Fanny and Stella (34 page)

In the 1840s and 1850s there had been shocking revelations about the prevalence of sodomy and the rape of boys in the convict barracks of New South Wales and in the mines of Van Diemen’s Land. Questions had been asked in Parliament.

By the 1860s, sodomy was a vice that was once again beginning to exercise, to agitate, to vex society. Hardly a week passed without some veiled – and often not so veiled – references to unnatural or abominable crimes in local and national newspapers.

In January 1866 the journalist James Greenwood anonymously published three articles in the
Pall Mall Gazette
. ‘A Night in the Workhouse’ was Greenwood’s sensational account of the night he passed in the casual ward of the Lambeth workhouse, the locked male ward where the dispossessed and the dislocated could pass the night; all the vagrants, trampers, ex-convicts and assorted riff-raff who had fetched up hungry and homeless and hopeless on the streets of Lambeth.

It was a shocking revelation of human degradation; of poverty, dirt, disease and, most shockingly of all, of raw and unrestrained – almost feral – sodomy between men and between men and boys. As he witnessed naked ‘great hulking ruffians’ and ‘dirty scoundrels’ seeking bedmates for the night, as he lay in the dark listening to the ‘infamous’ sexual noises of the night, Greenwood ‘could not help thinking of the fate of Sodom’.

There was new knowledge of old sins; new scientific facts were being formulated. In
Hard Times
, Charles Dickens’s novel of industrial life, Thomas Gradgrind, the cruel factory owner, is a man obsessed with facts:

‘Now, what I want is Facts,’ said Mr Gradgrind. ‘Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them . . . Stick to Facts, sir!’

Facts, facts and more facts were the intellectual
lingua franca
of the nineteenth century. Victorians were obsessed with facts and the classification of facts. Taxonomy, or the science of ‘classification, of putting things in their proper order’, according to an anonymous lexicographer in 1839, first made its appearance in relation to botanical and mineral samples in the early part of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, taxonomy had become not so much a method of classification as a potent guiding principle. The Victorian world-view was dominated by a need – a need verging on a compulsion – to order, to classify, to list and to designate; to establish relationships, formulate hierarchies and assign values. Nothing escaped this minute taxonomic enquiry. Everything was grist to the great mill of knowledge which ground out the meal of the modern world.

And now this great taxonomic enterprise was turning its attention to sodomy and sodomites. Learned tomes on medical jurisprudence began for the first time to describe the symptoms of sodomy. Articles and books started to appear – in France and Germany at first, but soon imported to Britain – which attempted to define and classify the sodomite, by his ways, his wiles and his physical characteristics. Experts included Casper in Germany, translated into English in 1864, and Tardieu in France (whose 1857 treatise on sodomy would find its way into the eager hands of Dr Paul). There were new names for old sinners, like ‘Uranian’, first coined in 1864, and ‘homosexual’, invented in 1869. There were even the slow, steady rumblings of medical and legal debate about the rights and wrongs of sex between men.

In 1867, three years before the arrest of Fanny and Stella, the
Medical Times and Gazette
had published an article by an anonymous ‘alienist’, a new breed of doctor who sought to bridge the physiological and the psychological, the sexual and the social. Entitled ‘Aberrations of the Sexual Instinct’, the article was a comprehensive catalogue, a complete taxonomy of unnatural behaviour, singling out for especial concern and condemnation the linked vices of masturbation, androgyny and sodomy.

By the 1860s, the dangers of masturbation had become a national obsession verging on mass hysteria. Masturbation in girls and women – or ‘peripheral excitement’ as the distinguished obstetric surgeon Isaac Baker Brown termed it – was thought to be responsible for a raft of female ailments including painful menstruation, melancholia, hysteria, epilepsy, nymphomania, dementia and death.

Boys who masturbated or who were deemed at risk of masturbating were isolated and variously beaten, clamped, bound, bathed, exercised, physicked, hectored and lectured. Not only did masturbation lead to a bewilderingly wide variety of diseases from spermatorrhea to blindness, it also sapped vitality, weakening and destroying the healthy male body. But most seriously of all, masturbation inexorably led by paths secret and mysterious to sodomy.

Masturbation also sapped virility, making men biologically and psychologically less manly, more androgynous, more effeminate, dangerously closer to that weaker vessel, woman. ‘Androgynism’, the
Medical Times and Gazette
declared, ‘may be taken to mean the intrusion of either sex, voluntarily or not, into the province of the other; to wit, when a woman dissects a dead body, or a man measures a young woman for a pair of stays.’

There was growing concern and complaint about the increasing visibility of masculine women and effeminate men. ‘There is not the slightest doubt’, a carefully worded editorial in the
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine
announced, ‘that England is hastening towards the border which divides the sexes; already persons have over-stepped and stand alone, hated and despised.’ The
Pall Mall Gazette
launched a lengthy diatribe against the ‘unsexed’ masculine woman who seeks to ‘usurp’ the place of men:

She has probably learned to smoke, and she takes kindly to a little strong drink; she talks slang, perhaps she bets, perhaps dabbles in the share market. She pants for excitement of a fierce and manly kind – for excitement that will stimulate her, that will satisfy her – for excitement that will unsex her.

As early as 1857,
The
Times
was fulminating about a new breed of smirking and ‘respectable young men who serve in drapers’ shops’: ‘For our own part we would far rather see any son of ours wielding the saw or the trowel, or even standing side by side with navvies on parade, than mincing and bowing and rubbing his hands to “carriage people” during the best days of an effeminate life.’

‘Smirking, mincing and effeminate’: it was clear that the Thunderer’s ire was directed at what it saw as the emergence of a new class or type of young men, men who were neither one thing nor the other, neither fish, nor fowl, nor good red meat, not men and not women, in-between men, ‘mistakes’, androgynous, effeminate men, sodomites by instinct and inclination, young men in fact very much cast in the mould of Fanny and Stella.

It was not for nothing that in 1851 the Registrar-General described the shortage of men over twenty years of age as ‘unnatural’. Marriage was waning, healthy young men were in short supply and yet androgynous, epicene young men seemed to be on the increase. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

There was a widespread feeling of unease that sodomy was spreading. ‘The increase of these monsters in the shape of men commonly designated as Margeries, Pooffs,
&c, of late years, in the great metropolis, renders it necessary for the safety of the public, that they should be made known,’
The Yokel’s Preceptor
warned in the 1850s.

After the arrest of Fanny and Stella, simmering public anxiety and indignation at the spread of sodomy reached a crescendo. Fanny and Stella were, it seemed, the tiny, visible tip of a vast iceberg. For every sodomite ‘who is known, innumerable persons unknown offend in a similar way’, reported the
Daily Telegraph
. The
Saturday Review
heartily agreed. ‘It is certain that the numbers are far more numerous than it is pleasant to imagine.’

Not only was sodomy on the increase, but rather more seriously, sodomites were becoming more visible, and more flagrant. ‘A certain form of iniquity has, within the last year or two, been thrust more openly than of old on the attention of the public,’ claimed the
Daily Telegraph
. Sodomites were organised and confederated. They were a gang; they were part of ‘a doubtful fellowship’; they formed a ‘clique’, and, most worryingly of all, a class.

The newspapers worried where it all might end if left unchecked. ‘Vice,’ the
Daily Telegraph
warned, ‘emboldened by impunity, will at length stalk forth boldly from its secret haunts, and flaunt about in public places in a way that must compel attention.’
The
Times
went even further: ‘There is no saying how far things might go in a year or two,’ it prophesied. ‘“Drag” might become quite an institution, and open carriages might display their disguised occupants without suspicion.’

What was to be done, what could be done in the face of this tidal wave of sodomy?
Reynolds’s Newspaper
drew an explicit comparison with Sodom and Gomorrah. ‘This London of ours is as foul a sink of iniquity as were certain Jewish cities of old, which, for their flagrant wickedness, met with retributive destruction by fire from heaven.’ Clearly, the fate of London, of Britain, and of its empire-in-all-but-name hung by a sodomitic thread. The only solution was to root out and destroy sodomy before ‘fire, brimstone and smoke’ engulfed the nation.

That the contagion of sodomy had spread, was spreading, and had infected all levels of society was not in doubt. The question was how far had it already spread, and how much further might it spread. There was, the
Pall Mall Gazette
thought, a strong sense of ‘organisation and concert’ involved in this sodomitic ‘conspiracy’. Sodomites were essentially vampiric. In order to survive, they were driven and compelled to corrupt the innocent and, in so doing, create even more sodomites. ‘It is essential for its continuance that it should go on enlisting fresh members,’ the paper warned.

It was this idea of a deliberate and purposeful conspiracy to spread the contagion of sodomy, to infect – and by infecting, recruit – new sodomites which so frightened the authorities. The very words used in the indictment against Fanny and Stella – conspiring, confederating, combining, agreeing ‘with divers other persons whose names are unknown’ – revealed the fear of a contagion that was turning into an epidemic, a veritable plague.

As sodomites, especially as effeminate sodomites, disguised as women, and prostituting themselves, Fanny and Stella and everything they stood for touched some of society’s deepest and darkest fears of dirt, degeneration, syphilis, excrement, poverty, violence and effeminisation.

Sodomites had to be identified and stopped, though where to start? The arrest of Fanny and Stella was just the beginning. With the sanction of religion, law and custom, and with the support of a modern and powerful police, the lines of battle were drawn. It was nothing less than a crusade, a great and grand design to discover, defeat and destroy the dark Kingdom of Sodom, to banish it, once and for all, from this green and pleasant land.

26

The Ship of State

‘Herald, read the accusation!’ said the King. On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and then unrolled the parchment scroll, and read as follows:

‘The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,

‘All on a summer day:

‘The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,

‘And took them quite away!’

‘Consider your verdict,’ the King said to the jury.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, 1865  

‘
T 
o judge from the crowd assembled in Westminster Hall at an early hour,’ the
Daily Telegraph
reported, ‘there has been no falling-off of the public interest in this twice-told tale.’ It was almost a year to the day since the arrest of Fanny and Stella in drag outside the Strand Theatre, and a large crowd had gathered in Palace Yard this brilliant May morning to catch a glimpse of the defendants as they arrived. Many of them were hoping to squeeze into the public gallery to watch what they hoped would be the trial of the decade, if not the century.

The trial of the Young Men in Women’s Clothes was a trial that some had predicted would never take place, especially after the Attorney-General himself had suddenly and dramatically intervened in early July 1870 and withdrawn all charges of sodomy against Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park. Fanny and Stella (along with Louis Hurt and John Safford Fiske, against whom charges of sodomy had also been withdrawn) were released on bail quietly and without fanfare, and it was generally assumed that that was that and the entire dismal and disturbing affair would gently fade from public memory, like a photograph left out in the sun. The
Porcupine
was confident that ‘the public are not likely to be troubled much further in this matter’. The
Penny Illustrated
agreed: ‘It is thought nothing more will be heard of the Young Men in Women’s Clothes.’