By Ray Goodspeed, chair Leyton and Wanstead CLP, personal capacity
120 years ago today, 30th November 1900, saw the death of a celebrated literary figure who was also one of the most ‘notorious’ – Oscar Wilde. His death in Paris, aged just 46, was almost certainly hastened by his two years in Reading prison (1895-7), in solitary confinement and with hard labour. His crime was “gross indecency” i.e. being homosexual, and his oppression was to become iconic both for pro- and anti-gay forces.
In 1895, Dublin-born Wilde was at the pinnacle of his career. His most recent play, The Importance of Being Earnest was on in the West End of London. He was rich and successful and hugely popular. But he was also hugely unpopular. For many years in his plays, novels, poems and essays and in his personal style he had delighted in puncturing the pompous moralising of late-Victorian society.
Source of shock and outrage
Even as a young man his foppish “aesthetic” fashion sense caused a scandal, and he went on to enjoy being the source of shock and outrage. His cynical and witty one-liners are still quoted today, but he created as many enemies as admirers. He was even politically radical and considered himself a libertarian socialist, though he was never an active campaigner. He wrote the well-known idealistic essay, “The Soul of Man under Socialism”, which is worth reading, and also signed a petition in 1886 calling for a pardon for the famous Haymarket anarchists in Chicago who faced the death penalty.
He thought himself untouchable, but the revenge of Victorian morality was just round the corner. Though married, with two children, Wilde was widely suspected of homosexuality. His works, such as the novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, hinted at homosexual relationships. His real-life relationship with the much younger Alfred, Lord Douglas, was a source of rumour and scandal. Unfortunately, Douglas’s father was a macho bigot, the Marquess of Queensbury (after whom the rules of boxing are named), who was incensed by his son’s relationship.
Libel case collapsed
He accused Wilde of “posing as a somdomite” (sic) and Wilde was deluded enough to sue him! The libel case collapsed when Queensbury threatened to bring a string of witnesses to court, whereupon Wilde was arrested, having ignored the sensible advice of many of his friends to flee to France. Two criminal trials followed. The first jury could not agree but the second one did.
A number of younger, working-class men were pressured to give evidence regarding having sex with Wilde and the money and gifts he lavished upon them. Wilde, in love with his own wit and intelligence, gave too-clever answers that damaged his defence and his letters and published works were used in evidence against him. He was found guilty of “gross indecency” and given the maximum possible sentence. Emerging a broken man, he lived abroad for the rest of his life, dying in Paris. Queensbury, his nemesis, died before him – of syphilis!
Criminal Law Amendment Act
The crime of gross indecency had only been on the statute book for ten years. It was the result of a last-minute amendment by a Liberal MP, Henry Labouchere, to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. This Act intended to raise the age of consent for heterosexual sex from 13 to 16, but Labouchere’s amendment added a clause making it illegal to commit or procure to commit an act of gross indecency with another male of any age. But gross indecency was never actually defined! This meant that any sexual contact at all between men now became illegal and remained so until 1967.
The same law was used to convict Alan Turing, the code breaker and inventor of computing, and thousands of other men. “Buggery” itself had been illegal for centuries but it was too difficult to prove penetration had taken place, and the penalty (life imprisonment) were so severe that prosecutions had become rare. Before 1861, the punishment was death and 1835 saw the last two men to be hanged for it, a labourer and a groom. The new amendment introduced a draconian, catch-all offence that gave the UK some of the strictest laws against male homosexuality in Europe. There were no laws in the UK dealing with lesbianism. Incidentally, the Ottoman Empire, in contrast, had legalized homosexuality in 1858.
Cleveland Street Affair
London society had already been rocked by the Cleveland Street Affair (1889) concerning male prostitution, which involved teenaged telegraph messengers. That had threatened to reach into the higher elite and the establishment had needed to work hard to shut it down and limit the court case to a few scapegoats before royalty was implicated. But for someone of Wilde’s fame to be involved in three trials, all feverishly reported in the press, was an enormous scandal that had serious repercussions for gay men. One reaction was a freezing effect on the expression of gay attraction owing to the terror of being caught.
On the other hand, the homosexual underworld now had a celebrated hero and tragic martyr, and the case was so well-publicised that many gay men in different parts of the country who had no contact with any gay sub-culture, or who thought they were somehow unique, now had the knowledge that a gay world existed, and they had Wilde’s name. In the gay novel Maurice, written in 1910, the distressed young gentleman hero tries to shamefully explain to his doctor that he is “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort!” Conventional, straight society could use Wilde’s case as a warning to show what fate awaited anyone who strayed. As a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray says “You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
Damaging stereotypes remained
Another negative effect of both the Wilde case, and the Cleveland Street Affair, was to fix in the popular imagination the idea that homosexuality was merely a vice of rich men who then corrupted innocent, working-class young men. This damaging stereotype even lasted in some parts of the labour movement into the 1980s and beyond.
An interesting comparison with Wilde’s life is that of his contemporary, Edward Carpenter (1844-1929). Though an upper-middle-class gentleman from Brighton, he moved to the north of England and taught in University “extension lectures”, but he was disappointed that these were mainly attended by middle-class people. He became part of a strong personal and political network of socialists and trade unionists all over Yorkshire, Lancashire and the north midlands.
He joined the Social Democratic Federation, which claimed to be a Marxist party, in 1883, and tried to form a branch in Sheffield, but they opted instead to set up an independent “Sheffield Socialist Society”. Carpenter himself left the SDF in 1884 and joined with William Morris and Eleanor Marx in the Socialist League. He became an extremely popular socialist orator and would travel round the northern towns and cities, addressing the crowds, as well appearing at big rallies and marches in London. He also wrote articles for socialist papers and was a well-known literary figure in the late-Victorian socialist movement.
Hypocritical morality of Victorian Britain
Carpenter was homosexual, and, crucially, proud to be so. He was one of the very first theoreticians to try to integrate the economic and political ideas of socialism issues around sexuality. He had no toleration for the hypocritical morality of Victorian Britain, the oppression of women and the suffocatingly strict rules of behaviour, including sexual behaviour, for women AND men. He regarded his personal liberation as being tied up with the struggles of working people for freedom, justice and democracy, and he saw working class culture as a way of resisting the stuffy bourgeois morality of his own class. He set out these ideas in the long poem, Towards Democracy, which he edited and revised between 1883 and 1905. He was a vegetarian and campaigned against pollution and the appalling conditions of the working class-districts of Sheffield.
He moved to a house in the small village of Millthorpe, in Derbyshire, on the outskirts of Sheffield, and set up a small market garden and a sandal-making craft shop. The house is still preserved as a museum today by the “Friends of Edward Carpenter”. He was in contact with an independent working-class ‘gay’ subculture and formed successive relationships, generally with local working men, some of whom moved in with him at Millthorpe. In 1891, Carpenter met George Merrill, a working-class man from the slums of Sheffield, who had worked in an ironworks, a newspaper office and a hotel and they became lovers.
Celebrated literary figures
Merrill moved in with Carpenter 1898 and they lived together until Merrill died in 1928. Although Merrill was “officially” a handyman/servant, the real, more equal, nature of the relationship was widely recognised by local activists and by a succession of celebrated political and literary figures who used to stay at Millthorpe. The openness of the relationship was astonishing, given that Merrill moved in only three years after the Wilde trials. Their separation from London “high society” undoubtedly helped, but Carpenter’s writing and campaigning around homosexuality must have drawn suspicion.
The pair were often visited by DH Lawrence and EM Forster, who records being profoundly moved when George touched his bum! He used their relationship as source material for his gay novel Maurice, a story of a love affair between a gentleman and a gamekeeper.Lawrence read the manuscript of this novel (not published until after Forster’s death in 1971!) and is believed to have used the plot for his heterosexual novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which was banned in 1963!
Bolsheviks legalized homosexuality
Carpenter was never a systematic Marxist as such and was influenced by anarchism and Eastern spirituality. He often took a sectarian, ultra-left, approach: he took no part in the Labour Party, for example. After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, he declared Russia to be state capitalist within months! He did live to see the Bolsheviks legalise homosexuality in the Criminal Code of 1922, but died before the Stalinist reaction re-criminalised it in 1933, sending gay men to the gulag.
Being neither a reformist nor a Stalinist, his ideas faded from memory in the labour movement of the middle of the 20th century and were only rediscovered in the 70s and 80s, with the rise of the lesbian and gay movement. Of course, some of Carpenter’s ideas are easy to mock now, but in other ways, he was a century ahead of his time, and I can’t help regarding him as a bit of a hero.
November 30, 2020
Clarification (August 8, 2021): Lawrence and Carpenter mentioned in the article in fact never met and the cottage in Derbyshire is no longer a museum.
