"A Very Proper Bostonian": Rediscovering Ogden Codman and His Late-Nineteenth-Century Queer World

Writing from his native Boston in March 1892, twenty-nine-year-old Ogden Codman confided to his closest friend, Arthur, of his latest attraction: "I am rather interested in Walter Abbott, Gordon Abbott's younger brother who has been in New York for a year and is quite unhappy in Boston where he has to live and is wild to get back to New York. He is much improved in looks, has rather nice skin and curly hair. He has grown thinner and is better dressed but looks cross and says foolish things about Boston which make him unpopular."¹ Arthur Little, age thirty-eight and himself constantly in search of young men, responded by return mail: "How does your smash on Walter Abbott get on? Also, the young Gray? You ought to push some of these things and get some wild adventures."² Less than a month later he could endure the silence no longer: "How is your smash on Walter Abbott getting on? You don't mention him so I suppose all sorts of things. Silence is golden. What is screwing for God's sake then?"³ In time Ogden did answer these urgent inquiries, and his cursory response indicates that, this time at least, there would be no amorous adventures with young Abbott: "I have not seen much of Walter Abbott but he is stupid and drinks a lot."⁴ Typical of his relations with young men, within the short span of three months Codman had met, avidly pursued, and then tired of one who had caught his fancy.

This exchange of letters between Codman and Little, with its intimacy and frank discussion of their respective sexual desires, is representative of their friendship. It also illuminates a world in which guilt for male same-sex attraction, including its physical consummation, was largely absent. Notwithstanding the public culture's judgment that same-sex sexuality was a subject to be denied or, even worse, bitterly denounced, these two friends always managed to view their attractions in only the most positive light.

Ogden Codman (1863–1951) was born at 34 Beacon Street into a family that had been prominent in Boston since late in the eighteenth century. The eldest of five children, he was raised in Boston and the family seat in Lincoln, Massachusetts, but after extended stays in France he felt as much at home in Europe as in his native Puritan city. He took great pride in his family genealogy, though by his generation the family had long ceased to be actively employed. His father managed inherited estates and investments in lieu of any more developed career, a pattern that virtually all of the children to a lesser or greater extent continued. Unlike his leisured siblings, however, Codman enjoyed a busy career as an architect and interior decorator during the 1890s, work that he continued until taking early retirement in 1918. Today he is best remembered for the influential book he wrote with his friend Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses (1899), which called for an end to the excesses of Victorian eclecticism and a return to the order of classical architecture. In 1904, alone among his siblings, Ogden Codman married, aligning himself at age forty-one with a widow of both established family and fortune. After five years of apparently contented married life, his wife, the former Leila Webb, died suddenly following emergency surgery. Rather than remarry, Codman spent the remainder of his long life with a succession of young male secretaries. In 1919, unable to endure any further erosions of upper-class privilege, he fled to Paris, never to return.

Housed today at the Boston headquarters of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, the voluminous Codman family archive originated when the estate was presented intact to the society at...