Before Wilde. Charles Upchurch

family member and a female servant. The young Macklin was fired on the day after Mrs. Seymour was told of the affair, and the rest of the staff seem to have accepted this dismissal without dispute.²⁸ Mr. Seymour also attempted to intimidate the female servants into dropping the matter, curtly telling one of the women that “as for you, Bailey, you saw nothing.”²⁹ Hopkins recounted that on the night after she told Mrs. Seymour of the affair, “the servants were all in the kitchen at dinner-time; the dinner was served up as usual, but I believe that no one ate anything.” When the servants spoke of the matter together later, they expressed concern that they all remain united, or else “Hopkins . . . and the rest of the servants would be imprisoned as long as [they] lived” for putting forward a false accusation.³⁰ In spite of this potential risk, the servants felt compelled to go through with confronting the Seymours, because, in Hopkins’s own words, “we could not think of staying in his family after what had happened.”³¹

      Yet they did stay on in Seymour’s service, and for more than eight months after the initial incident they did so without making use of the courts. Instead they exercised a power of their own, based on their unresolved grievance against Seymour. The vicar of Crowood related that John Seymour had told him that “for the last twelve-months he had neither been able to change a shirt, or make water, or do anything whatever without being watched by these servants.”³² They stayed in his household, but they also felt empowered to police him. Over time, the allegations began to leak out, leading Seymour to move his family and household staff from Crowood to Worthington in an attempt to escape the rumors. The move was short-lived, though, and he returned to the town a few weeks later to face down the speculations.

      It was in this period of growing community suspicion that Seymour tricked Hopkins into signing a refutation of her charges on a sheet of paper that she had not read. He then had this document printed up as an advertisement in the local Reading newspaper. Hopkins was furious at this deception, and although the facts of the incident remain somewhat unclear, it seems to have been pivotal in the decision of the staff to take the matter to court in March 1828. There Hopkins denied that her story had ever changed, and she recounted some of the other schemes and subterfuges that John Seymour had used over the months to undermine the story and the unity of the servants. Not only did the newspaper advertisement make her and her fellow servants look like liars or extortionists, but it also took the dispute out of the household and into the community. A negotiated settlement within the household would no longer suffice, because if the advertisement were not publicly refuted it would be the servants and not John Seymour who would most likely be subject to community suspicion. Seymour’s attempt to avoid resolving the situation on the servants’ terms by appealing to the community seems to have pushed the servants to take the risk of going to court.

      The fact that the servants ultimately prevailed in the case was greatly aided by the strong evidence of John Seymour’s guilt and his contradictory statements about the events in question. Seymour’s defense shifted between accusations of a conspiracy among the servants and claims that what they had seen actually had an innocent interpretation. With his stories both inconsistent and implausible, he had difficulty gaining support even among the other propertied men of the town. At several points before the servants went to court, prominent local men were prepared to support him in taking legal action against them, but Seymour’s own reluctance to start this process undermined their belief in his story.³³ If other similar cases can be taken as a guide, it is likely that had Seymour been able to marshal the support of the local men of his class and gone to court first, he would have been exonerated.³⁴

      Exactly what Phoebe Hopkins and the other servants felt to be the proper punishment for sex between men remains unclear. The personal welfare of Charles Macklin was not their primary concern. After his dismissal he was sent back to his parents’ farm, where he resided for at least the next year. Rather than providing for him as an individual, or seeing that either he or Seymour received the proper state-sanctioned punishment for unnatural acts, the servants’ primary concern seemed to be that the order of the household be restored and some form of restitution made. Although their demands were not specifically recorded, they were apparently ready to wait. They were also, it seems, willing to remain in the household once the demands were met. This acquiescence was in part due to their dependence on a good letter of character from Seymour if they were to seek other jobs, and he attempted to use this lever against at least one of the women. Most likely it was because the household was at something of an impasse that Seymour took the gamble of publishing the newspaper advertisement. Tied together by mutual obligation, mutual dependence, and mutual threats in an increasingly tense situation, the servants ultimately resorted to the state’s authority to rectify a situation that they seemed unable to either forget or resolve.

      Macklin’s feelings toward Seymour were not directly recorded. He apparently did not seek help in stopping the repeated sexual acts with Seymour, although this omission should not be taken as evidence of conscious complicity in “unnatural crime.” Others of Macklin’s age, class, and rural background are recorded as expressing a lack of awareness that sex between men was wrong, or even that it was named. Young men in similar circumstances but with more knowledge of the world took more control over their situations. John Yoread was a fifteen-year-old servant who worked for the proprietor of the Anatomical Museum at 280 Regent Street, whose employer, from “the first day I went there . . . took liberties with me and felt my legs, which I didn’t like.” Yoread, in turn attempted to extort money from his employer for his silence, stating that he would accept “not less than 100l.” as “he knew a boy in Birmingham who had got 200l. or 300l. from a gentle- man that way.”³⁵ Knowledge of the seriousness of sex between men, let alone the extortion that might be possible because of it, seemed foreign to Macklin, though. Whether out of ignorance, affection, or simple deference to the older and socially superior Seymour, Macklin took no action of his own but left the matter in the hands of the other servants.

      Although wealth was a great advantage in such trials, the critical factors were the way character was defined and the great weight that assessments of character carried when decisions were made regarding whose testimony to believe. Men of all classes were judged by the same yardstick of character, which involved criteria such as standing in the community, respectability of occupation, and responsibility to family. Seymour lost his case in part because his actions among his own social peers, long after the alleged incident with Macklin, seemed to call his integrity into question. Other men of good standing in the upper and middle classes who had not so compromised themselves could often prevail in a contest between accuser and accused.

      In perhaps no other case does the privileging of the word of a middle-class man over that of a working-class man seem more pronounced than when Patrick Dawley and his two sons were twice made the victims of John Webber. In the early fall of 1842, Patrick Dawley, a “dealer in cakes,” was locking his outer door after 1:00 A.M. when John Webber came up to him and asked where he might get lodging for the night.³⁶ After being told that no places would be open at that late hour, Webber asked if he might be able to stay with him until morning. Although Patrick had never met Webber before, he “looked at him, and seeing he was most respectably dressed, said ‘You don’t mean to say, Sir, that a gentleman like you would sleep in the beds with the poor people down here?’” Webber responded by telling Patrick, “I shall be under a great compliment or obligation to you, if you will allow me to sit in a chair until morning.” Patrick replied: “It is a pity that a gentlemanly man like you should be without a lodging, so you may come in and sit till morning.” The two men talked together for some time in the kitchen, “and the more they talked the more [the] witness [Patrick Dawley] liked the prisoner [John Webber].”³⁷ When Patrick was ready to go to bed himself, he told Webber that if he liked, he could sleep in the bed in the kitchen, where his two sons were currently asleep. Patrick first attempted to wake one of his sons and send him upstairs to sleep with his sisters, so that there would be more room for Webber, but Webber told him not to bother the younger boy. Patrick left his guest and his sons in the kitchen and went to bed, but within the hour he was awakened by the shouts of his elder son, James.

      It was the younger son, the thirteen-year-old Thomas, who explained to the police court that “on the night of Sunday last, about 2 o’clock, while asleep with his elder brother in the kitchen of the house, he