Brian Reade - Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850-1900

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
LITERATURE AND SEXUALITY

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Volume 7

SEXUAL HERETICS

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SEXUAL HERETICS

Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 18501900

An Anthology Selected with an Introduction by Brian Reade

First published 1970 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

This edition first published in 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1970 Brian Reade

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-415-78487-0 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-315-21275-3 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-79054-3 (Volume 7) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-79089-5 (Volume 7) (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-21285-2 (Volume 7) (ebk)

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Sexual Heretics

Male Homosexuality
in English Literature
from 18501900

An Anthology Selected
with an Introduction
by Brian Reade

First published in 1970
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
Broadway House, 6874 Carter Lane
London E.C.4.

Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading

Brian Reade 1970

No part of this book may be
reproduced in any form without
permission from the publisher,
except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism

I.S.B.N. 0 7100 6797 6

Contents

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Perhaps the fashion for books on homosexuality is passing, and it will be only with previously unco-ordinated inferences that future writers on this subject will be anxious to concern themselves. The present book may be regarded as attempting to close a gap a gap I myself could have filled years ago, I think, if circumstances had permitted. As it happens, it is a gap greatly reduced by Mr. Croft-Cooke in his very readable Feasting with Panthers, except that the author dealt there with prominent Victorian figures and he made no attempt to cover homosexual literature generally during the period. Moreover, aiming to cut everybody and everything down to size, as he confessed, he abetted himself with the slang of our time which must have given younger generations an odd impression of Victorian vocabulary and manners. I would emphasize willingly my indebtedness to Mr. Croft-Cooke, if I felt any that is, apart from places in the text where he is mentioned. Unfortunately the present work was more or less finished when his book came out in 1967.

I am however distinctly indebted to a few people: first to Dr. W. H. Bond, Librarian of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, by whose permission I am able to quote from the librarys collection of privately printed poems by John Addington Symonds. I am indebted also to Mr. Donald Weeks, of Detroit and London, a leading authority on Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), who lent me several photographs from his collection and responded most patiently to my enquiries about such comparatively little-known writers as John Gambril Nicholson and Charles Kains-Jackson. Equally I would have fared worse without Mr. Timothy dArch Smith and Mr. W. G. Good at hand, willing to impart bibliographical and other information essential to the subject; and to Mr. dArch Smith moreover for lending me rare books from his library. To these friends I can add Mr. Anthony Symondson, who sent some material of his for reproduction and who engaged in helpful correspondence.

It is a pleasure to recall the names of others who took an interest in this compilation while it was under way; including Mr. John Adlard, Dr. Ian Fletcher, Mr. Peter Gunn, Mr. Lionel Lambourne, Mr. Ronald Lightbown, Mr. Henry Maas, Mr. Jonathan Mayne, Miss Sybil Pantazzi, and my wife Mrs. Margaret Reade.

An all-embracing study of nineteenth-century homosexuality was not what I projected, nor was there scope for it in the introduction. This introduction is a guide to the anthology; and while some of the material included here is of merit, some of it may be considered merely amusing. That is not the point, however: all of it seems to me to be of particular interest.

London Brian Reade

It was during 1964 while I was doing researches in the life of Aubrey Beardsley and his friends that I found something was taking shape in the distance which amounted to the beginnings of the anthology presented here. In the introduction to a book on Beardsley published in 1967 I suggested that this artist was not a homosexual in one of the current senses of the word, but rather an ironist who mocked the impulses in himself which responded to homosexual young men in the art world of his time.

It is unwise, perhaps, to use the word homosexual in this way as a noun, with the suggestion that anyone so-called has sexual feelings only for persons of the same sex. Many people who are homosexual are heterosexual too, though either at different times in their lives, or with one or another state in the ascendant. Of these again, some like Lord Alfred Douglas grow out of a youthful phase, or become like Oscar Wilde more homosexual as they grow older. Here we are not concerned with these personal transitions, only with the literary evidence of homosexual moods and with the idea of homosexuality as a romantic stimulus.

But the sexual element in a homosexual condition is less important than it is in a heterosexual condition, which offers wider and longer developments as in family life for example. Why then not avoid using the word sexual and keep to the word friendship for attachments between persons of the same sex? This indeed was done in the days when homosexual males were legally persecuted, and the phrase romantic friendship was used for relationships of the kind inspiring so many of the poems in the present anthology. But as soon as psychologists evolved the idea of sex underlying many other springs of emotion, homosexuality began to be seen as a normal but unresolved state, abnormal perhaps in persons who habitually imitated functional (that is to say heterosexual) acts.

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