Before Wilde. Charles Upchurch

a change of venue. As an upper-class man, Lowndes was entitled to have his case moved from the Central Criminal Court to the Court of the Queen’s Bench. This change meant that the case would be heard before a jury of individuals of high social rank, and nearly all the men put on trial at this venue for unnatural assault charges between 1820 and 1871 were acquitted.⁵² Yet on the day of the trial, he all but threw away these advantages by arguing the case himself. Being wholly inexperienced, he made a poor job of it. Among his mistakes was citing the previous unnatural-assault charges against him, from the Bow Street and Marlborough Street police courts, as evidence of his innocence and susceptibility to false charges.⁵³ His arrogant manner in the courtroom also seems to have greatly irritated Lord Chief Justice Thomas Denman and did nothing to sway the jury. Lowndes was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment at Coldbath Fields for his acts.

      A few weeks of imprisonment appear to have made Lowndes more contrite but did not diminish his desire for special treatment. He wrote several letters to the Home Office in the first months of his incarceration, asking if his sentence could be replaced by a fine to the Crown “or some charity.”⁵⁴ Even at this point his letters seem to show disbelief at his incarceration and a certainty that the situation could be rectified when the proper personal connection had been established. His fear, he said, was that his friends and relations would not bother to distinguish between his rightful or wrongful imprisonment if he was not released soon. The marginal notes of the home secretary and undersecretary in his letters to them indicate that they had little sympathy for a young man whom they considered dissolute and out of control, and no special considerations were given to him.⁵⁵

      Despite Lowndes’s expressed worries over his friends’ and relations’ opinions, no family member or long-time friend wrote letters or spoke on his behalf, either before or after his trial. Witnesses from Lowndes’s social class were more likely to be believed when they were pitted against those from the lower classes, but with no respectable individuals of any class to speak for his character, no one except Lowndes himself could dispute the word of the shop boy who had accused him. By contrast, the shop boy in this particular case, as well as other young men whom Lowndes had previously accosted, did have family members and friends to testify on their behalf. Under such circumstances and in light of his previous actions, Lowndes’s wealth alone, bereft of the social and familial connections that usually went with it, was insufficient to shift the outcome of his criminal case in his favor.⁵⁶

      Lowndes’s behavior led to his abandonment by his family, and yet not all upper-class men, even those whose guilt was strongly assumed, faced such ostracism. An extremely favorable obituary in the Annual Register commemorated Richard Heber, whose sexual desires for younger men had received substantial publicity less than a decade before his death. Heber’s assumed sexual relationship with a young man was the central issue in a 1826 libel case brought by the young man’s father against the editor of the John Bull (see chapter 5). The obituary printed at the time of Heber’s death in 1833 acknowledged this incident in a reasonably frank manner: “In 1826 he [Heber] resigned his seat [in Parliament]. He had quitted England in 1825, and he prolonged his stay on the continent for several years. . . . In the year 1831, he returned to England, but not into the society which he had left; for rumors had been in circulation degrading to his moral character. With the exception of his visits to the auction-rooms and booksellers’ shops, he lived entirely secluded among his books at Pimlico or Hodnet.”⁵⁷

      Heber was neither the defendant nor the plaintiff in the libel trial, yet during the proceedings the editor of the John Bull had done much to establish the existence of a sexual relationship between him and a younger man.⁵⁸ After staying abroad for four years, he was able to return to his home in the London district of Pimlico and resume his free if isolated life. The obituary mentions the books Heber wrote, the catalogues he compiled, and his extensive library of rare books. It notes the kindness that he had always shown to his younger brother and the steps Heber took to ensure that the brother received a good education. There is every reason to believe that its writer knew of Heber’s earlier sexual relationship with the younger man and assumed that readers did also, yet that knowledge did not stop him from presenting a positive assessment of Heber’s life.

      The 1844 obituary for the Rev. Percy Jocelyn, second son of the Earl of Roden, also demonstrates the continued involvement of a family in the life of a man who had become involved in one of the most scandalous incidents involving sex between men in the first half of the nineteenth century. Twenty years before his death Jocelyn had held the title of bishop of Clogher, and under that title he was brought before a magistrate for an unnatural crime.⁵⁹ Released on bail, Jocelyn disappeared and was not heard of publicly until his death.⁶⁰ The obituary indicated that Jocelyn had lived a simple and pious life of exile in a small Scottish town, where “the post occasionally brought him letters, sealed with coronets.” Some of his books and articles of furniture had been sent to him, although with the family name “obliterated” so as to protect the family’s reputation and preserve his exile. Jocelyn’s career was destroyed, and he paid for that mistake for the rest of his life; yet even in his disgrace, family letters and artifacts were shared with him, and the story of his pious penance, demonstrating the availability of grace even to those who had so transgressed, was eventually reproduced in numerous publications throughout the nation.⁶¹

      The siblings of John Joyce were more divided in their attitude toward a disgraced relative. Joyce, from a wealthy family, had been involved in a well-publicized case involving sex between men and related extortions. Stories had been printed in the Times giving his name, and the circumstances surrounding his arrest made his guilt appear extremely likely. He was convicted and transported to Gibraltar. His sister, Johanna Carrington, wrote many letters over several years to the Home Office,

      

      arguing for her brother’s release from transportation into her care.⁶² The ten-year mark was the conventional point at which men sentenced to transportation for life were released on a ticket of leave, and Johanna, anxious to see her brother again, began writing to the Home Office to inquire into the prospects for his release. Her letters stated that her brother was “no common ruffian, but was educated with care and brought up in luxury by a good father whom he lost very young.” Knowing the Home Office concerns in these matters, she also stressed that “he will not; like many ticket of leave men, be thrown on the wide world without the means of sustenance as I can offer him that.”⁶³

      Eventually, Carrington began to suspect that someone in the family was working against her efforts, and she began to mention this issue in her letters. She wrote to Earl Grey that she had “wondered whether any influence of a Wealthy Brother—who has reasons for keeping the convict where he is—could have operated against his release.”⁶⁴ Not wishing to harm her own case by an improper insinuation, she quickly added, “I trust the cause of justice or mercy could not be so tampered with.”

      The actions of another family member were unnecessary to ensure her brother’s continued detention, however, as the men of the Home Office had extremely strong feelings against John Joyce based on the trial itself. Undersecretary Waddington, assistant to the home secretary, scrawled on the outside cover of one petition letter that release “was quite out of the question. It was one of the worst cases ever known.”⁶⁵ Waddington seemed to be referring to the fact that Joyce had befriended a group of working-class extortionists and aided them in the exploitation of a member of his own class. This breach of class solidarity in combination with sexual acts between men seems to have turned the men of Joyce’s own social class strongly against him (see chapters 6 and 7). Joyce’s transgression against class as well as “nature” struck a particularly sensitive nerve. Something of his fate is indicated by the last letter in the Home Office file on him, written by Joyce himself after thirteen years of transportation. Perhaps suspecting that there were no plans to release him, he requested to be sent to Western Australia, where at least he would have the chance to build something of a life for himself.

      In spite of his conviction and more than ten years of exile and imprisonment for what men at the Home Office apparently considered to be one of the most egregious transgressions related to sex between men, Johanna remained devoted to her brother: she was willing not only to accept him back into her life but