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  • Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times
  • Charles Upchurch (bio)
Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times, by Morris B. Kaplan; pp. 314. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005, $35.00, £19.95.

Morris Kaplan opens Sodom on the Thames with a first-person account of his decision to embark on this study of late-nineteenth-century homosexuality, interspersed with a discussion of the sources that he has brought together in order to make it possible. Many of the individuals, events, and themes touched on in these first pages will be familiar to scholars of the period and topic, but it is in their arrangement and interpretation that Kaplan stakes his best and ultimately successful claims for the originality and importance of his work.

In the introduction Kaplan informs the reader that what follows will be a narrative history, and he expresses his hope that this "return to storytelling" will be welcomed by some readers "impatient with the obscurity of 'postmodern' theory" (7). The emphasis on narrative is evident in part one, which details the lives of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, two young middle-class cross-dressers arrested in 1870 and tried for conspiracy to commit sodomy. Kaplan's account brings together almost all of the major themes and events described in the surviving trial documentation, making it the most comprehensive overview of this well-known case in the secondary literature. In the narrative, the reader is introduced to the extravagant behaviors of these young men and their friends, the dresses they wore on and off the stage, and their flirtations with other men. The central ambiguity that drove the court case is also explored: whether, without direct evidence of sexual acts, their behavior proved "unnatural" intent.

In part two, Kaplan follows a similar narrative strategy, but with less well-known subjects. Primarily through the use of personal letters, Kaplan constructs a detailed look [End Page 769] into the lives of a group of public school men associated with William Johnson Cory, a master at Eton dismissed in 1872 under a cloud of suspicion. As with Boulton and Park, the question of whether sexual contact between men occurred cannot be definitively answered by the sources, and Kaplan refrains from reading into his evidence explicitly sexual relationships, as at least one earlier author has done. Instead Kaplan follows several of these men from the time they were at Eton through their careers, marriages, and involvement with younger men. While most interested in exploring the complex desires that link them long after their school days, Kaplan is also willing to introduce evidence that complicates any simple reading of their actions, such as the passion with which Cory also embraced the education of women later in life (152–53).

Yet for all the engaging and valuable detail provided, this first half of the work has its limitations. Aside from a few pages at the start of part two, we learn little here about the public schools themselves, or about just how far from the norms of accepted masculinity were the behaviors of the men Kaplan describes. Greater attention to these and other areas of context would have helped to alleviate the occasional narrowness of the first half of the book, where the focus is dominated by primary sources and unwavering from details of either one trial or one circle of friends.

No such criticism can be made of the remaining chapters, though. Part three, on the "West End Scandals," is not limited solely to the 1889–90 Cleveland Street affair, in which telegraph messenger boys were recruited for a male brothel patronized by well-connected upper-class men. Here Kaplan also includes scandals centering on heterosexual desire, including W. T. Stead's "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" (1885) and several politically charged divorce cases from the following years. Citing the Cleveland Street affair within this larger frame allows Kaplan to bring into his analysis the feminists, working-class leaders, and radical journalists who campaigned against elite male privilege, "linking hostility toward the aristocracy to suspicion of deviant desires and practices" (179). Through Kaplan's analysis we learn how public reaction...

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