by Koven, Seth
Only a year after Nevinson recorded his impressions, John Francis Bloxam, an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford, published a daring short fiction probing the libidinal drives fueling the mixture of asceticism and ritualism that was such a marked feature of the masculine personae of Oxford House men.131 Bloxam’s story, “The Priest and the Acolyte,” appeared under an alias in the sole number of the Oxfordbased journal he edited, the Chameleon.132 It chronicles the attempt of a young, “ascetic” upper-class cleric to sublimate his same-sex desires in self-denying work as a priest in a small mission chapel in the countryside. But the priest’s longing for the golden-curled, fourteen-year-old acolyte sent to serve him overmasters him and they become lovers. Bloxam’s narrator and protagonist explicitly link the aesthetic attractions of religious life to homoerotic appreciation of youthful male beauty. Rejecting entirely the possibility of interpreting his story as the immoral exploitation of a youth by an older man, Bloxam’s narrator confirms his protagonist’s self-serving claim that he is a “martyr” in “the struggle against the idolatrous worship of convention”(358). “The Priest and the Acolyte” suggests that asceticism, aestheticism, the rejection of conventional norms, and male same-sex desire are intertwined components of a coherent and moral approach to manly life.
If Bloxam’s imagined space of homosexual freedom (albeit only fleeting) within the framework of his fiction was the English countryside, he spent the final years of his own working life as the vicar of St. Saviour’s, Hoxton, the most notoriously ritualist slum parish in the East End of London in the early twentieth century.133 Bloxam owed his appointment to none other than Winnington Ingram, then the bishop of London, who viewed Bloxam as a safe appointment in comparison to his predecessor at St. Saviour’s. We can only assume that Winnington Ingram had no knowledge of Bloxam’s youthful literary efforts and his close association with Wilde’s circle at Oxford in the 1890s.134 During the previous decade, Winnington Ingram had been forced to discipline severely the previous incumbent of St. Saviour’s, Ernest Edward Kilburn, whose commitment to enticing the poor of Hoxton into his the church was exceeded only by his love of ritual.135
Toynbee Hall, like Oxford House, served as a magnet for men discontented with existing relations between rich and poor and with prevailing conceptions of gender and sexuality. “Comradeship” at Toynbee Hall flirted dangerously on the boundaries between homosociability, homoeroticism, and homosexuality. When English admirers of Walt Whitman rallied to provide financial support for the poet of democracy and comradely love in 1885, they found allies at Toynbee Hall. William Michael Rossetti was pleased that T. Hancock Nunn, a leading resident at Toynbee Hall, “the headquarters of those University Men who are endeavouring to tinge the grime of the East end of London with a little civilization” proposed to “do something, himself and others” to help Whitman.136 Samuel Barnett also admired Whitman, though it seems he, along with so many of his contemporaries, either could not or would not acknowledge the homoerotic themes saturating Whitman’s work. He dreamed that one day Toynbee Hall and its residents would succeed in transforming the soulless and impersonal metropolis into Whitman’s “City of Friends.” In this city, the poor would have “the personal care of a brother man better equipped than himself with gifts of time; and all men from the lowest to the greatest would delight to know one another.”137
The elevating virtues of passionate male friendships among social equals and across class lines was one subject about which residents of the first male settlements all waxed rhapsodic. H. Clay Trumbull’s 1892 tome, Friendship the Master Passion or The Nature and History of Friendship, and its Place as a Force in the World, is a notably uninhibited monument to the Anglo-American cult of “friendship-love,” his translation of the biblical word “agape,” which he defined as love that neither demanded nor desired control over the beloved.138 Friendship-love was precisely what Toynbee Hall and Oxford House had in mind when they enjoined settlers to make friends with one another and the poor. One Toynbee resident put the matter quite simply: “It is love that begets love,” which in turn binds together the disparate parts of the nation. “We have done almost everything for our working classes,” he continued, “but love them.”139 Acting on this imperative for the man of West London to love his forgotten brother in the East End was the essential work of the settlement movement. Barnett had famously enjoined settlers to express their fraternal love for the poor through what he called the “personal touch.” Despite its apparent endorsement of tactile intimacy, Barnett’s idea of touch was emphatically not sexual. For him, the personal touch was merely a figure of speech to describe constructing bridges of mutual sympathy between East and West London through friendships between individual settlers and individual working-class men and boys. In language echoing Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Barnett insisted that cross-class friendship entailed stripping away outward signs of social distinction “to get at the man hidden within the clothes.”140
At least a few men who came to work or live at Toynbee Hall quite literally lusted after the man “hidden within the clothes.” C. R. Ashbee conspicuously interpreted Barnett’s ideas about friendship, touch, and the democratic possibilities of a “world out of clothes” to serve his own needs and ideas. During his association with Toynbee Hall (1886–89), Ashbee tested the Barnetts’ determination to preserve the settlement movement from the taint of “unnatural fraternity.” Ashbee arrived at Toynbee Hall in 1887 after three years in the intellectual and social hothouse of Kings College Cambridge. At Kings, Ashbee had found a group of young men who shared his passion for Carlyle and Ruskin, for the riddles of art, poetry, and philosophy, and, above all else, for one another’s company. Ashbee and his friends Roger Fry and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson formed a circle of frustratingly chaste comrades who worshipped the beautiful while seeking “to serve humanity” amidst the dirtiness of the slums.141 They revered not only Edward Carpenter’s social and sexual philosophy, but the way he lived by his principles. After staying with Carpenter and his working-class lover, George Merrill, at Millthorpe in December 1885, Ashbee proclaimed that Carpenter “come[s] nearer to ones ideal of the Man than anyone I have ever met.”142 So when Ashbee arrived at Toynbee Hall, he hoped to find in Samuel Barnett another Carpenter, and in his relations with fellow residents and laboring men, the building blocks to create his idealized “comradeship in the life of men.”143 He was destined to be bitterly disappointed in both Barnett as a mentor and Toynbee Hall as a place to develop his daring but muddled ideas about art, sexuality, and cross-class brotherhood.
During the Michaelmas term of 1887, Ashbee launched a new venture in aesthetic philanthropy and brotherly love for the benefit of Whitechapel. Two weeks after dining with the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, with whom he discussed “dreams and schemes and promises” for East London, Ashbee confided in his journal the stirring of his plan: “The inauguration of an Idea.”144 Ashbee’s idea grew out of a project he had undertaken with members of his Ruskin reading class at Toynbee Hall to decorate the settlement’s dining room with heraldic friezes of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges supporting the settlement.145 In Ashbee’s adoring eyes, his erstwhile Cockney students were “my boys and men,” who gave him “upwards of 2000 hours of love time.” Ashbee’s thoughts were rapidly moving beyond the social constraints imposed by the classroom. They were his men and boys, and they gave him, not merely time, but “love time.”
Ashbee’s enthusiasm for Cockney youths was widely shared among philanthropic men in the slums, many of whom idealized the youths’ “high spirits” as proof of their unrealized human potential. The aristocratic Hugh Legge, a resident at Oxford House in the early 1890s, described his affectionate relations with the rough lads who attended the boys’ club that he managed in terms strikingly similar to Ashbee’s. They were “my lads” and “my boys,” whose earthy smells, physical strength, and pluck he admired.146 Winnington Ingram’s official biographer believed his subject’s work among the roughest
lads “most attracted” him. He was most fully himself among these “lads” and believed their power of reciprocal affection “far surpassed that of a woman.”147 So deeply did the working-class boy appeal to the imaginations of sexually dissident elite men that one scholar has recently argued that he was a sort of femme fatale, an iconic object of erotic and altruistic desires.148
In the months ahead, as Ashbee formulated his plans for the Guild and School of Handicraft, Ruskinian ideas about craft production fused with Carpenter’s vision of male comradeship across class lines.149 Ashbee proposed to establish his School of Handicraft devoted to training young men and boys from the slums in the arts and crafts and to instilling in them a love of beauty and design. The burden of instruction would fall on Ashbee and on the adult members of the professional Guild of Handicraft, which was run on democratic and cooperative principles. Ashbee’s closest friends at Toynbee Hall—Arthur Laurie, Hubert Llewelyn Smith, Hugh Fairfax-Cholmeley, and A.G.L. Rogers—joined him as members of the governing committee. Barnett delighted in Ashbee’s initiative while Carpenter praised Ashbee’s “real love for the rougher types of youths among the ‘people’, which of course will help you much—without which indeed one could do but little.”150
Within a few months of the founding of the guild and school in 1888, Ashbee had grown disillusioned with Toynbee Hall and Samuel Barnett. It seems likely that as Ashbee came to discover that Samuel Barnett’s conception of fraternal love was entirely sexless, his initial adoration for the saintly Barnett quickly turned to virulent hatred. “A man very great but very evil,” Ashbee decided. “He is primarily a eunuch—in spirit and heart—that is the reason for his coldblooded saintliness. He plays fast and loose with the moral enthusiasm of young men, and has not the strength either to lead or to be led by them.”151 Ashbee’s assessment is largely self-revelatory and many years later, upon rereading these words, he asked “forgiveness of Barnett’s shade.”152 His sexually charged image of Barnett as a moral eunuch must have contrasted disastrously, in Ashbee’s mind, with Carpenter’s robust manliness. As Ashbee grappled with his own ever more urgent same-sex desires, he sought to consolidate “the love of my friends … making the bulwarks of real human love so strong in the hearts of our men and boys [the East London guildsmen and students] that no castrated affection shall dare face it.“153
By March 1889, Ashbee had shaken Barnett off his back and along with some of his fellow Toynbee residents had established his own splinter group in Beaumont Square, a short distance away from Toynbee Hall (figure 5.5).154 If Barnett could not give Ashbee the affection he craved, the boys at the school more than satisfied his needs. They were “Treasures of the New Socialism,” chosen by Ashbee’s friend, Arthur Laurie, from his pupils at the People’s Palace, one of late Victorian London’s best-known attempts to bring education and entertainment to the poor. Ashbee felt that “eternal love” had been “sealed” between him and his “rough lads” as they frolicked together on a country holiday he organized to the Isle of Wight.155
What did these youthful “Treasures” think about the Toynbee men in their midst? The son of an out-of-work saddle maker, Frank Galton156 went on several such excursions with Ashbee’s fellow workers, A.G.L. Rogers and Hubert Lewellyn Smith, and left a vivid account of what such holidays meant to him. A gifted student who avoided both drink and the music hall, Galton toiled as an errand boy in an engraving shop while attending classes at the Working Men’s College. This work eventually led him to Toynbee Hall and Ashbee’s group of friends where he hoped to improve his skills as a draftsman. He found the atmosphere congenial and spent countless evenings “drawing from plaster models, working on bits of metal.” While he gained valuable skills, the Toynbee men were the “main interest.” Hubert Llewelyn Smith, A.G.L. Rogers and Vaughan Nash “opened a new world to me.” “They were from the public schools and university,” Galton remembered, “and were entirely new phenomenon to us, we had never met people of their kind before.” The university men took Galton and his classmates on weekend excursions to Epping Forest, which were “red letter days” for Galton. They all slept in hammocks, and women from the neighboring cottages brought tea and did the housekeeping for the young university men and their band of East Enders. They romped through the forests, played “chase the stag,” cricket, and rounders, and enjoyed “substantial plain dinners.”157
This was the sort of utopian gambol that appealed deeply to philanthropic men in the slums, especially to the Toynbeeites who founded the School and Guild of Handicraft. Galton felt that these heady adventures changed the course of his life. “It is impossible to exaggerate the value of these short weekends to us two boys.” The beauty of the forest, the bracing exercise, and “above all the society of three young men of high culture and great ability, all combined to produce an effect it is difficult to describe and impossible to over rate.”158 Galton may not have been the typical East London boy, but the gratitude he felt so unreservedly toward male settlers is echoed by the handful of working-class memoirists associated with clubs and classes at Toynbee Hall and Oxford House.159
FIGURE 5.5. Ashbee ultimately translated his disappointment with the Barnetts and the demise of his connection with Toynbee Hall into aesthetic form through a series of images. The upper two convey his aspiration of using craft training to build bridges of comradeship between university men and working-class East Londoners. The bottom image is a visual allegory of his departure—along with the Guild and School of Handicraft—from the familiar shores of Toynbee Hall. (From C. R. Ashbee, A Few Chapters in Workshop Reconstruction and Citizenship, and an Endeavour Towards the Teaching of Ruskin and Morris, 1894.)
If relations between the settlers and their band of working-class youths seemed idyllic, among the settlers themselves, tensions mounted. Undoubtedly, Ashbee’s insistent and difficult egoism lay at the heart of the internecine conflicts at the school and guild. Ashbee was uncharacteristically reticent about this period in his life. He destroyed his journal for these months, perhaps because the memories were too painful. All we know definitely is that by Christmas 1890, Ashbee was entirely isolated. His colleagues had resigned from the committee of the school and were ensconced in a rival craft school close by Toynbee Hall. A letter from the publisher Kegan Paul to Arthur Rogers implies that Ashbee had attempted to push comradeship beyond what his peers would tolerate. “I agree,” Paul wrote, “with those who oppose his [Ashbee’s] action, and that I am sure your hitherto joint work cannot be carried on on his lines … that any raising of boys to a different level and to companionship with those who have had so different training must be on a basis of fact and manly life, not on sentiment and moonshine.” While no hint of any sexual scandal ever appeared in print about Ashbee’s relations with his Cockney boys, he seems to have pushed “companionship” with his boys beyond what even his friends and supporters could tolerate.160
Ashbee’s endeavors at Toynbee Hall and his subsequent break with it—whether an expulsion or self-imposed exile—made visible an erotic dimension discernible, albeit only faintly, in so much male slum work in late Victorian Britain. Toynbee Hall proved to be a much less fertile ground for planting the seeds of an erotic but elevated form of male comradeship than Ashbee initially had supposed. Just as Oxford House could not allow its High Churchmanship to turn into outlawed ritualism, so, too, Toynbee Hall needed to preserve friendship-love from the dangers of same-sex passion. Far from idealizing celibacy, as did the founders of Oxford House, or expecting chastity of its unmarried residents, as did Toynbee Hall, Ashbee spent much of his subsequent adult life seeking to satisfy his sexual needs with working-class men and boys
at home and abroad, and, occasionally, with his remarkable comrade wife, Janet, whom he married in 1898.161
Leaders of the men’s settlement movement were acutely aware of the paramount importance of policing the uncertain boundaries separating male friendship-love from homosexuality, all the more so from the mid-1890s onward when the trials of Os
car Wilde cast suspicion on relations between all elite men, especially those identified as “aesthetes,” and poor slum youths.162 Wilde had ironically appropriated the rhetoric of aesthetic philanthropy and child rescue when asked to explain to the court why he had treated two young working-class men to an expensive dinner at Kettner’s, a well-known bohemian haunt in Soho. A “passion to civilize the community” was his arch reply, a passion that compelled him to take beautiful “street arabs” into private rooms for confidential chats.163 The crusading journalist W. T. Stead feared that public exposure of “a few more cases like Oscar Wilde” would seriously impair “the freedom of comradeship” that served the British “race” so well.164
Wilde’s civilizing “passion” among working-class boys and youths echoed a scene from the 1881 pornographic urban fantasy, Sins of the Cities of the Plain, Or Confessions of a Maryanne, a book that Wilde apparently had read.165 The anonymous author exploited the homoerotic underbelly of male slumming in his gruesome tale of a gentleman who, masquerading as a philanthropist, “went down Whitechapel way” and picked up a beautiful thirteen-year-old shoeblack living in a Ragged School Refuge.166 Tender benevolence—the gentleman gives the boy a bath and buys him new clothes—suddenly turns into coerced sexual aggression. After raping the boy, the gentleman sells him into prostitution. While this fictional narrative should not be read as a statement of historical facts, it does, as Morris Kaplan argues, emphasize “the difficulty of separating the exaggerations and projections of fantasy from documentary representations of social reality.”167