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G&S Typesetters PDF proof Chapter 8 Pioneers: England For all the differences between the pioneering prophets of the love between men in the United States and Germany—Whitman the visionary poet and Ulrichs the scholarly lawyer and pedant—they had important characteristics in common. Both belonged to the first generation of modern defenders and definers of homosexuality. Whitman was born in 1819, Ulrichs in 1825, and they came of age in the 1840s, a time of liberal ferment in both countries. The United States was a new and expanding nation that had yet to experience the tragedy of civil war; Germany was not yet a single nation but seemed destined soon to achieve unity through the will of the people rather than, as was to be the case, through blood and iron. Both Whitman’s ebullient faith in a democratic society based on comradeship and Ulrichs’s naive belief that prejudice and error could be righted by appeals to reason were born of the heady optimism of the 1840s, before the violent and sobering realities of later decades set in. The men who laid the groundwork for the modern homophile movement in England, John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter, emerged in very different circumstances. Born in the 1840s, they came of age in the 1860s, when Whitman and Ulrichs were at their most active and when Germany and the United States were undergoing profound internal crises. Moreover , while Germany and the United States were both in the early stages of building modern nation-states, England was not only one of the oldest nationstates but already the most urbanized and most industrialized country in the world. Thus Whitman and Ulrichs understandably saw themselves as pioneers , not only because they were breaking new ground but also because they hoped to influence and shape the emergence of new or renewed societies. Symonds and Carpenter, on the other hand, saw themselves as almost the op100 | 08-V2660 6/19/03 6:50 AM Page 100 G&S Typesetters PDF proof posite, as critics of an established society, as confined within rigid norms that needed to be broken down. Whitman and Ulrichs ultimately arrived at not dissimilar views of their own and their countries’ condition. But that was a product of disillusionment; Symonds and Carpenter began more or less where Whitman and Ulrichs ended up. The Englishmen’s acute consciousness of being sexual outsiders was largely responsible for this sense of frustration, of course, but not entirely. The 1860s was a pivotal decade in England, a time when the Victorian consensus established by their parents and grandparents came to seem too narrow and stifling to the generation of Symonds and Carpenter. However necessary the disciplines imposed on early Victorian society may have been during the transition from a predominantly rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one, that was no longer true by the mid-sixties. England had made that transition, and made it peacefully, avoiding the revolutions that had swept the Continent . England was a prosperous, relatively stable country with at least the rudiments of the institutions necessary to manage a complex modern society. It could afford to both broaden the base and loosen the restraints of that society . And it did. Urban working men were given the vote in 1867, and a more limited local franchise was gradually extended to women, who also increasingly demanded and won greater employment and educational opportunities and a more nearly equal status in law and marriage. From the issues of gender equality in and out of marriage it was but a short step to the discussion of issues of sexuality and of sexual fulfillment as something good in itself, quite apart from procreation. The doctrine of free love, scarcely mentioned since the late eighteenth century, was broached again, as were issues such as family planning and contraception. The Darwinian revolution and the questioning of revealed religion served to reinforce and validate what the sons and daughters of the mid-Victorians were moving toward in any case, the discussion of such matters apart from traditional morality, as practical questions of individual rights, scientific inquiry, and social policy. Much in this climate of intellectual ferment spoke directly to Symonds’s and Carpenter’s concerns arising out of the nature of their sexuality. Unwilling and ultimately unable to live according to the sexual mores of Victorian society, both were intent on breaking out, on finding a means, as Symonds put it, of “self effectuation.” They took very...

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