Jobs for Women: the Angel in the Workforce

For 465 years, from 1377 to 1835 [the Ship and Turtle Tavern] was run by a succession of widows. During the Victorian era, the Ship and Turtle Tavern even supplied several of the West-end clubhouses. Source.

And yet we speak of working women as the exception in the Victorian era. Was that the case?

During the Industrial Revolution in the UK, young people (including women) were moving to cities at an unprecedented rate. Usually, a young person would arrive and stay with, or in the neighbourhood of, a person who knew their family, which resulted in regional concentrations of religious and cultural groups. It also created large households of people who were loosely connected.

In these households, everyone did their part (including women and children). Family economics of this type had long been the norm in rural populations, but in cities, women’s work was frequently downplayed, or entirely overlooked, as the emphasis increasingly focused on the male as breadwinner.

Victorian culture’s emphasis on separate spheres overplays the “Angel in the Household” motif, which simply doesn't describe the reality for many Victorian women and families. The obvious example being female heads-of-house, such as widows.

Moreover, the industrial revolution increased the demand for female and child labour, who could be paid less than their adult male counterparts. Still, forty percent of female occupations listed on the census of 1851 were in domestic service, with textiles and clothing services in a near second place. Women did much of the delicate work in factories that produced household goods and participated in trades that suited ideals of femininity, such as kitchen work, sewing, laundry, and retail.

Dore's Woman Pedlar.

While 'upper' working class women rented shops, the 'lower' hawked on the streets and beaches. They sold flowers, toffee apples, ice cream, cold drinks, shrimps, oysters and whelks, and offered donkey and goat rides and even fortune-telling, sometimes by budgerigar. Source.

Even in the middle- and upper-classes, the ideal of the Angel in the Household doesn’t adequately describe all that was taking place. Not only were women, like Rachel Beer, dominating the world of journalism, but many widowed and single-women had no choice, but to earn money to support their standard of living. Some, like Marie Corelli and Lady Jane Wilde (Speranza), did so by writing, but many widows carried on the family business after the death of their spouse. Many middle- and upper-class women could be found working as governesses, running boarding houses, or managing properties for income. Many of these women also played important roles in family businesses as silent partners, bookkeepers, administrative workers, and more.

Three fully-clothed women hiking their skirts at the
shoreline of the beach in Averne, Wallace G. Levison, 1897

By the 1890s, stories of the New Woman, who was educated and independent, began to emerge. Many of these women resented the stereotypes that depicted all women as seeking a husband to support them.

For more information, two excellent sources are the BBC and the Economic History Association.

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Humans of London (in the 1890s)

Who isn't occasionally inspired by Humans of New York? Since I've taken a little break from writing recently and been playing with Photoshop, I thought I would share what I've come up with.

These are writers in London in the 1890s (if they had Facebook and someone got inspired by Humans of New York).

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Dens of Debauchery

Without kids to take trick-or-treating, we've been talking about going out for Halloween, but no one wants to spend too much money, which got me thinking of what writers in London in the 1890s feared most: poverty and debauchery.

"There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

East End Den etching (1870)

Addictions were killing writers, like Wilkie Collins, at the end of the Victorian era. Decadence was paired with degeneration in the imagination, and the adventurous upper classes secretly enjoyed 'slumming.'

"It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade. His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though they were determined to discover his secret." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

William Ewart Gladstone was the only PM to physically walk the streets, trying to rescue fallen women, and make London a safer place (however duplicitous Gladstone's interest in prostitutes may have been). Like most Victorian Londoners, he was probably both fascinated and terrified by the path that poverty and vice could lead one down.

"Have you seen that awful den of hellish infamy—with the very moonlight alive with grisly shapes, and every speck of dust that whirls in the wind a devouring monster in embryo?" - Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897).

Stories, like Dracula, make it clear that no one was really safe from the horrors of vice.

"...it is only recently that I have come to the den where I live now. But that is the humour of Absinthe! — It leads one down in the social scale so gently, step by step, — so insidiously, — so carefully — that one can- not see the end. And even for me, the end is not yet." - Marie Corelli, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (1890).

Poverty in Victorian London was the 1890s writer's greatest fear. The specter of poverty lived in a den, some dark, smoky place, filled with opium and thieves. Dens of thieves turned boys, like Oliver Twist, into "fogle-hunters." Loose women would be killed by the Ripper.

While socially-conscious middle-class Londoners worked tirelessly to improve the lives of the poor, the media often portrayed the oppressed classes as monsters.

Workers in a textile factory.

Phantom stalking Whitechapel, as an embodiment of neglect.

Consequently, it may be argued that the thing Victorian Londoners feared the most was other Victorian Londoners.

Throughout October 2014, I will be sharing the halloween-themed stories of 1890s London. Check back often!

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Where did your favourite 1890s writer go to school?

What did it take to be a successful writer in 1890s London? Did Education have anything to do with it? While managing the Lyceum, Bram Stoker used to receive manuscripts from aspiring playwrights of all walks of life. Though Stoker seemed skeptical about some of the aspiring writers he came across, a study into the educational backgrounds of some of 1890s London's most successful writers demonstrates that they did indeed come from all walks of life.

Of course, access to education was influenced by gender and social class. Women's education was topical in the 1890s, and formed the basis of some of these writers' works.

J.M. Barrie was educated in his native Scotland before moving to London, and becoming a writer. Barrie started school at the Glasgow Academy at age 8. At 10, he continued at the Forfar Academy, before moving on to the Dumfries Academy at age 14. He had a lifelong love of reading, and devoured Penny Dreadfuls as a kid. Barrie knew he wanted to be a writer, even though his family wanted him to go into the church. Determined to study literature, he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he eventually earned his M.A. in Literature in 1882.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, like most Victorian women, was privately educated. It helped that she married a publisher.

Hall Caine grew up in the Isle of Man, but attended the Hope Street British Schools until age 14.  After school, he articled with John Murray, as an architect and surveyor. During this time, he still loved reading, and spent a lot of time at Liverpool's Free Library, leading him to insist that he was mainly self-taught.

Marie Corelli was the love child of the Scottish poet and songwriter Dr. Charles Mackay, and his servant Elizabeth Mills. Consequently, she was educated by a series of governesses, who, according to biographer Annette Fredrico, "fled from her intellectual exhibitionism and her intimidating sense of her own brilliance." Without a governess to look after her, Corelli was sent to a convent, most likely in Paris, where, according to Fredrico, "she concocted private theatricals about love and murder." Corelli left the convent at age 15. She published her first novel 16 years later, after a career as a musician.

Arthur Conan Doyle came from a broken home. His family actually had to split up because of his father's alcoholism, and lived in squalid tenement flats. With the financial support of his uncles, Doyle went to a Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school at age 9, then Stonyhurst College, until he was 16. Next, he spent a year at Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria (also a Jesuit school). He left that place agnostic, and went to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where writing became a hobby for him. He finished school at 28 with an advanced medical degree, and tried to be a doctor, until he got really good at his hobby, and the world became obsessed with Sherlock Holmes.

Richard Bernard Heldmann a.k.a. Richard Marsh used his pseudonym to practically assume a new identity, which included a claim to having graduated from Eton and Oxford. These claims have recently been proven false. Marsh adopted the new name, and life, to recover from the scandal of serving eighteen months’ hard labour, during April 1884, for forging cheques in Britain and France in 1883. He started using the name "Marsh" upon release from jail. Stories by ‘Richard Marsh’ begin to appear in literary journals in 1888, followed by two novels in 1893. Marsh wrote prolifically during the 1890s, and the early years of the 20th century. However, we're still not sure where he really went to school.

Ellen Buckingham Mathews a.k.a. Helen Mathers attended a boarding school in Chantry, near Frome in Somerset, which made it into her first novel,"Comin' thro' the Rye." In that book, she explores her experiences at school. "Mr Russell" in the novel was Rev Fussell in real life, who was the Lord of the manor and founder of the school. In the novel she calls the village Charteris.

W. Somerset Maugham studied medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth, London. He was still studying there in the 1890s (I mostly include him in this site because he is one of my husband's favourites). During this time, Maugham felt he got the education he needed for writing from the streets, by hanging out with the "low" sorts of people that he didn't otherwise get a chance to be around. He saw them on the streets, and in the hospital: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief ..." As a medical student, he wrote at night, and published Liza of Lambeth in 1897, which was a big success.

Sometimes, more is made of Bram Stoker's education before he went to school than during. An unknown illness kept him in bed, listening to his mom's horror stories, until he inexplicably recovered and went school at age 7. Of being a sickly kid, Stoker wrote, "I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years." His private school was run by Rev. William Woods. Stoker's early illness left him with no further major health issues; he even excelled as an athlete at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated with honours as a B.A. in Mathematics. Stoker actively participated in the College Historical Society, 'the Hist', and became president of the University Philosophical Society, writing his first paper on "Sensationalism in Fiction and Society".

One might say education was a habit in the home of Mary Augusta Ward a.k.a. Mrs. Humphry Ward.  She was born into a prominent intellectual family of writers and educationalists in Tasmania, Australia. Ward was the daughter of a literature professor, the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, and she was Aldous Huxley's aunt. She attended boarding schools, including Shifnal in Shropshire from ages 11-15. Her schooldays inspired one of her novels, Marcella (1894). When she wasn't at school, she was at home with her family at Oxford University. She eventually married a writer and Oxford educator, and continued to live at Oxford, at 17 Bradmore Road, where she is commemorated by a blue plaque.

Oscar Wilde was educated at home until age 9, focussing on languages with a French bonne and a German governess. Then he was off to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. At university, Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He developed a prominent role for himself in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. By the time he was finished school, Wilde was basically the poster boy for aestheticism.

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LGBT Writers in London in the 1890s

This short descriptive list should serve as a catalogue of LGBT writers, who were active in fin-de-siècle London - that is the London of the 1890s. The term "fin de siècle" here refers to the cultural trends of the 1880s and 1890s, including cynicism, and a rebellion against materialism, bourgeois society, liberal politics, and decadence.

This list does not include writers who were too young to be active - even if they were deeply influenced by the era, like Radcliffe Hall. Also, history has made assumptions about the sexuality of some of these writers because homosexuality - especially male homosexuality - was very taboo, especially post-1895. If there's anyone you think I should add to this list, leave a comment, or send me an email.

E.F. Benson

Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was known professionally as E.F. Benson, but his friends called him Fred. He was 23 at the beginning of the decade, and wrote his first book, Dodo: A Detail of the Day (1893), while still a student at King's College. Dodo featured a portrait of the famous suffragette, Ethel Smyth.

Benson was a prolific writer and quickly followed Dodo up with a book per year for the rest of that decade, including: The Rubicon (1894), The Judgement Books (1895), Limitations (1896), The Babe, B.A. (1897), The Money Market (1898), The Vintage (1898), The Capsina (1899), and Mammon and Co. (1899).

Biographers assume that Benson was homosexual because he never married and his work is, at times, homoerotic. In addition to writing, Benson was a star athlete, who represented England at figure skating.

Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) has made important contributions to the literary canon, most notably (in my opinion), his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, which remain in use today. He was in his 50s and 60s, during the 1890s. In 1892, his first significant lover, Charles Pauli, died.

After profiting from the sale of a New Zealand farm in the 1860s, Butler began paying Pauli a regular pension, which he continued to do until Butler had spent all of his savings - even though their romance had ended. Shockingly, for Butler, when Pauli died, he learned that Pauli had similar arrangements with other men, and had died wealthy without leaving anything to Butler in his will.

Butler kept another lover on a salary as his literary assistant and travelling companion, but their relationship was not exclusive.

Butler's sentimental poem, "In Memoriam H.R.F," was written in 1895 for Hans Rudolf Faesch, a Swiss exchange student, who had stayed with him in London for two years. Butler had his aforementioned literary assistant, Henry Festing Jones, submit the poem for publication at several important English magazines, but withdrew the poem from publication when the Oscar Wilde trial began in the spring of that year, out of fear of similar persecution.

Butler believed the author of the Odyssey was a woman, and offered his evidence for this theory in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897). His translation of the Iliad first appeared in 1898, and he published Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered in 1899, in which he proposes that, if Shakespeare's sonnets are rearranged properly, they tell the story of a homosexual affair.

Edward Carpenter (right)
& George Merrill (left).

Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was actually an early LGBT activist, as might be evidenced simply by reading a list of his 1890s writings.

From Adam's Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (1892)
A Visit to Ghani: From Adam's Peak to Elephanta (1892)
Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894)
Sex Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894)
Marriage in Free Society (1894)
Love's Coming of Age (1896)
Angels' Wings: A Series of Essays on Art and its Relation to Life (1898)

Carpenter was close friends with Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore. He was in his 40s and 50s during the 1890s, and travelled to Ceylon and India in 1890 to spend time with a Hindu teacher, Gnani, described in Adam's Peak to Elephanta (1892). Carpenter felt transformed by the experience, and converted to the belief that Socialism could produce a profoundly good shift in human consciousness, in which mankind would rediscover a primordial state of joy.

The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon. - Edward Carpenter Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889) 

Through his brand of socialism, Carpenter was inspired to campaign against air pollution, while promoting vegetarianism and opposing vivisection.

Carpenter met his life partner when he returned to London from India in 1891. Carpenter's partner, George Merrill was a working class man from Sheffield. In 1898, they moved in together defying contemporary sexual mores, as well as the British class system. Their relationship reflected Carpenter's convictions about same-sex love and his belief that gay culture would radically change their society.

Carpenter's writing is anti-capitalist. He supported Fred Charles of the Walsall Anarchists in 1892, before becoming a founder member of the Independent Labour Party in 1893.

Marie Corelli

Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was famous, like Oprah; I've mentioned her before. She was the "Idol of Suburbia," and, like many writers from the 1890s, her biographers only guess at her sexuality based on the circumstances of her life, such as her companion, Bertha Vyver.

"Vyver and Corekki may be understood as devoted companions, sexual lovers, or romantic friends, sisters, mother and daughter, or even guardian angel and inspired genius. There are so many kinds of relationships, after all," writes biographer, Annette Fredrico, "Certainly Corelli's relationship with Vyver strengthened her faith in women's self-sufficiency and limitless capabilities for achievement."

Corelli favoured spiritual themes in her writing, such as astral projection, and her work is seen as groundbreaking for contemporary New Age religion. She had four novels under her belt by the 1890s, and kept on going with: Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (1890), The Soul of Lilith (1892), Barabbas, A Dream of the World's Tragedy (1893), The Sorrows of Satan (1895), The Mighty Atom (1896), The Murder of Delicia (1896), Ziska (1897), and two short story collections.

Nine film adaptations were made from her books between 1915 and 1926.

The Young Diana (1922)
A Marie Corelli inspired film.

The Sorrows of Satan (1926) Another Marie Corelli inspired film.

Lord Alfred Douglas

Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945) a.k.a. "Bosie" or the bloke who ruined Oscar Wilde's life; I don't like him one little bit, but he was an active gay writer in the 1890s, so I feel I ought to mention him.

Douglas and Wilde met in 1891. Robert Hichens' novel, The Green Carnation (1894), was said to be based on Wilde and Douglas's relationship; it was one of the texts used against Wilde in court.

Douglas was editor of the Oxford magazine, The Spirit Lamp, which he used to covertly gain acceptance for homosexuality. Wilde wrote Salomé originally in French, and commissioned Douglas to translate it in 1893. Douglas's French was bad, so his translation was met with scrutiny. Douglas didn't take criticism well, and claimed the errors were in the original play, which lead to one of many temporary breakdowns in their ever turbulent romance.

One story goes, Douglas got sick with the flu and needed Wilde to nurse him. When he got better, Wilde had got the same flu. Instead of taking care of Wilde as Wilde took care of him, Dougas checked into a hotel and sent Wilde the bill.

Douglas also had a careless habit of leaving Wilde's incriminating letters in old clothes that he gave to male prostitutes, leading to blackmail. Of course, Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, soon discovered the relationship, leading to Wilde's infamous trials and eventual imprisonment.

Signed copy of Douglas's autobiography.

Still, Douglas managed to be the chief mourner at Wilde's funeral at the end of the decade. Soon after, he would meet and marry a rich poet, decide that homosexuality was evil, and persecute more gay men in court. I do not like him, not one little bit.

E.M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) is best known for his novel, A Passage to India (1924). I'm still not sure I should include him in this list because he was so young and still at school, but he was attending King's College. While at school, he joined a society called the Apostles (formally the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Its former members went on to establish the Bloomsbury Group, an influential group of associated writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, including Forster and Virginia Woolf (who is only three years younger than Forster, but I have to cut off who I'm including in this list somewhere).

Forster was open about his sexuality to his friends, and closed to the public. The love of his life was a married police officer.

A.E. Housman at age 35.

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) was already one of the foremost classicists in the 1890s, and just in his 30s. He has also been ranked one of the greatest scholars who ever lived. He was a classicist and poet, best known for his cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad (1896).

In the 1890s, Housman was recovering from unrequited love: his college roommate Moses jackson, who married without telling him in 1889, and died in 1892. By that time, Housman's professional reputation had grown such that he was offered professorship of Latin at University College, London, which he accepted.

He liked going to France to read books that were banned in Britain.

Mostly while living in Highgate, London, Housman worked on A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems. After being rejected by publishers, he self-published in 1896. After a slow start, it became a lasting success, and has been in print continuously since May 1896.

W. Somerset Maugham as a medical student.

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was young in the 1890s (teens and twenties), playing doctor, until his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out, and he decided to be a writer instead.

As a medical student, Maugham was very self-sufficient and productive, he kept his own place, loved decorating it, though it was cluttered with notebooks full of ideas, and wrote nightly while going to school. What he loved most about being in London was that he got to meet people of a different class that he wouldn't have got to meet otherwise. This was carried forward into his first novel, which is about the consequences of working-class adultery.

When Liza of Lambeth sold out in just a few weeks, he dropped medicine, and devoted his working life to writing.

Walter Pater (1890s)

Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) was already a literary celebrity in the 1890s, teaching at Oxford and living with his sisters in Kensington between terms. His 1893 piece on Mona Lisa is considered the most famous piece of writing about any picture in the world: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave..."

Pater was one of the founding thinkers of the Aesthetic Movement. Oscar paid tribute to him in The Critic as Artist (1891). Though, Pater wrote a negative review of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891):

A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man's entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde's heroes are bent on doing so speedily, as completely as they can, is ... to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development.

To be fair, the character, Lord Henry Wonton, willfully and incessantly misquoted Pater throughout the book.

In 1893, he moved his sisters to Oxford, where he was in high demand as a lecturer. He died in that home of heart failure due to rheumatic fever at the age of 54.

Henry James (left), Edith Wharton (middle),
Howard Sturrgis (right).

Howard Overing Sturgis (1855-1920) was the kind of guy who waited until his mom died before moving in with his boyfriend, and it's safe to say that the 1890s were his glory days.

Sturgis was raised in an upper middle class family, attended Eton and Cambridge, and his brother, Julian, also became a novelist. When his mother died in 1888, he moved into a lovely country house with William Haynes-Smith, his lover. I get the sense that Sturgis finally felt free of his family's expectations of him, and he wrote his first novel, Time: A Story of School Life (1891), dedicated to "love that surpasses the love of women." Of course, it's set at a boys boarding school.

Sturgis was friends with Henry James and Edith Wharton. His first two novels sold successfully, but his third petered off. Although Wharton praised it, James called it "unsatisfactory," leading Sturgis's enthusiasm for writing to wane at the beginning of the next century.

Algernon Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was a poet, playwright, novelist, and critic; he even contributed to the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909. According to Oscar Wilde, Swinburne was "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer."

By the 1890s, Swinburne was a mature writer, who spent very little time in London, unlike Wilde. Swinburne had already faced an early death by alcoholism, and overcame it with the help of his mother, sister, and close friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton.

It's said that his poetry suffered after he settled down, but that has also been attributed to his age.

Renée Vivien & Natalie
Clifford Barney

Renée Vivien was born Pauline Mary Tarn (1877-1909), and although she was British, she wrote in French, adopting the mannerisms of Symbolism, as one of the last poets to claim allegiance to the school.

Pauline's father died when she was 9, leaving her everything. Consequently, he mother tried to have her declared insane, so that she could claim the money for herself, but the courts saw through her mother's scheme, and place Vivien in protective care until she reached the age of 21.

In 1898, she inherited her father's fortune, and emigrated to Paris, where it was much easier for women to be involved in the Bohemian arts movement.

It would seem that any time Vivien spent in London before inheriting her independence, was about biding her time until she could become who she truly was. In Paris, Vivien lived lavishly, as an open lesbian, and had a public affair with American heiress and writer Natalie Clifford Barney. She travelled extensively, wintering in Egypt, and exploring China and the Middle East, as well as Europe and America. Contemporaries called her beautiful and elegant, with blonde hair, brown eyes flecked with gold, and a soft-spoken androgynous presence. She wore expensive clothes and particularly loved Lalique jewelry.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) appears at the end of this list, not because I am saving the best for last, but because I've tried to write this list alphabetically. Wilde is certainly the most famous homosexual in London in the 1890s, a decade which would encompass the best and worst years of his life.

By the time the decade started, Wilde was living in "House Beautiful" on Tite Street with his wife and two young sons. The marriage had problems, most specifically that Wilde wasn't sexually attracted to his wife, after she bore his children, so he started seeing men.

Wilde published his first and only novel in 1890, then began his theatrical career, which produced some of the most witty and quotable plays of all time.

As I mentioned before, Wilde had an affair with the reckless and spoiled Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father found out about the affair, leading to Wilde's imprisonment. The affect of this trial on the gay community and the world cannot be understated. Not only did it drive some homosexuals into hiding,  like Samuel Butler, who withdrew a homoerotic poem that he had submitted for publication, but Wilde's association with homosexuality would code homosexual culture for many years to come.

Wilde had a very identifiable personality, which ever after became associated with homosexual behaviour. Wilde was flamboyant, witty, obsessed with the most minute detail of decorating "House Beautiful," obsessed with his own clothes, as well as the clothes of women. It might be said that the more a homosexual man assimilates his behaviour to Wilde's the more likely it is that he will be identified as "flaming," even today.

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Perverted Biographies of Marie Corelli

Like any other kind of writer, historians want to make their writing interesting. So, what is so-and-so had sex with so-and-so? That would be interesting!

Clearly, historians can be perverts too. This is one of my favourite examples of sexualized history in the blogosphere.

Because mine is an evil and a petty mind, suitable more to wallowing in the sordid sexual goings-on of literary giants than in reading their work, I take every opportunity I can to inform people who may not have known that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde almost certainly had sex in 1882.

We don’t have evidence that Wilde and Whitman had sex. It would be weird if we did. They had the opportunity to have sex and Wilde liked to imply that Whitman kissed him, but a kiss is just a kiss and Wilde preferred younger, less hairy men.

I bring this up to talk about Marie Corelli and her companion, Miss Bertha Vyer. Some biographers and historians like to think they were lesbians. Why?

There are lots of reasons. An early biographer (1903) wrote:

Miss Corelli’s sole companion after her convent school-life, with the exception of Dr. Charles Mackay [her father], was her devoted friend, Miss Bertha Vyver, daughter of the Countess Vyver, a not unimportant personage at the court of Napoleon III. The friendship between Miss Vyver and Miss Corelli has always been of the closest description.

The “closest description,” eh? Wink-wink, nudge, nudge!

Since Dr. Charles Mackay welcomed Miss Vyver as his “second daughter,” they have never been separated. In all her daily life, not the least the nursing of Dr. Mackay through his long illness, Miss Vyver has been by her side helping her in home difficulties and trials as help can obly be given by one with whom there is perfect sympathy. Miss Vyver has seen every detail of all the work the novelist has done, and to-day the friendship between the two is closer and dearer than ever for the years that have passed, and the sorrows and joys that have been borne in company.

Ok. The author doesn’t come out and say they had sex, but this kind of narrative led to the belief that Corelli was a lesbian, though she never self-identified as one and fell in love with a man three years later. That romance didn’t last. He was married and didn’t return her feelings, but, with the support of her good friend, Corelli gradually moved on.

Is it possible that Corelli was gay? Who cares? Is it possible that she and Vyver had sex? Certainly, but what difference does it make.

Two people can be good friends and never have sex. Look at Watson and Sherlock Homes! Wink-wink, nudge, nudge!

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Dancing Through Literature in the 1890s

I’ve spent the past week struggling to write a scene in which my characters are dancing at a ball in 1890. Invariably, it comes off sounding like the script of a corny romantic comedy from the 1950s, which conveys none of the feelings I want to get across.

Next, it occurred to me that writers don’t often put dance scenes into literature. Dance is, in many respects, a visual art that best suited to film. That’s why it sounded like I was writing a script, surely! But movies didn’t have dance scenes or plots in the 1890s, so I dug deeper to find out more about how my writers (the characters in my novel) felt about dancing in the 1890s.

What I found surprised me.

First, the verb ‘to dance’ is most commonly used in English fin-de-sciélé literature in descriptive passages to describe things, not people: the leaves dance on the trees, the flames dance on a log, and so on.

Second, when men write about people dancing, during this period, they write about the indigenous peoples of North America more often than they write about the kind of ball room dancing that I was looking for.

With yells of triumph the Indians came flocking down from their caves and danced a frenzied dance of victory round the dead bodies, in mad joy that two more of the most dangerous of all their enemies had been slain. - The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

In his only novel, Oscar Wilde includes a scene about dancing, but it’s not in a ball room and it is used to make the woman dancing look less appealing.

The scene was the hall of Capulet's house, and Romeo in his pilgrim's dress had entered with Mercutio and his other friends. The band, such as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began. Through the crowd of ungainly, shabbily dressed actors, Sibyl Vane moved like a creature from a finer world. Her body swayed, while she danced, as a plant sways in the water. The curves of her throat were the curves of a white lily. Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.

Yet she was curiously listless. She showed no sign of joy when her eyes rested on Romeo. The few words she had to speak--

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss--

 with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly artificial manner. The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view of tone it was absolutely false. It was wrong in colour. It took away all the life from the verse. It made the passion unreal.

Basically, Wilde is using dance to give us an example of bad acting. Sure, Sybil Vane is beautiful, but, now that she is in love with Dorian Gray, she can’t act.

As I scanned the literature of the 1890s, I found love and bad acting to be recurring themes in literary scenes of ballroom dancing. In Violet Hunt’s The Maiden’s Progress, while Moderna is getting ready for a ball, Peggy says: “I wonder who you'll dance with? Perhaps you'll meet your Fate?” And Verona adds, pensively: “The ‘Unknown God.’ Father says every young girl raises altars to the ‘Unknown God.’ I wonder.” When Moderna returns from the ball, they both say at once: “Was it nice? Who did you dance with? Are you engaged? Did you get many compliments?” When Moderna gets rid of those meddlers, she writes in her diary:

My first ball. It is 4 A.M. Minching and Peggy and Verona have just left me. I must try and recall the events of the evening. I had a white dress trimmed with lilies of the valley rather pretty. Cecilia Riddell had daisies. Aunt Riddell had diamonds. What waste ! I danced twenty-one times twice with the son of the house. I danced three times with a Mr. Donkin. I can't remember whether it was twice or three times with Mr. Deverel. I danced the Lancers with Edward; and I went in to supper once with Mr. Vere and once with Edward. That is all I can remember. I was decidedly nervous at first. I don't think people thought me pretty there were such lots of awfully pretty girls there. They seemed to know everybody so well, and they all looked older than I. I look too dreadfully young. Cissy Riddell looked a perfect infant in her rational Liberty frock, that's one consolation. Mrs. Mortimer was kind. She said, "Who did your hair, child?" and gave it three pats that quite altered it.

So, that’s one example of how a woman might feel about dancing in the 1890s. What about her love interest? Why does he go to balls?

I suppose in the vague hope of meeting some day with a real woman, and talking to her. It is one of the very few social opportunities one has of doing so. A dinner party is complicated with eating how can two immortal souls communicate with each other through a medium of 'steaming soup, or the fumes of the roast, or at a musicale where one is constantly " hushed," until one's blood boils? But at a dance, social convention has decreed that one should have a woman to oneself for a quarter of an hour at least. I singled you out at once, and hoped that you would let me speak to you I was introduced, wasn't I?

Much as it continues to be today, dancing in the 1890s, was a mating ritual. Hunt writes hilariously in A Hard Woman that: "I don't think married women have any business to dance at all. [...] Dances aren't intended for them." But married women do go to dances. And, at a time when women really couldn’t just say what they thought or ask for what they wanted, dancing at a ball could be an effective weapon, as in Lady Windermere’s Fan.

I feel that every woman here sneers at me as she dances by with my husband. What have I done to deserve this?

But, I found that dancing didn’t just happen at balls or in North America when the indigenous people were attacking. In Paris, Marie Corelli describes the can-can, like it is going to destroy society!

...while I tried to urge my muddled intelligence into a clearer comprehension of all that was going on, the crowd suddenly parted asunder with laughter and shouts of applause, and standing back in closely pressed ranks made an open space in their centre for the approach of two women discreetly masked, — one arranged in very short black gauze skirts, the other in blood-red. Attitudinizing for a moment in that theatrical pose which all dancers assume before commencing the revolutions, they uttered a peculiar shout, half savage, half mirthful, — a noisy burst of music answered them, — and then, with an indescribable slide forward and an impudent bracing of the arms akimbo, they started the "can-can,” — which though immodest, vile, vulgar, and licentious, has perhaps more power to inflame the passions of a Paris mob than the chanting of the 'Marseillaise.' It can be danced in various ways, this curious fandango of threatening gesture and amorous invitation,— and if the dancers be a couple of heavy Paris laundresses or perilously it will probably be rendered so ridiculously as to be harmless. But, danced by women with lithe, strong, sinuous limbs — with arms that twist like the bodies of snakes, — with bosoms that seem to heave with suppressed rage and ferocity, — with eyes that flash hell-fire through the black eye-holes of a conspirator-like mask, — and with utter, reckless, audacious disregard of all pretense at modesty, — its effect is terrible, enraging!— inciting to deeds of rapine, pillage, and slaughter! And why ? Why, in Heaven's name, should a mere dance make men mad? Why ? — Mild questioner, whoever you are, I cannot answer you! Why are men made as they are? — will you tell me that? Why does an English Earl marry a music-hall singer ? He has seen her in tights, — he has heard her roar forth vulgar ditties to the lowest classes of the public, — and yet he has been known to marry her, and make her ^^ ray lady " — and a peeress of the realm ! Explain to me this incongruity, — and I will explain to you then why it is that the sight of the " can-can " danced in all its frankness, turns Parisian men for the time being into screeching, stamping maniacs, whom to see, to hear, to realize the existence of, is to feel that with all our ^ culture,' we are removed only half a step away from absolute barbarism!

All of this makes me think that I should save the dancing for more dramatic moments in my story, if I include any at all. Even W.B. Yeats identified the love of a dancer as brief.

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