The Pleasures and Dangers of Telling Tales

In the right hands—and with the right archives—legal proceedings can make for some of the most compelling stories out there. As any student of the queer nineteenth and twentieth centuries must admit, the Wilde trials attest to this fact. In a refreshing attempt to examine their context and preconditions, however, Morris Kaplan's Sodom on the Thames decenters the 1895 trials even while it acknowledges their stubborn centrality, asking "what cultural configurations enabled [Wilde's] case to become so spectacular" (2).

The bulk of Kaplan's book is dedicated to narrating the lives and events behind three other late-nineteenth-century sex scandals. Drawing on an impressive archive of trial transcripts, newspapers, letters, memoirs, and would-be ephemera such as penny pamphlets, popular limericks, and marginalia, Kaplan sets out to tell tales here, writing that "the heart of this book is its characters and their stories" (6). Interpretations and analyses are explicitly kept to a minimum throughout, as are direct engagements with other scholarship. The book's apparatus is in line with the method: the endnotes are dedicated almost solely to documenting the archival sources, and suggestions for further reading are offered in lieu of a bibliography.

This is not a book that sets out to offer challenges to or explicit applications of existing paradigms, and at times I found myself frustrated by its lack of sustained analysis and engagement with other scholarship, which it sometimes invokes too simply as "recent work in queer and feminist thought." Throughout, the line Kaplan draws between "narrative history" and "theory" is perhaps a bit too stark, and there are some moments when integrated critical analysis might help make sense of the narratives being told.

The book's narrative method seems most suited to part 1, on the arrest and trial of Ernest "Stella" Boulton and Frederick "Fanny" Park. Stella and Fanny were arrested and exposed as men in 1870, after being watched by police for some time as they paraded the West End "in drag" (a phrase that the trial transcripts mark as being "offered into evidence for the first time"). Ultimately acquitted in 1871, Boulton and Park were charged with conspiracy to commit sodomy, after months of a highly publicized trial. With his careful management of a massive and unusually detailed archive, Kaplan presents a thorough, engaging reconstruction of Stella and Fanny's movements through public spaces, a semiprivate underworld, and their multiple domestic spheres. The result is a narrative that feels quite supple and as complete as possible, without lapsing into univocality or a naive faith in authenticity. This section contains a particularly astute synthesis of news coverage of the case, taking into account various papers' class and political affiliations as well as the relatively new practice of letters to the editor. Here and throughout the book, Kaplan is always careful to tell his story with authority while opening it up for future analyses by pulling together multiply articulated discourses and anxieties around sex, gender, class, nation, and aestheticism (among other things).

Arguably, at least some of the credit for the narrative success of this first part must go to the sheer size and detail of the archive. As Kaplan notes, the two-thousand-page verbatim transcript of the Stella and Fanny trial—along with all the depositions, numerous letters entered into evidence, and vast coverage in the popular press—is a rare find in the history of nineteenth-century sex scandals. Part 3 of the book covers the Cleveland Street affair of the late 1880s, with its well-known—but still opaque—links to the aristocracy, members of Parliament, and possibly even Prince Albert Victor, Victoria's grandson and second in line to the throne. The archive here was greatly limited by the imposed silence around this series of scandals, evidenced by correspondence among officials about managing and minimizing press coverage and by the successful libel action the Earl of Euston brought against Ernest Parke, the editor of the North London...