 10 from Carshalton to fill up vacancies at Woolwich, were accused by their new schoolfellows of grossly immoral practices.”²⁹ The parents of the boys were informed, private hearings at the school were held, and the three were expelled. The incident did not end there, though, because “in the course of the investigation it unexpectedly transpired that the practices in question were more or less prevalent amongst the pupils of Carshalton Academy, whence the culprits had recently come.”³⁰ These revelations sparked an extended investigation, “conducted by officers of the highest rank in the most cautious and secret manner,” that resulted in thirty pupils, mostly from Carshalton Academy, being sent home or withdrawing from the schools.

Roughly two-thirds of the parents of the accused boys complied with requests that they remove their boys rather than have them expelled. The remaining parents objected that they did not have the chance to confront their sons’ accusers, with one angry father, described as an officer of thirty years’ service, writing that “a secret committee has sat with closed doors and has examined 33 children in a way calculated to criminate [sic] themselves without any possibility of their knowing what charges are brought against them, or who were their accusers!”³¹ It was the objections of these parents, and their decision to make statements to the newspapers about the incident, that brought it to public notice; otherwise, it would almost certainly have been contained within the elite community of the schools.

Defenders of the schools’ approach argued that secrecy was maintained precisely for the protection of the accused boys. “Had a public investigation taken place . . . every one of their schoolfellows would have been cognizant of their disgrace . . . and the stigma thus affixed upon them would have clung to them in after life.”³² Because the matter was dealt with in secret, “their names are known to but a few, and would have been known to still fewer, had it not been for the injudicious contumacy of the parents of the 10 boys.” This correspondent to the Times also held out the hope that because these offenders were “mere children,” and because their names were not publicly revealed, “there is surely no reason why, having been thus promptly removed from the scene and from amongst the witnesses of their shame and their disgrace, they should not, in another career or amongst other associates, become in due time virtuous and estimable members of society.”³³

But others responded that the secretive nature of the proceedings was not necessarily for the boys’ protection and did not necessarily serve their interests. If the behavior among the boys was really so widespread, it was suggested, then the administrators had been negligent in their oversight; and if it was not, then the administration had overreacted, using the protection of secrecy to err on the side of extensive dismissals, and in the process inflicting a severe punishment on boys who were perhaps guilty of only the slightest infractions. A different letter to the Times speculated that “the authorities of Woolwich are . . . building up for themselves a reputation for vigilance and discipline out of the mutilated characters of these sacrificed children.”³⁴

Another line of accusations was directed not simply at the administrations of Woolwich and Carshalton but at the way boys were supervised in such institutions in general. One writer pointed out that in both schools, older boys shouldered the responsibility of supervising the younger ones. The Times indicated that it had heard from other credible sources that part of the problem lay within Woolwich Academy itself, where “tyranny of the most oppressive kind, and all the more resistless from being systematized into a part of the institution, is said to prevail.”³⁵ But Woolwich, and the system of peer supervision, also had its defenders. In the midst of the controversy, Sir Eardley Wilmot defended the practices at Woolwich, claiming “that the guiding principle of the whole system is reciprocal confidence between officers and pupils; that appeal is expressly made to the instincts of honour on the part of the cadets; that the fact of their being gentlemen is never lost sight of.”³⁶ As gentlemen, the boys in the school were expected to be able to govern themselves, and even scandals like this were not enough to undermine support for this central aspect of elite education.

In this instance and in many others, men within the privileged classes treated sex differently when it occurred exclusively among men of similar backgrounds. These men had long-standing ways of settling disputes among themselves without involving the police or the courts, and rarely did any of them feel so aggrieved as to appeal to a more public forum, as the parents of some of the Carshalton students did.

It is difficult to know exactly what occurred at Woolwich and Carshalton. No police reports exist. Many of the sources describing similar cases refer only to “brutal” or “beastly” acts, without actually defining these terms.³⁷ Some slightly more specific evidence of what happened comes from a statement printed in the Weekly Dispatch, which indicated a hope that “youths guilty of such offences, before they even know the opprobrium or the criminality to which belongs to them, may grow up to be manly citizens.”³⁸ But outside the protected space of the public schools, behaviors as benign as “spooning” beside another boy in bed or mutual masturbation could be grounds for criminal charges of indecent assault or attempted sodomy. Similar ambiguity surrounds the practices related to hero-worship of older boys, and the romantic or excessive language in their conversations or letters, all of which might occur between two pupils away from home for the first time, forming new kinds of intense attachments with others.

If few rigorous efforts were made to prevent or stamp out sexual contact between youths, this was in part due to the idea that some early sexual experimentation was acceptable. Nineteenth-century medical literature argued that sexual acts between males were worrisome only after the teen years. As late as the 1880s, Richard von Krafft-Ebing argued that homosexual acts before puberty were not significant; it was those occurring afterward that were dangerous to a man’s development.³⁹ Havelock Ellis, almost two decades later, also observed that many in his own day still held that undifferentiated sexual feelings were normal in boys in the first years of puberty.⁴⁰ Lesley Hall’s examination of the purity literature of the late nineteenth century also finds no fear in Britain that “adolescent homoerotic experimentation” would lead to permanent sexual inversion.⁴¹ Undifferentiated sexual urges were thought to be more common in the less mature as well as the less civilized. Masturbation was the more serious threat to the young, because as a solitary activity it was more difficult to observe and detect, and thus it was more likely to encourage the habit of vice and sexual excess.

As the reforms at Rugby spread to other institutions, the public schools cemented their high standing among both the middle and upper classes. They were places where men could find their own position among their peers, and they fostered a fierce loyalty in those who passed through them. The public schools were, therefore, to borrow a phrase from James Scott, off the stage of the performance of power in society. For their pupils, the public schools offered a break from the power relations enacted in the regular face-to-face communications between the “lower ranks” and their “social betters.” They were in preparation for the future politics of Britain, not fodder for the current version of it.⁴² The privacy of these spaces was protected by the same code of behavior that assured elite men that their behavior in the clubs of the West End would not be used against them.⁴³

The political power of sexual issues made public had been demonstrated in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the morality of George IV sparked the enormous popular protests associated with the 1820 Queen Caroline Affair. The sexual impropriety of the governing elite evident in this and earlier events, such as the Mary Anne Clarke Affair of 1809, were seized on by middle- and working-class radicals and others as examples of the abuses of “Old Corruption” and further evidence of the need for political reform.⁴⁴ Attitudes toward sexuality also played an implicit political role in parliamentary reform, when, for the first time in generations, the line was being redrawn between those who deserved to be citizens, with the right to participate in parliamentary politics, and those who would remain subjects. It was not at all clear where that line would fall in the years before 1832, and, as Dror Wahrman, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, and Anna Clark have argued, the rhetoric of morality was central to the justifications of upper-, middle-, and working-class men for their respective visions of the political future.⁴⁵

While the middle class questioned the morality of the upper classes in order to bolster their own access to the vote, they also denigrated the morality of the lower classes in order to justify the continued exclusion of them from the franchise. The improvidence of working-class masculinity was characterized as one of the causes of poverty. Working-class male pub culture was denigrated as demonstrating a lack of thrift and self-control, and working-class tolerance of sexual relations with a prospective spouse before marriage was not recognized as any less promiscuous than casual forms of extramarital sexuality.⁴⁶ The physicality and violence of working-class masculinity were interpreted as pointless brutality. These and many other issues were framed by middle-class men in a way that justified denying working-class men the right to greater political participation.

This criticism of working-class men’s masculinity was part of the ideological armor that allowed the middle class to push forward with an economic program which, by eighteenth-century standards, was itself of questionable morality.⁴⁷ By shifting the focus of morality away from the economic obligations between the higher ranks and lower orders and instead upholding personal and family conduct as the measure of the moral, the middle class was able to seize the rhetorical high ground even as its actions seemed to lead to widespread impoverishment through a laissez-faire implementation of wage labor and the factory system. The stakes were raised in this contest of moralities with sweeping changes to the system of poor relief in 1834. This abolition was justified not only in terms of economics, as part of an effort to free up underutilized labor, but also as a moral reform that would encourage self-reliance among the poor and break the degrading habit of dependence.⁴⁸ Yet this was not how the New Poor Law was seen by the working class, for whom the previous system of relief might have sustained a family through a temporary factory closing or a slump in the business cycle. In the name of fostering moral and responsible behavior, the newly reformed Parliament removed what many in the working class considered a central pillar of social justice in Britain, and one that a large percentage of working-class families had drawn on. It was a brutal clash of competing definitions of morality that had ramifications for decades to come.

Because it was the form of morality on which they themselves chose to be judged, accusations of sexual impropriety by middle-class men became a powerful weapon for the working class. Anna Clark has shown that within working-class popular culture, the threat of sexual violence for working-class girls, especially household servants or factory employees, was most often represented as coming from middle-class men. This belief persisted even though legal records demonstrate that the majority of sexual violence inflicted on poorer women was perpetrated by men of their own class.⁴⁹ Representations of middle-class sexual impropriety were powerful because they could reverse the power dynamic between the classes, allowing working-class men to present themselves as the defenders of women against rapacious and uncontrolled outsiders. Such representations later had resonance in arguments for the family wage in working-class politics. In arguing that they should be paid enough to keep their wives at home and protected from the dangers of the workplace, working-class men turned the arguments of the middle class, centered on the sacredness of the family, to their own ends.⁵⁰

As for men of other classes, full masculine status for working-class men came with the establishment of a household and the fathering of children, although the achievement of this ideal was constrained by economic circumstances.⁵¹ Working-class households depended on the wages of all family members of working age. To dampen the shocks of periodic economic dislocations, members of the working class spread their financial risks across wider networks of family and community, and through formal organizations such as friendly societies and trade unions. Working-class masculinity thus placed a greater emphasis on a man’s status and social standing, and thus in some respects it had a greater affinity with upper-class masculine values than with the more religiously inflected concept of character that defined middle-class masculinity.⁵² Although some within the working class were committed to rigorous versions of Christianity, such as Methodism, the economic imperatives of these men’s lives played a greater role in shaping their definition of masculinity, which continued to value physical strength, masculine dominance, and community obligations, even when economic conditions forced compromises of these ideals.

These conditions did not make working-class men more inclined to sexual acts with other men, or any less likely to denigrate such acts publicly, but they did shape judgments about the severity of such transgressions and the circumstances under which they were felt more or less onerous than other options in a given situation. Evidence from the period suggests that understandings of masculine dominance might allow for sex with another man, provided that other man was rendered subordinate by being younger or rendered effeminate by the performance of more submissive acts. The work of Matt Houlbrook has shown that in early twentieth-century London, age-structured systems of organizing sexual relations between men were still found within the working class. Men retained their masculine status after such encounters even if the working-class “lads” they partnered with were well into their twenties.⁵³ This assessment coincides with the remarks of nineteenth-century observers who found “less repugnance” to homosexuality among the lower orders of British society.⁵⁴ In the case of soldiers and working-class extortionists, masculine status among peers could be sustained even with an association to sex between men, provided it was for financial gain, and it was the partner of the working-class man who was effeminized by the act. Although there were clearly many working-class men who would not and did not condone such associations, and who would not have seen themselves reflected in the actions of soldiers or extortionists, working-class masculinity, like upper-class masculinity, might allow sexual acts between men to be justified, either to an individual himself or to a small community of trusted men, in a way that middle-class masculinity did not. If cultural texts from the ancient world allowed for at least a potential alternative understanding of sex between men for some upper-class men, as discussed earlier, the economic resources and imperatives of working-class men provided the context for a similar potential proximity for at least some of these men as well.

These differing ways of configuring masculine status among the different classes are important for understanding the changing nature of the regulation of sex between men in early nineteenth-century London. In the 1820s, new methods of policing and publicizing sex between men came into force, including the establishment of London’s first professional police force and a rise in the circulation of newspapers. Although wealth could be used to carve out spaces of comfort, privilege, and relative privacy, the urban environment of London was not a protected or safe space for anyone. In the city, men and women from all backgrounds and classes mixed, and none of those interactions could be entirely controlled. The geography of London was not offstage in British politics, but rather center stage.

The sexual encounters between men in London that were most often uncovered, disrupted, and discussed involved two men of different classes. Certain broad spatial patterns are also evident. Locations such as parks, urinals, and public houses, noted in eighteenth-century accounts as locations where sex between men occurred, continued to be prominent. Police-court records indicate that the West End neighborhoods served by the Marylebone and Marlborough Street police courts accounted for the greatest number of arrests (see chapter 6). But there is also a great deal of evidence that sex between men was not just confined to the entertainment districts of the West End or locations like the molly houses. Sex between men occurred in a wide variety of locations around the city, and men who strongly identified with their feelings of same-sex desire were only one part of the story.

True, many associated London with opportunities for sexual encounters between men. When trying to convince a police constable to commit sexual acts with him one evening on the street, Thomas Hosier reportedly described “the crime as one of common occurrence in both London and France.”⁵⁵ In 1843 the presiding judge at the Central Criminal Court sentenced two men for indecently assaulting each other “after alluding to the painful increase of such offences” in recent years.⁵⁶ Several months earlier a magistrate at the Marylebone police court also commented that “it was a melancholy thing that cases of so shocking a description should be of such frequent occurrence.”⁵⁷ At the end of a case centering on an indecent assault between men standing in front of a shop window, the presiding magistrate lamented that “he believed assaults of that kind were of common occurrence in the city of London, and that the police would say the same thing.”⁵⁸

The types of sexual encounters referred to in these cases were those that occurred in public space, those which one of the involved parties chose to make public via the legal system, and those observed by a third party. It was often difficult to find privacy. Sex between men could not be regularly engaged in even in the home without a substantial risk of detection. Working-class homes were crowded, and in middle-class homes individuals were constantly under the eyes of servants and family members. Although quiet sexual contact might occur between men sleeping in the same bed in a working-class home, and quick encounters might take place in opportune moments in a middle-class house, such behavior was difficult to sustain.⁵⁹ Moreover, although families might make grudging accommodations for a family member caught engaging in such acts, they would not permit sexual relationships between men to continue once discovered.

Even men who lived alone took a great risk when bringing another man home. One man who took that risk was John M’Dougal, a twenty-year-old clerk in the War Office, who picked up a younger man, Thomas Dolamore, in the Strand around nine o’clock on a Monday night and took him back to his nearby rooms at 6 Warwick Court, Charing Cross.⁶⁰ But M’Dougal’s sexual advance was not welcomed. The younger man left M’Dougal’s house in anger, quickly returned with a constable, and gave him in charge.

Frederick Randall’s problem, by contrast, was that the young man that he brought home would not leave. Randall had first met the twenty-year-old John Joyce at the Lyceum Theatre, and subsequently the two men met at the Half Moon public house and on the London Bridge Wharf. Randall took Joyce up to his rooms, ostensibly to show him the “fine view” he had from the window, but while there Randall gave Joyce alcohol and started a suggestive conversation that included showing him “indecent prints” and “French letters,” or condoms. The evening did not go as Randall had planned, though: Randall took the risk of leaving the young man alone in his rooms and went out to get a constable, allegedly telling the policeman whom he eventually found “not to take [Joyce] into custody if he could get him out of the house without.”⁶¹