Sexual Reform in Britain: From the Wilde Trials to The Well of Loneliness (1885–1938)

Prelude: the Bradlaugh–Besant trial and the Malthusian League (1877)

The first stage of the British sexual-reform movement was the Bradlaugh–Besant trial of 1877 over birth control. The atheist Charles Bradlaugh, who had founded the National Secular Society in 1866, and Annie Besant, one of its leading speakers, set up the Freethought Publishing Company in 1877 and republished The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People, a birth-control pamphlet by the American physician Charles Knowlton, whose previous British publisher, Charles Watts, had already been convicted of obscenity. Both were prosecuted, and Charles Darwin, pleading ill health, declined to give evidence, writing to Bradlaugh that he opposed birth control. 1 2 3

The Bradlaugh–Besant trial revealed, contrary to its purpose, a wide public interest in birth control. The publicity made The Fruits of Philosophy an overnight bestseller: its circulation rose from about 700 copies a year to 125,000 in a single year, and Besant went on to publish her own birth-control manual. The cost of the campaign was heavy, however. In 1878 Besant’s husband successfully argued that her public campaigning on contraception made her unfit, and took custody of both children. 3 2

In July 1877, in the middle of the trial, Bradlaugh and Besant founded the Malthusian League as a permanent body to abolish penalties for promoting contraception and to spread birth-control education; Charles Robert Drysdale was its first president and Besant its secretary. Holding over-population to be the chief cause of working-class poverty, the Malthusian League kept its distance from socialism and drifted towards eugenics over time. Even so it remained one pillar of the British birth-control movement until its dissolution in 1927, opening a contraceptive clinic in London in 1921 with Norman Haire as its medical officer. 4

The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 and the Labouchere amendment

The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 was aimed not at homosexuality but at child prostitution. A bill “to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes” had stalled in the Commons until, in July 1885, W. T. Stead, editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, exposed child prostitution in his series “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”. Stead manufactured the story by actually “buying” the thirteen-year-old Eliza Armstrong, and his unlawful methods later earned him three months in prison. Amid the moral panic the series created, the Act was passed on 14 August 1885, raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 and strengthening the laws against brothels and prostitution. 5 6 7

The clause punishing male homosexuality was added in the final stage of the bill’s passage. The amendment moved by Henry Labouchere, Liberal MP for Northampton and founding editor of the magazine Truth, was rushed through in the early hours of 7 August 1885 and became section 11 of the Act. When a member asked what it had to do with the bill’s original intent, the Speaker replied that procedural rules permitted any amendment by leave of the House. Section 11 reads: 8 5

Section 11. Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour. 9

Section 11. Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour. 9

The Labouchere amendment did not define “gross indecency”. It thus made it possible to punish almost any sexual act between men even where anal intercourse, still a separate crime carrying life imprisonment under the 1861 Act, could not be proved. Lawyers dubbed section 11 “the blackmailer’s charter”; it led to many convictions of homosexual and allegedly homosexual men, a number of whom committed suicide. Relations between women were not covered. 8

The trials of Oscar Wilde (1895)

The most famous man punished under the Labouchere amendment was Oscar Wilde. In mid-1891 Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas, a young aristocrat at Oxford whom his family called “Bosie”, and by 1893 the two were in a tempestuous affair. Earning up to £100 a week from his plays, Wilde indulged Douglas’s every whim, and Douglas initiated him into the Victorian underground of male prostitution; from 1892 Alfred Taylor introduced Wilde to young working-class male prostitutes, encounters Wilde later likened in De Profundis to “feasting with panthers”. Douglas’s poem “Two Loves”, published in 1894, contains the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name”, often misattributed to Wilde. 10 11

The spark of the Wilde trials was Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Known for his atheism, his brutish manner and for lending his name to the rules of modern boxing, the Marquess feuded constantly with his son, and in June 1894 he called on Wilde unannounced and threatened to thrash him if he caught the two together again. When The Importance of Being Earnest opened on 14 February 1895, he planned to throw a bouquet of rotting vegetables onto the stage, but Wilde was tipped off and had him barred from the theatre. On 18 February Queensberry left his card at Wilde’s club, the Albemarle, inscribed, with a misspelling, “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite”. 10 12

The first trial was of Wilde’s own making. Encouraged by Douglas and against his friends’ advice, Wilde brought a private prosecution for criminal libel against Queensberry. At the Café Royal on 24 March Frank Harris warned him that “they are going to prove sodomy against you” and urged him to flee to France, a scene Bernard Shaw witnessed. Under the Libel Act 1843 Queensberry had to prove his accusation true and in the public interest, so his lawyers set private detectives on the world of male prostitutes, blackmailers and cross-dressers around Wilde. At the trial, which opened at the Old Bailey on 3 April, Queensberry’s counsel Edward Carson quoted The Picture of Dorian Gray and pressed Wilde relentlessly on his friendships with lower-class young men, some as young as sixteen. 10

The libel trial ended in catastrophe for Wilde. Wilde won the most laughs, but Carson scored the legal points. When Carson announced that he had found male prostitutes who would testify to having had sex with Wilde, Wilde dropped the prosecution on his lawyers’ advice; the court found Queensberry’s accusation “true in substance and in fact” and acquitted him, and Wilde, liable for Queensberry’s costs, was bankrupted. A warrant for his arrest was applied for that day; friends urged him to make for Dover and a boat, but Wilde could only say, “The train has gone. It’s too late.” On 6 April 1895 he was arrested for “gross indecency” under section 11 of the Act, the Labouchere amendment. 10 8

There were two criminal trials. In the first, which opened on 26 April, the prosecutor Charles Gill asked what “the love that dare not speak its name” was; Wilde answered that it was the great affection of an elder for a younger man such as that between David and Jonathan, the very basis of Plato’s philosophy and the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare, a deep spiritual affection, the noblest form of affection, with nothing unnatural about it, and drew loud applause mingled with hisses. Legally the answer only reinforced the charges, yet the jury could not reach a verdict. Freed on bail, Wilde hid at the house of his friends the Leversons; even Carson asked the Solicitor General whether they could not let up on him now, but the case had become too politicised to be dropped. 10

In the second trial Wilde was convicted. On 25 May 1895 Mr Justice Wills sentenced Wilde and Taylor to two years’ hard labour, the maximum, calling it “totally inadequate for a case such as this”. Wilde’s “And I? May I say nothing, my Lord?” was drowned in cries of “Shame”. Still, the libel-trial transcript published in 2000 and other studies point out that Wilde took advantage of teenagers of about sixteen, and some writers judge that he would face prosecution even today. 10

Prison broke Wilde’s body. At Pentonville his hard labour meant hours on the treadmill and picking oakum; moved to Wandsworth, he collapsed in chapel and ruptured his right eardrum. When he was transferred to Reading Gaol on 23 November 1895, a crowd jeered and spat at him on the platform at Clapham Junction. At Reading, known only as “C.3.3”, he wrote between January and March 1897 a 50,000-word letter to Douglas, published in part in 1905 as De Profundis. Released on 19 May 1897, Wilde sailed that evening for Dieppe and never returned to the United Kingdom. 10 13

In exile Wilde lived in poverty under the name “Sebastian Melmoth”. At Berneval-le-Grand in 1897 he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol on the hanging of the trooper Charles Thomas Wooldridge, who had killed his wife; published in February 1898 under the name “C.3.3.” and famous for the line “Yet each man kills the thing he loves”, it went through seven editions in less than two years. He also wrote two letters to the Daily Chronicle denouncing the brutality of English prisons. Wilde died of meningitis, which stemmed from his prison ear injury, at the Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris on 30 November 1900. In 2017 Britain pardoned him together with some 50,000 men convicted of homosexual acts that are no longer offences. 10 14

Defenders of homosexual love: Symonds, Carpenter, Ellis and Ives

Writing in defence of homosexual love continued even under the Labouchere amendment. In 1873 John Addington Symonds wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics, a work of what would later be called gay history, but held it back for a decade and then printed it only in a limited edition for private distribution; A Problem in Modern Ethics followed in 1891. He corresponded with Walt Whitman and in 1891 tried to visit Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in Italy. Symonds criticised the clause as a mere encouragement to blackmail of homosexuals. 15 8

Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis and Symonds was the first English medical textbook on homosexuality. First published in German in 1896 and in English in 1897, it is regarded as the first objective study of homosexuality, describing it as neither disease, immorality nor crime. Ellis had joined the Fellowship of the New Life in 1883, meeting Eleanor Marx, Edward Carpenter and Bernard Shaw there. Founded in London in 1883 on a life of altruism, love and wisdom, the Fellowship gave rise to the Fabian Society among members who wanted to enter politics, and was dissolved in 1898. 16 17

Edward Carpenter joined the defence of homosexual love to socialism. An inheritance from his father let him give up his lectureship and live the “simple life” at Millthorpe near Sheffield, where he wrote Towards Democracy (1883), a long poem in Whitman’s manner; in 1891 he met George Merrill, a working man from the Sheffield slums, who became his lifelong companion. In The Intermediate Sex he wrote that Eros is “a great leveller” uniting the most estranged ranks across class and caste, and that true democracy rests on it. His life inspired E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice. 18

George Ives tried to advance “the Cause” through a secret society. Meeting Wilde at the Authors’ Club in 1892, he hoped in vain to recruit him to the cause of homosexual emancipation, and in 1893 Douglas, with whom he had a brief affair, introduced him to several homosexual Oxford poets. In 1897 he founded the Order of Chaeronea, named after the battle of 338 BC in which the Sacred Band of Thebes, made up of male lovers, was annihilated. Members swore at their initiation never to harass or persecute lovers; the Order had rituals and passwords, and at its height is thought to have had 200 to 300 members. 19 20

The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology and the World League for Sexual Reform (1913–1935)

The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology was founded to advance a radical sex-reform agenda based on the writings of Carpenter and Ellis. Sources date its founding to 1913 or 1914; its first pamphlet, “Policy and principles”, is dated 1914. Carpenter was its first president, and the German Magnus Hirschfeld is counted among its co-founders. The Society was concerned above all with homosexuality, seeking to counter legal discrimination with scientific understanding; its members included Ives, Stella Browne, Laurence Housman, Ellis and Bernard Shaw. 21 18

The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology carried the German movement’s documents into Britain. Its pamphlets included The Social Problem of Sexual Inversion, an abridged translation of a treatise of Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, Browne’s Sexual Variety and Variability among Women (1917) and Ellis’s The Erotic Rights of Women (1918). Renamed the British Sexological Society in 1931, it seems to have continued until some point in the 1940s. 21

The London congress of the World League for Sexual Reform in 1929 linked the British movement with the continent. The League’s congresses met in Copenhagen (1928), London (1929), Vienna (1930) and Brno (1932), and its speakers included Hirschfeld, Norman Haire, Dora Russell, Charles Vickery Drysdale of the Malthusian League, Stella Browne, Marie Stopes, Laurence Housman, George Ives, Alexandra Kollontai and Max Hodann. But divided by the growing power of Hitler and Stalin, and losing its records in the Nazi raid on the Berlin institute in May 1933, the League ceased to exist in 1935. 22

Marie Stopes and the birth-control movement (1918–1921)

It was Marie Stopes’s Married Love that brought birth control into British public discourse. A palaeobotanist and the first female academic at the University of Manchester, Stopes had her book turned down by academic and popular publishers alike until Humphrey Roe, a Manchester businessman and birth-control campaigner whom she would later marry, paid £200 for its publication in March 1918. The book argued that marriage should be an equal partnership and was the first to point out that women’s desire peaks at ovulation and just before menstruation. Officially scorned in Britain, it went through 19 editions and almost 750,000 copies by 1931. 23 24

Letters from readers of Married Love drew Stopes into the actual birth-control movement. That year she published Wise Parenthood, a birth-control manual for married people, and on 17 March 1921 she and Roe opened the Mothers’ Clinic at Holloway in north London, the first birth-control clinic in Britain. Run by midwives with visiting doctors, the free clinic gave all married women advice on birth control and dispensed Stopes’s own cervical caps. When the Malthusian League opened its clinic in Walworth nine months later, it stressed that it was the first in Britain to teach contraception under medical supervision. 23 24 4

Stopes’s birth-control campaign had a strong eugenic motive. She explained that the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, founded to support the clinic, was meant to counteract the falling birth rate among “the thrifty, wise, well-contented” and the “reckless breeding from the C.3 end”. In public Stopes opposed abortion, arguing that preventing conception was all that was needed, though her private actions were at odds with her pronouncements. The open demand for working-class women’s right to abortion came from another current, that of Stella Browne. 23

The obscenity trial of The Well of Loneliness (1928)

It was Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness that made lesbianism a public question. Hall, whom her friends called “John”, shared her life with the singer Mabel Batten from 1907 and from 1915 with Batten’s cousin Una Troubridge, and was a celebrated author whose Adam’s Breed (1926) had won the Prix Femina and the James Tait Black Prize. Published on 27 July 1928, The Well of Loneliness told of the love and isolation of Stephen Gordon, an upper-class woman born an “invert”, and sought to spread the view of Ellis and others that homosexuality is inborn; Ellis supplied a commentary for the novel. 25 26

The campaign to ban The Well of Loneliness began in the press. For three weeks no reviewer called for its suppression, until James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, wrote, “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.” When the publisher Jonathan Cape asked the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, for his view, he declared the book “detrimental to the public interest” and threatened criminal proceedings unless it was withdrawn. “Jix”, as the Conservative Home Secretary was known, wanted to stem “the flood of filth coming across the Channel” and cracked down on nightclubs, the work of D. H. Lawrence and books on birth control. Cape secretly leased the rights to the Pegasus Press in Paris and kept the book coming in, and seizure followed in October. 26 27

The obscenity trial of The Well of Loneliness took no account of literary merit. Some forty witnesses, among them Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Laurence Housman, came to Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in November 1928, but under the Obscene Publications Act 1857 the Chief Magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, heard none of them. On 16 November he applied the Hicklin test, whether a work tended “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences”, held that a well-written obscene book was even more harmful, and ordered the book destroyed. The Well of Loneliness was not published again in England until 1949, but the uproar made lesbians visible in British and American culture, and for decades it was the best-known lesbian novel in English. 26

Abortion law reform: Stella Browne and Rex v Bourne (1929–1938)

The first in Britain to demand openly the right to abortion was Stella Browne. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Browne argued in her 1915 paper “Sexual Variety and Variability Among Women” that women had the right, equally with men, to sexual experience and variety outside conventional marriage and could refuse motherhood if they wished. She was active in Labour and communist parties and several women’s societies, and became secretary of the Chelsea Labour Party to bring birth control and abortion into politics. In 1929 she delivered “The Right to Abortion” to the World Sexual Reform Congress in London. 28

The Abortion Law Reform Association was founded in 1936 by Browne, Janet Chance, Alice Jenkins and Joan Malleson; Chance provided the funding and publicity, and Jenkins, as honorary secretary, built a network of supporters. Its aim was to change attitudes and the law to allow access to abortion in Britain. In 1938 the campaign went to court over the case of one girl. 29

Rex v Bourne established that an abortion to protect the mother’s health could be lawful. On 27 April 1938 a fourteen-year-old girl was raped by a group of guardsmen; refused an abortion at hospital in May, she was referred by Joan Malleson, a physician on the medico-legal council of the Abortion Law Reform Association, to the obstetric surgeon Aleck Bourne. On 14 June Bourne openly terminated the pregnancy, having told the police beforehand, and asked to be arrested. At the Old Bailey on 18 and 19 July the judge, Sir Malcolm Macnaghten, drew on the words “done in good faith for the purpose of preserving the life of the mother” in the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929 and told the jury that preventing the mother becoming a “physical or mental wreck” could qualify. Bourne was acquitted, and the judgment set the precedent that led to the Abortion Act of 1967. 30

Assessment: gradual reform between continental reversals

British sexual reform took a different path from the continent. The Soviet Union legalised abortion and abolished its sodomy law in the 1920s only to reverse both in 1934–1936, the German movement was crushed by the Nazis in 1933, and Franco erased the Spanish Republic’s reforms. Britain had neither revolution nor dramatic reaction. The Labouchere amendment and the Obscene Publications Act 1857 stood, yet birth-control clinics opened, Married Love sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and court precedents such as Rex v Bourne opened the way little by little. 8 23 30

The limits of the British movement were clear too. After the Wilde trials the defence of homosexual love retreated into private printing and secret societies, and eugenics ran deep in Stopes’s birth-control campaign and in the Malthusian League. Open persecution of homosexuals actually intensified after the Second World War: at the end of 1954, 1,069 men were in prison in England and Wales for homosexual acts, and the mathematician Alan Turing, convicted under the Labouchere amendment, had to accept chemical castration as the alternative to prison. 31 8 23 4

The legacy of the movement of this period became law only after the war. The Wolfenden report of 4 September 1957 recommended decriminalising homosexual acts between consenting adults, and the Sexual Offences Act 1967 removed from punishment private, consensual relations between two men over 21 in England and Wales. The same year brought the Abortion Act, building on the Bourne judgment. Scotland followed on homosexuality in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982. 31 32 30