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Reviewed by:
  • Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times
  • Brian Lewis
Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times. By Morris B. Kaplan. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. 328. $35.00 (cloth).

In 1889, in an unpublished letter to the radical journal Truth during the Cleveland Street affair, a scandal about prominent men having sex with working-class youths in a male brothel, the reliably nonconformist George Bernard Shaw mocked the press and public opinion for their moral cowardice in failing to stand up for individual rights. Although he peppered his remarks with orthodox references to the "nasty and ridiculous" alleged conduct of the accused, he recognized that same-sex desire had moved many men and women throughout history and that for them it was perfectly natural to act on such impulses. "I appeal now to the champions of individual rights," [End Page 295] he wrote, "to join me in a protest against a law by which two adult men can be sentenced . . . for a private act, freely consented to and desired by both which concerns themselves alone" (quoted on 191). Those champions failed to step forward.

In 1895, in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trials, published letters in the radical Reynolds' Newspaper made similar points. One writer, "Ethicus," thought that anyone with a reasonable knowledge of history would recognize that homosexual sex was "common to all men and all classes of men at all times and in all countries"; that it could not be unnatural, since animals engaged in it; and that "it evidently does not disgust those who practice it. On what is the principle founded that what is disgusting to some is illegal for all?" (quoted on 257). Another writer, "Crede Experto," speculated that there was a purpose—population control—to same-sex desire: "This passion is not a fashion or a passing craze, it is universal in all ages and all countries. . . . It would be strange if anything so usual were without a purpose. It would be inconsistent with all experience if such an inclination were without advantage." Moreover, "it is not wise to treat with contempt a human passion that has survived the rigour of the most ruthless laws, that has defied the ordnances of religion, and is so irresistible as to have conquered sometimes the very ministers of religion themselves" (quoted on 259-60).

Such voices in the wilderness, anticipating the language of gay rights debates in the second half of the twentieth century, are among the delights in Morris Kaplan's engaging study of sexual scandal in late-nineteenth-century England. The book covers well-trodden ground—the Boulton and Park case of 1870-71, the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889-91, the Wilde trials of 1895—and also has a segment on the perhaps less familiar territory of Greek love at Eton College. A trial lawyer before he became a professor of philosophy, Kaplan revels in the engrossing detail of the legal process, the attendant publicity, and the political fallout. He draws on but does not engage much with other historians, and he self-confessedly minimizes his own interpretations, quoting at length from trial records, newspaper accounts, correspondence, memoirs, and a pornographic novel in the hope that his cast of characters will somehow "speak for themselves." Anyone seeking a clear opinion on any of the big debates in recent queer historiography will be frustrated. Much of the recent writing on homosexuality in late-nineteenth-century Britain has sought to undermine a widely held belief that a recognizably modern homosexual identity was created through the power of new medical and legal categorization. It points to alternative and preexisting sources of self-identification and tends to downplay the significance of the big trials and scandals.1 Kaplan's reflections on much of this are confined [End Page 296] to a brief introduction and conclusion, and he wastes little time justifying a revisiting of some of the set pieces of British queer history. But he is by no means methodologically naive, nor is his work a throwback to an older school of gay scholarship and activism hot in pursuit of gay ancestors. "My own...

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