Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England
by Neil McKenna (Faber and Faber, £16.99)
It wasn’t illegal in Victorian England for a man to dress as a woman. But if a man wore women’s clothing in a public place and made a spectacle of himself while doing so—well, that was a different matter. On 28th April 1870, Miss Stella Boulton and Mrs Fanny Graham were arrested as they tried to leave the Strand Theatre. Their appearance and behaviour had marked them out as prostitutes: wearing silk and lace, their faces painted, they had smoked and drunk and made suggestive noises and gestures at the audience. Prostitutes were common at the Strand, but the officer who arrested Stella and Fanny knew that these were no common prostitutes. They were two young men, Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, who had for some years been leading double lives as women. The next day, they were charged with outraging public decency.
There was another, more serious charge: the “abominable crime of buggery,” which until 1861 had carried the death penalty. Boulton and Park were accused of having anal sex with each other and with “divers other persons,” conspiring to “induce and incite” potentially innumerable men to the same crime. Their trial, which became one of the great sexual scandals of the age, turned on obtaining proof of homosexual activity. Fanny and Stella’s dresses were displayed in court and their letters read aloud. Lawyers debated just how conclusive was the discovery of glycerine and chloroform (the Victorians used the latter as an aphrodisiac) among the men’s possessions. Six doctors examined Fanny and Stella in front of an audience of 16, looking for anything that might indicate anal sex, according to medical wisdom of the day: a dilated anus, an elongated penis, anal warts, syphilitic sores.
Neil McKenna’s Fanny and Stella, like Kate Summerscale’s hugely successful The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008) and Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace (2012), uses a Victorian criminal investigation to reconstruct the society around it. McKenna, whose last book was a “sexual and emotional” biography of Oscar Wilde, is expert at parsing the homosexual subcultures of the 19th century. He portrays Stella and Fanny’s world in all its glitz and grime: a world of drag balls and theatricals, lovesick suitors and paying customers. Boulton and Park crossed boundaries of both gender and class, mixing with dukes and diplomats as well as with male and female prostitutes. For a period, Stella lived as the “wife” of the Duke of Newcastle’s son. In court, witnesses struggled over whether to refer to Stella and Fanny as “he” or “she.” McKenna allows this slipperiness to pervade the book, calling his two subjects by their preferred female names even as he describes the state of their male genitalia.
McKenna’s approach is imaginative rather than analytical. Though he quotes extensively from trial transcripts, medical literature and Stella’s letters, there are whole chapters in which he abandons documentary evidence in favour of novelistic recreation of his subjects’ psyches (“For as long as she could remember, from before she had words to express it… she had always been Fanny in her heart”). Even in less fanciful moments it is hard to separate speculation from fact, since McKenna provides no endnotes, beyond attributing quotations. As a result, his depiction of the world outside Fanny and Stella’s circle is insubstantial, lacking a sense of the ways in which the Victorians engaged with and recorded their own culture. And though the book explains 19th-century attitudes towards homosexuality, it makes little attempt to situate these in a wider context, aside from a brief chapter which credits the usual suspects (Darwinism, the rise of disease, the Victorian love of taxonomy and so on). On occasion McKenna’s focus is so myopic as to seem perverse: he quotes a letter sent to the poet Swinburne which discusses the Boulton and Park case, yet fails to mention the intense homoeroticism of Swinburne’s own writing.
That Fanny and Stella is not a specialist work does not quite excuse this narrowness of vision. Summerscale’s books, richer and subtler than McKenna’s, prove that meticulous research and use of contemporary art and literature need not interfere with narrative punch. Fanny and Stella is as flamboyant as its subjects. Even so, it feels like a wasted opportunity.
It wasn’t illegal in Victorian England for a man to dress as a woman. But if a man wore women’s clothing in a public place and made a spectacle of himself while doing so—well, that was a different matter. On 28th April 1870, Miss Stella Boulton and Mrs Fanny Graham were arrested as they tried to leave the Strand Theatre. Their appearance and behaviour had marked them out as prostitutes: wearing silk and lace, their faces painted, they had smoked and drunk and made suggestive noises and gestures at the audience. Prostitutes were common at the Strand, but the officer who arrested Stella and Fanny knew that these were no common prostitutes. They were two young men, Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, who had for some years been leading double lives as women. The next day, they were charged with outraging public decency.
There was another, more serious charge: the “abominable crime of buggery,” which until 1861 had carried the death penalty. Boulton and Park were accused of having anal sex with each other and with “divers other persons,” conspiring to “induce and incite” potentially innumerable men to the same crime. Their trial, which became one of the great sexual scandals of the age, turned on obtaining proof of homosexual activity. Fanny and Stella’s dresses were displayed in court and their letters read aloud. Lawyers debated just how conclusive was the discovery of glycerine and chloroform (the Victorians used the latter as an aphrodisiac) among the men’s possessions. Six doctors examined Fanny and Stella in front of an audience of 16, looking for anything that might indicate anal sex, according to medical wisdom of the day: a dilated anus, an elongated penis, anal warts, syphilitic sores.
Neil McKenna’s Fanny and Stella, like Kate Summerscale’s hugely successful The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008) and Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace (2012), uses a Victorian criminal investigation to reconstruct the society around it. McKenna, whose last book was a “sexual and emotional” biography of Oscar Wilde, is expert at parsing the homosexual subcultures of the 19th century. He portrays Stella and Fanny’s world in all its glitz and grime: a world of drag balls and theatricals, lovesick suitors and paying customers. Boulton and Park crossed boundaries of both gender and class, mixing with dukes and diplomats as well as with male and female prostitutes. For a period, Stella lived as the “wife” of the Duke of Newcastle’s son. In court, witnesses struggled over whether to refer to Stella and Fanny as “he” or “she.” McKenna allows this slipperiness to pervade the book, calling his two subjects by their preferred female names even as he describes the state of their male genitalia.
McKenna’s approach is imaginative rather than analytical. Though he quotes extensively from trial transcripts, medical literature and Stella’s letters, there are whole chapters in which he abandons documentary evidence in favour of novelistic recreation of his subjects’ psyches (“For as long as she could remember, from before she had words to express it… she had always been Fanny in her heart”). Even in less fanciful moments it is hard to separate speculation from fact, since McKenna provides no endnotes, beyond attributing quotations. As a result, his depiction of the world outside Fanny and Stella’s circle is insubstantial, lacking a sense of the ways in which the Victorians engaged with and recorded their own culture. And though the book explains 19th-century attitudes towards homosexuality, it makes little attempt to situate these in a wider context, aside from a brief chapter which credits the usual suspects (Darwinism, the rise of disease, the Victorian love of taxonomy and so on). On occasion McKenna’s focus is so myopic as to seem perverse: he quotes a letter sent to the poet Swinburne which discusses the Boulton and Park case, yet fails to mention the intense homoeroticism of Swinburne’s own writing.
That Fanny and Stella is not a specialist work does not quite excuse this narrowness of vision. Summerscale’s books, richer and subtler than McKenna’s, prove that meticulous research and use of contemporary art and literature need not interfere with narrative punch. Fanny and Stella is as flamboyant as its subjects. Even so, it feels like a wasted opportunity.
