Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900

By Dominic Janes

“I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad,” Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom—which erupted in laughter—accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite. What was so terrible about posing as a sodomite, and why was Queensbury’s horror greeted with such amusement? In Oscar Wilde Prefigured, Dominic Janes suggests that what divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite, but whether or not it mattered that people could appear to be sodomites. For many, intimations of sodomy were simply a part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life.

Oscar Wilde Prefigured is a study of the prehistory of this “queer moment” in 1895. Janes explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style, and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century. He supplements the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Wilde, it turns out, is not the starting point for public queer figuration. He is the pivot by which Georgian figures and twentieth-century camp stereotypes meet. Drawing on the mutually reinforcing phenomena of dandyism and caricature of alleged effeminates, Janes examines a wide range of images drawn from theater, fashion, and the popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics, gender performance, and queer culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226396552

Book preview

Oscar Wilde Prefigured

Oscar Wilde Prefigured

Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750–1900

Dominic Janes

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35864-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39655-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226396552.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Janes, Dominic, author.

Title: Oscar Wilde prefigured : queer fashioning and British caricature, 1750–1900 / Dominic Janes.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016007547 | ISBN 9780226358642 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226396552 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Caricature—Social aspects—Great Britain. | Gay men—Great Britain—Caricatures and cartoons. | Dandies—Great Britain—Caricatures and cartoons. | Gay men in art. | Homosexuality and art—Great Britain. | Homosexuality—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Homosexuality—Great Britain—History—18th century.

Classification: LCC NC1470 .J36 2016 | DDC 741.5/6941—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007547

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memoriam O. F. O’F. W. W.

Isn’t it exquisitely funny? There is something rather Georgian in Oscar’s deportment.

—Max Beerbohm, 1893¹

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1.  Introduction

Part One:  Dammee Sammy you’r a sweet pretty creature

2.  Macaronis

3.  Men of Feeling

4.  The Later Eighteenth Century: Conclusions

Part Two:  Corps de beaux

5.  Regency Dandies

6.  Byronists

7.  The Earlier Nineteenth Century: Conclusions

Part Three:  An unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort

8.  Aesthetes

9.  New Men

10.  The Later Nineteenth Century: Conclusions

References

Index

Endnotes

Illustrations

1.1  W. K. Haselden, Coming and Going of the Dandy, 1906

1.2  Frontispiece and title page, David Garrick, The Fribbleriad, 1761

1.3  George Plank, Aunt Georgie, 1916

1.4  Detail, George Cruikshank, Backside and Front View of the Ladies Fancy-Man, Paddy Carey, 1822

2.1  Johann Zoffany, David Garrick in Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1763–65

2.2  Thomas Patch, Caricature Group in Florence, c. 1760

2.3  John Carter, Horace Walpole, after Breakfast, before Dinner and after Dinner, 1788

2.4  Anon., How d’Ye Like Me, 1772

2.5  Philip Dawe, The Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade, 1773

2.6  Anon., Mademoiselle de Beaumont or the Chevalier d’Eon, 1777

3.1  Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, 1756–57

3.2  Joseph Wright of Derby, Sir Brooke Boothby, 1781

3.3  Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781

3.4  Anthony Walker, after Isaac Oliver, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 1764

3.5  Richard Cosway, Sir James Hamlyn and His Wife Arabella, c. 1789

3.6  Edward Francis Burney, A Mushroom Frogstool and Puff: Here To-day and Gone To-morrow, c. 1780

3.7  Thomas Rowlandson, Preceptor and Pupil, 1784

5.1  Isaac Cruikshank, A New French Bussing Match, 1790

5.2  Detail, John Doyle, The New Regulation Infantry Hat; Prince Albert’s Own, c. 1843

5.3  Detail, James Gillray, Monstrosities of 1799,—Scene, Kensington Gardens, 1799

5.4  Detail, anon., Bond Street Bucks and Keen Countryman, 1804

5.5  Alfred Henry Forrester/Daniel Maclise, George Cruikshank, 1833

5.6  Detail, George Cruikshank, Ancient Military Dandies of 1450, 1819

5.7  Detail, Isaac Robert Cruikshank, A Dandy Fainting, or, an Exquisite in Fits: Scene a Private Box Opera, 1818

5.8  George Cruikshank, The Dandies Coat of Arms, 1819

5.9  George Cruikshank, The Boxers Arms, c. 1819

5.10  Detail, George Cruikshank and Alfred Henry Forrester, Beauties of Brighton, 1825

5.11  George Cruikshank, Monstrosities of 1822, 1822

5.12  George Cruikshank, Lacing in Style, or, a Dandy Midshipman Preparing for Attraction!!, 1819

5.13  George and Isaac Robert Cruikshank, Jerry in Training for a Swell, 1820

5.14  Henry Stephen Ludlow, Athletics v. Aesthetics, 1883

5.15  Thomas Lord Busby, after Benjamin Marshall, Mr John Jackson, 1813

5.16  Thomas Lawrence, Satan Summoning His Legions, 1796–97

6.1  John Tenniel, Dressing for an Oxford Bal Masqué, 1864

6.2  Alfred Henry Forrester/Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, 1833

6.3  John Phillips, The Broom-Girl Duet, 1830

6.4  Robert Seymour, To Lord Wharnecliffe, 1832

6.5  John Doyle, Extraordinary Case of Assault and Butt-ery, 1834

6.6  John Doyle, Study for What, in Parliamentary Phrase, May Be Termed a Pair, 1839

6.7  Alfred Henry Forrester, The Footman, 1842

6.8  John Doyle, A Scene from Macbeth, 1849

6.9  John Doyle, The Gheber, Worshipping the Rising Sun, 1830

7.1  Detail, Isaac Robert Cruikshank, Dandies Dressing, 1818

7.2  Isaac Robert Cruikshank, Dandy Pickpockets, Diving, 1818

7.3  Anon., The Arse Bishop Josilin g a Soldier—or—Do as I Say Not as I Do, 1822

7.4  Anon., Confirmation or the Bishop and the Soldier, 1822

8.1  George Du Maurier, Maudle on the Choice of a Profession, 1881

8.2  George Du Maurier, A Love Agony. Design by Maudle, 1880

8.3  Alfred Henry Forrester, Love. Or an Exquisite at his Devotions, 1825

8.4  George Grossmith as Reginald Bunthorne in Patience at the Opera Comique, 1881

8.5  Detail, George Cruikshank, Humming Birds, or, a Dandy Trio!!!, 1819

8.6  Shirl, Guy-ing Him, 1883

9.1  Anon., The Latest Fashion, 1885

9.2  Alfred Bryan, Oscar Wilde, 1895

9.3  Alfred Bryan, Aestheticism On and Off, More Study and More Study Still, 1882

9.4  Alfred Bryan, The Wilde Speculation, 1895

9.5  Alfred Bryan, Showing the Arrival, 1895

9.6  Aubrey Beardsley, The Woman in the Moon, 1894

9.7  Detail, Max Beerbohm, Club Types, 1892

9.8  Max Beerbohm, Caricature of a Man in a Frock Coat, c. 1892

9.9  Max Beerbohm, George the Fourth, 1894

9.10  E. T. Reed, Parallel, 1890

9.11  Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, 1894

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following libraries, archives, and collections in particular:

Birkbeck College Library, University of London

Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

British Library, London

British Museum, London

Cambridge University Library

Courtauld Gallery, London

Detroit Institute of Arts

Houghton Library, Harvard University

Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut

Library of Congress, Washington, DC

Mirrorpix, London

National Archives, London

National Library of Scotland

National Portrait Gallery, London

Royal Academy, London

Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

Tate Gallery, London

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Wolverhampton Art Gallery

I completed this book during a period I was able to spend at the University of the Arts London, based at the London College of Fashion, where I held the position of University Chair of Cultural and Visual Studies. This provided me with the resources to complete this book in terms of both time and funding to cover the cost of copyright permissions.

I would like to thank the following individuals who either commented on a draft of this book or provided help or guidance on specific points: Dr. Heike Bauer, Dr. Sean Brady, Prof. John Dunkley, Prof. Vic Gatrell, Duncan Horne, John Lotherington, Prof. Brian Maidment, Prof. Peter McNeil, Dr. Kate Retford, Dr. Andrew Rudd, and Adam Thorn.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

WILDE: . . . I then said to him, Lord Queensberry do you seriously accuse your son and me of sodomy? He said, "I do not say that you are it, but you look it (laughter)—

JUDGE: I shall have the Court cleared if I hear the slightest disturbance again.

WILDE: —but you look it and you pose as it, which is just as bad."¹

Laughter filled the room when Lord Queensberry’s verbal challenge to Oscar Wilde in June 1894 was related in court. The issue of the truth of poses was of importance in the libel trial of 1895 because the scrawled words on the card left by John Sholto Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, at the Albemarle Club were read as an accusation that Wilde had posed as a sodomite and, therefore, was one. What was so terrible to Queensberry about posing as a sodomite, and why was Wilde’s account of his antagonist’s disgust greeted with amusement in the courtroom? I will suggest that what divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite but whether it did or did not matter that people could appear to be sodomites. On the one hand, it could be held that sodomy was so disgusting and obscene that it should be kept, at all costs, from public attention. On the other, it might be felt that intimations of sodomy were simply part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life. From the latter viewpoint, men who sought sex with other men could deploy coded expressions of their desires that were more or less obvious and legible depending on the audience at which they were targeted. Pleasure was facilitated by flirtatious visual games of posing and supposing in opposition to textual imperatives of naming and shaming. However, to flirt with the appearance of sodomy was not the same as proud affirmation, since it had to take place in the context of the threat of public denunciation. Moreover, to pose as a sodomite was to engage with forms that had developed in collusion with imagery conjured from the lurid imaginations of moral opponents.

This book reads queer performances and phobic caricatures as interrelated phenomena, understanding the word queer to refer to transgressions of normative constructions of gender and sexuality that focus on aspects of male same-sex desire.² There is no single definition of the term queer as used in academic writing, but it is generally employed in the exploration of circumstances in which there is some form of overlap between the cultural politics of transgression and the construction of alternatives to normative sexual identities. Because queerness is, therefore, generally understood to exist in relation to the transgression of categories, it necessarily does more work than the terms homosexual or gay. The main problem with these latter words is that they are largely defined negatively in relation to the notion of not being sexually straight and operate through the assertion of a new oppositional category, whereas queer can be seen as that which sets itself up against the normative, whatever that might be, including against the imperative to categorize.³ This study looks, in particular, beyond the notion of the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 as representing a queer moment in the course of which sodomitical acts become joined to the novel creation of a homosexual identity.⁴ Wilde’s image, I will argue, was prefigured in a ribald, satirical tradition since the eighteenth century, which associated dandified performances with sodomitical desires.

Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (1994) remains an important study, but it should be placed in context as a product of an academic environment in which much of emergent queer theory was focused on textual concerns. It was widely accepted that it was through language that homosexuality was constructed in the course of the later nineteenth century. This had a number of repercussions. It meant that far more attention was paid to Wilde’s literary production than to his visual and performative self-fashioning.⁵ And it also resulted in an understanding of his material form as strangely inert matter onto which meaning was written, as can be seen from Moe Meyer’s view of the events of 1895: If we read Wilde’s containing inscription into discourse and his physical containment behind bars as the successful culmination of his efforts to construct a personal homosexual identity, then a solution to one of history’s most perplexing psycho-mysteries can be offered. . . . [Instead of fleeing,] he simply waited for the State to begin its inscriptory process. . . . Wilde needed the State’s dominance, with its control over signification, in order to complete the project by linking his transgressive reinscription of bourgeois masculinity to sexology’s homosexual type.⁶

However, if equal attention is paid to Wilde’s visual and material, as well as to his textual, performances, it becomes apparent that he was visibly legible to some people as a sodomitical type of person before his trials. The year 1895 did not see the immediate creation of a homosexual identity but rather the distribution of an image of the effeminate pervert that was to become a dominant stereotype of the homosexual for much of the twentieth century.⁷

A further concern of 1990s scholarship was identity politics, yet same-sex desire must take place through sensory admiration before it can become the basis for an identity. Edmund White drew attention to the centrality of looking in his States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980). To White, the visual admiration of others’ bodies was a product of busy urban life. What I am singling out, he wrote with reference to New York, are the scanning eyes that lock for an instant, the cool and thorough appraisals of someone’s person and apparel—the staring in a word . . . the staring is continuous, a civic habit.⁸ It was, I would argue, in association with the experience of admiring and being admired that identities based on sexual desires began to develop. Visual codes then started to appear with the aim of attracting the attention of others with similar tastes. In due course, some of these performances, particularly those that played with tropes of effeminacy, were noticed and written up by sexologists and other social commentators as part of the truth of the homosexual. But it was in the nature of such visual and material performances that, save for the most blatant, they tended to hint at rather than openly express same-sex desires. The challenge today of correctly interpreting such acts of self-fashioning is all the greater because often they have only been preserved for us through references in other (often hostile) media. In this study, I focus on visual caricature because it was a genre predicated on exaggeration. The nuanced codes with which dissident desires were signaled in the street appear in more pronounced forms in satirical productions. Not only does this enable lost visual discourses to be recovered, but it also does so in a way that acknowledges the power of mockery in creating such queer signs in the first place. Satirists, I will argue, were frequently implicated in the scenes that they affected to denounce, since, like the mirrors that were installed in eighteenth-century theaters, humorous prints reflected the foibles of fashionable society. Caricaturists needed to be intimately familiar with that which they chose to mock, and their productions frequently acted to spread awareness of the queer possibilities of performance.⁹ I aim to supplement the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a textually constructed homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain.

The central focus of this study is the fashionably clothed male body and its representation in caricature. This focus requires attention to be moved on from some of the more familiar textual evidence for the history of same-sex desire (such as legal sources) but also demands that a visual culture approach be brought to bear on materials, such as satirical prints, that have not always been given a prominent place in art history studies.¹⁰ This strategy also relies on recognizing that these satirical materials could be interpreted differently according to who was viewing them. Thus, rather than seeking to demonstrate that caricature of excessive male fashion did or did not refer to effeminacy rather than sexual desire, my aim is to explore whether such works could have been viewed as bearing sexual significance. This involves a parallel approach to that taken by Oliver S. Buckton in his study Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography (1998). The queerness of the texts that he was exploring, and of the images that I will be discussing, lies substantially in the ways in which sexual revelations were negotiated in the context of various degrees of self-awareness and coded expression.¹¹ The story that I will be telling is not one in which it took a literary genius in collision with the disciplinary power of the state to conceptualize previously inchoate yearnings but rather one in which people referenced and learned from each other. This involved a combination of hostile and sympathetic visual messages, since satirists and the satirized influenced each other and sometimes were the self-same people.

Queer visual self-expression, seen from this perspective, was an art of looking, copying, and exaggeration in which prefiguration played as vital a role as originality. The geographical focus of this creative activity was the crowded heart of the metropolis of London and particularly the West End.¹² The study of fashion and clothing history, as well as wider practices of visual self-fashioning, has advanced rapidly over the last couple of decades. Christopher Breward made a particularly significant contribution in a series of studies including The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (1995) and Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis (2004). Breward has, among many other things, developed a nuanced understanding of the tendencies toward the containment of formerly elaborate male self-presentation in the course of the eighteenth century. In the 1930s, psychologist J. C. Flügel labeled this process as the great masculine renunciation.¹³ In the course of this process, the formal French-style court dress, the habit habillé, was superseded by simpler garments that are the ancestors of the modern three-piece suit.¹⁴

The fact that fashionable men’s clothing during this period became cheaper and plainer had a number of effects. First, the precise fit of the clothes became increasingly significant, and this had the effect of highlighting the vitality, or otherwise, of the body beneath the clothes.¹⁵ Second, the wearing of elaborate silk costumes by men was increasingly associated with tastes that were financially profligate and unpatriotic. Third, such attire was increasingly read as effeminate, since it used colors and materials that were mostly employed by women. Fourth, the wearing of fashionable clothing spread further down the social spectrum, creating anxiety about the fragility of social status. It was in these circumstances that the word dandy was first coined in the 1780s to indicate vulgar and awkward social upstarts.¹⁶ Male fashionability from this point onward depended on the mastery of increasingly subtle visual codes that mediated between ostentation and restraint.¹⁷ Dandyism came to be associated with claims to personal autonomy set against the backdrop of a conformist set of assumptions about style.¹⁸ It was an art that displayed virtuosity, as Kaplan and Stowell have said of Wilde’s stage comedies, by working within limitations.¹⁹ In such circumstances, the judicious application of satirical wit could temporarily relieve the anxieties of a society that had become preoccupied with the correct performance of manliness because it was, arguably, increasingly insecure about the essential nature of masculinity.²⁰ Witty self-presentation that played with stereotypes had the potential to offer the dandy a place of social prominence in which at least some of his personal foibles might be condoned.²¹ The performativity of both gender and class involved in such practices was tacitly acknowledged both in the theater of everyday life and on the stage itself. Victorian dandyism, as was the case with its Georgian precursors, was widely treated in theater performances that ranged from Wilde’s social comedies to the more raucous music hall travesties in which charming ladies presented themselves in the guise of the young buck about town.

In some of his most detailed work on this topic, published as part of The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (1999), Christopher Breward argues for strong continuities of male fashioning through and beyond the nineteenth century. After Wilde’s imprisonment, he writes, the musculature of the strong man and the monocle of the male impersonator continued to delineate the boundaries of a key public discourse on the nature of modern masculinities and consumption dating back to the era of dandy insurrection in the 1830s and 1840s.²² Moreover, he says that dandyism should be understood as a reaction not merely to desires for self-fashioning in general but also to the existence of a competitive sexual market place.²³ And yet he follows Sinfield’s reasoning when he says that although the new figure of the homosexual . . . reflected previous anxieties regarding the connections between gender, class and consumption . . . no single material template for homosexuality existed outside of the complex and secretive subcultural groupings that had constituted London’s demi-monde since the late seventeenth century.²⁴ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued that by 1865, a distinct homosexual role and culture seem already to have been in existence in England for several centuries, which she saw as at once courtly and in touch with the criminal. Yet she saw this milieu as highly secretive, such that there seems in the nineteenth century not to have been an association of a particular personal style with the genital activities now thought of as ‘homosexual’ . . . the educated middle classes . . . operated sexually in what seems to have been startlingly close to a cognitive vacuum.²⁵ I will be arguing that such reasoning underplays the degree of knowledge available concerning the possibilities of same-sex eroticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sedgwick’s thinking on this point misses the possibilities of queer modulations of style through its expectation that a single homosexual appearance was notable by its absence. Breward, by contrast, does suggest that such a template existed but that either it is lost to us or it was not of great significance because it was restricted to the demi-monde. As I will argue, queer fashioning in the case of Wilde, but also long before, was predicated on strategic movement both within and beyond the boundaries of polite society and its associated gender and sexual norms. His trials did not create the codes of the demi-monde but rather had the effect of spreading certain stereotypes concerning them. Many members of the middle class attended single-sex public schools, where classical literature was read and sexual activity was often rampant.²⁶ After 1895, it was simply less easy for the middle classes to cement their position through a respectability that was predicated on not knowing—or pretending not to know—about sexual transgression.

As I will demonstrate, images of men known in Britain as macaronis in the eighteenth century and Regency dandies in the early nineteenth century prefigured those of aesthetes in the later Victorian period. All these stock types were associated with male effeminacy, but I argue that it was not only with the outing of Oscar Wilde as a sodomite that effeminacy became, potentially, a queer quality. Images of effeminacy from the eighteenth century onward operated as a cultural field in which same-sex desire could be, but was not necessarily, expressed. It was this visual language that Queensberry longed to obliterate, since it provided a vital means by which sodomites could recognize and meet others of like mind. Wilde’s styles, I will show, were imitative of those of previous decades because he was employing well-established patterns of visual and bodily expression that attempted to defuse horror and disgust through humor or to employ wit in ways that enabled the viewer conveniently to misrecognize allusions to (homo)sexual transgression as merely trifling absurdities. To be the subject of a phobic joke, in ages far removed from those in which gay liberation could be promulgated as a realistic goal, was vastly preferable to being taken seriously as an abomination. It was, after all, in the persona of an (implicitly ridiculous) Angry Old Buffer that a contributor to Punch complained on the second day of the first of Wilde’s two criminal trials that

When ADAM delved and EVE span,

No one need ask which was the man.²⁷

While I see the queer moment as stretching back long before the fin de siècle, I likewise understand it as stretching forward well into the twentieth century. The queer (in the sense of strange and sexually ambivalent) nature of images of dandyism was alive and well in Edwardian England, as can be seen from the (in retrospect) ludicrous prognostication of the cartoonist W. K. Haselden (1872–1953), whose Coming and Going of the Dandy appeared in The Daily Mirror in February 1906 (fig. 1.1). Launched in 1903 as a newspaper for women, The Daily Mirror was relaunched the following year as a more conventional mainstream publication in which Haselden played his part with more or less amusing satires on contemporary social changes, such as the campaign for the extension of the franchise. This strategy saw it rapidly emerge as one of the top three daily morning newspapers by the end of the decade.²⁸ In his image of the dandy, Haselden exploited populist hostility to aristocrats as etiolated (dis)embodiments of effete display in contradistinction to the (literally) solid manliness represented by John Bull. By so doing, he was deploying two stereotypes that first arose in opposition to one another in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, his cartoon represented a comment on the strong move in public opinion that was producing a collapse in the Conservative Party vote at the general election that had been in progress since January. But on the other, it also implied hostility to a specific form of male posing that was radically out of kilter with popular notions of normative masculinity. The implication of the return of such a performance in 1906—"What? You [original emphasis] trying to come back!"—suggests that it had only been in temporary abeyance since the Wilde trials. The effect of the events of 1895, therefore, was not to end well-established patterns of posing, and of hostility to posing, but to bring about an enhanced awareness, on the part of the general public, of sexual perversity as a possible presence behind such self-presentation. Moreover, the treatment of personal codes through what I will argue were the collusive media of cartoons and caricature played its part in bringing deviance back into social visibility, albeit in an atmosphere of decidedly tentative Edwardian laughter.

Fig. 1.1. W. K. Haselden, Coming and Going of the Dandy, Daily Mirror, February 9, 1906, p. 7, reproduced courtesy of Mirror Syndication International.

The roots of the British tradition of visual caricature are various and include illustrations in Puritan broadsides and their satirical equivalents in the Netherlands that were popularized in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The word caricature itself derives from the application of the term caricatura to works by Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) and his relatives in relation to tastes for grotesque deformity and exaggeration in portrait likenesses. This style can also be understood to have drawn inspiration from the worlds of carnival and commedia dell’arte. The artist Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674–1755) is widely held to be the first professional caricaturist. His work began to become known in England from the 1720s, from which point the self-consciously English visual satires of William Hogarth (1697–1764) were joined by others produced by men who either worked in or visited Italy, such as Thomas Patch (1725–82) and Joshua Reynolds (1723–92). Meanwhile, changes in printing technology and the development of a wider market for books and prints saw a considerably enhanced circulation of satirical texts and images, many of them distinctly scabrous, centered on the bookshops and print shops of London. In Victorian Britain, satirical images became a prominent element of book and periodical publications, in which they became known as cartoons. Haselden’s dandy eventually evolved from contexts such as these.

In 1761, the famous actor, playwright, and theater manager David Garrick (1717–79) published The Fribbleriad, the frontispiece of which reveals to the reader the visual appearance of a fribble, which was one of the many types that prefigured the dandy (fig. 1.2). Garrick was responding to attacks on his own masculine probity and did so by satirizing his opponents through the appearance of Fizgig, an arch-fribble, who With visage sleek and swelling chest, / With strech’d out fingers, and a thumb / Stuck to his hips, and jutting bum, / Rose up!—All knew his smirking air,— / They clap’d and cry’d . . .²⁹ Garrick’s fribble and Haselden’s dandy clearly give different performances; however, as I will go on to argue, the static pose of the dandy was born during the Regency period as a reaction against the energetic performativity of stereotypes of effeminates during the eighteenth century. One aim of this current study is to counter the view that the only alternative to a narrow vision of the emergence of queerness into visibility with the Wilde trials is an anachronistic or essentialized reading of sodomy into earlier contexts. Before the twentieth century, transgressive sexual desires were often regarded as being evidenced by unorthodox gender performances (and vice versa).³⁰ Therefore, I believe that a dynamic and ongoing pattern of interactions between same-sex desire and male performance can be clearly discerned since the eighteenth century, the origins of which lie even further back in time.

Fig. 1.2. Frontispiece and title page, David Garrick, The Fribbleriad (London: Coote, 1761), reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford (Vet. A5 d. 743).

In my argument to this effect, I build directly on my earlier study, Picturing the Closet: Male Secrecy and Homosexual Visibility in Britain (2015). In that book, I elaborated an ongoing history for a dynamic between visual expression and sexual secrecy derived from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s identification of what she termed the spectacle of the closet, which she attacked in her book Epistemology of the Closet (1990) as representing part of the defining structure for gay oppression.³¹ Sedgwick explored the emergence of the open secret of sodomitical desire within a series of novels dating from the end of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth. For example, she highlighted a queer moment (one of many, of course!) in the fiction of Proust "when the narrator, from his place of concealment, witnessed a sudden secret eye-lock between [the Baron de] Charlus and Jupien in the courtyard . . . ‘[Jupien] had—in perfect symmetry with