This rare film from 1897
shows Queen Victoria
celebrating her Diamond Jubilee.
It's the ultimate display of order and respect.
But don't be deceived.
Beneath the surface,
Victorian Britain is in turmoil.
In the 1890s, the modern world erupts.
This is the decade
that electrified Britain.
When science, entertainment,
art and morality collide.
And the Victorians have to make sense of it all.
Now, in three films, Dr Hannah Fry,
Philippa Perry
and I are travelling back in time,
to an era when anything seemed possible,
to understand what was really on the Victorians' minds.
Dear ones, if you can hear me,
I'm already dead...
And please don't forget to feed the cat.
Well, I'm shocked.
Think how shocked they were in the 1890s.
I've always been fascinated
by the art and culture of this decade.
The daring works of Oscar Wilde.
I congratulate you on the great success of
your performance... LAUGHTER
The fantastical tales of HG Wells.
Now, I'm going to discover
how they were shaped by fears of moral,
social and racial degeneration.
The whole sort of cultural idea
is the improvement of people,
improvement of their stock.
And I'll see how the Victorians' anxieties
provoked radical arguments for women's empowerment.
And a pioneering campaign against imperial rule,
and its racist underpinnings.
"The British Empire will come to grief
"unless it changes its methods of dealing with the aboriginal races."
Welcome to the decade the future landed.
It's 1894,
and the novelist HG Wells is readying his new time machine
for its maiden voyage.
"What strange developments of humanity,"
the time traveller ponders,
"what wonderful advances upon
"our rudimentary civilisation might appear?"
And with that, he flings himself into futurity.
REPEATED PINGING
DRAMATIC MUSIC
But the future that HG Wells showed us
was one in which the human race had not evolved, nor advanced,
but, rather, decayed and degenerated.
Wells was a student of science,
and in his vision, society has divided into two species.
The effete, childlike Eloi,
who drift, carefree, on the surface of the Earth...
..but then huddle, in fear of the dark
and of being preyed upon by
the ape-like Morlocks,
who toil away underground.
The time traveller's journey might be the stuff of science fiction,
but it wasn't pure fantasy.
This was a future all too recognisably rooted in the present.
For HG Wells, writing at a time of
widening social divisions,
the Eloi represent the upper class,
living in luxury upon the surface,
only to be consumed by the workers,
the Morlocks, massing ominously beneath them.
The Time Machine is emblematic of the 1890s -
a decade of invention and scientific discovery,
but one in which conflicting visions of the future
are at war in the Victorian imagination.
On the one hand,
the Empire has never been so vast.
Are the British destined to be
the world's master race -
robust, enduring?
Yet, at home, industrialisation
has rapidly swollen the numbers of the urban poor.
There's rising hostility to immigration.
Perhaps Britain's future really is like that of the Eloi and Morlocks,
one of decline and degeneration.
These fantasies and fears have been brewing
in the Victorian mind since 1859,
when Charles Darwin challenged the assumption that species
were fixed and immutable.
Since then, other eminent thinkers
have begun to argue that Darwin's theory of evolution
might be given practical application
to the human race.
This social Darwinism, as it came to be called,
held that human society should be governed by
the survival of the fittest and that, with intervention,
one could improve the genetic stock of the nation.
Some believe that these measures
might protect humanity
from the kind of social decay
prophesied in The Time Machine.
One Social Darwinist - no less than Darwin's own half-cousin,
Francis Galton - sought to push these principles
to what he saw as their logical conclusion.
And the name he gave to his new project?
Eugenics.
Francis Galton's proposition
combined social elitism with outright racism.
"Could not the undesirables be got rid of
"and the desirables multiplied?" he later asks.
But first, Galton needed to gather data on
the British people's physical characteristics.
Lots of data.
And in a way that anticipates
today's tech giants,
he encouraged people to supply their personal details,
and even pay for the privilege.
In a pioneering exercise,
Galton set up what he called his anthropometric laboratory
where, for a mere thruppence,
he would take your measurements.
So, here I am in Galton's lab.
Got my thruppence. What does it get me?
So, this is the card that Galton used.
And so, you come into the lab,
and you'd be measured for various dimensions.
OK, so, things like skull dimensions.
So, use calipers, you know, to measure
your temporal dimensions there,
and across the sagittal plane there. HE LAUGHS
I'm from a long line of big 'eads. There it is, yeah.
So, you know, eye dimensions like that.
I'm really conscious of poking you in the eye here!
This astonishing piece of equipment
is here to test
your visual acuity. Oh.
So... What do I do? You look through it.
And you've got to see which of those cards you can still read,
in this slightly peculiar angle.
Well, I keep seeing the word "church."
So, they're pages from...
the Book of Prayer.
But wouldn't people know some of this text anyway?
Do you know what? He pointed that out
when he wrote the study up afterwards.
He realised that the Book of Prayer was a poor choice,
because people knew the text,
and he actually suggested that a book of logarithms
would be a better test, because they're so boring that
no-one would actually know what they are.
Yeah, so, one of them was...
blow of hand in feet per second. So, basically,
it was punch strength. And we don't have the equipment
to test that, but, you know, it's basically,
how hard can you hit? Shall I? Yeah!
Ooh, God, I almost glanced off there!
Sorry. Here you go.
You get your little certificate,
which says all of your biometrics on it,
and I've got a carbon copy.
9,000 people did this over the course of a week,
and I've got the biggest dataset
that's ever been compiled of human metrics, biometrics,
and you paid me for it. It's brilliant!
Galton hopes that by building up
a long-term database of people's physical characteristics,
he can identify which sections of British society
should be encouraged to breed and which should not.
The whole sort of cultural idea at this time
is the improvement of people, improvement of the stock.
We're now in the Darwinian era,
so we recognise that people and all organisms change over time,
and so there is a sense that if you didn't breed well,
that degeneration was the result.
And so, people were beginning to turn to these ideas that
we could improve individuals through science.
So, this search for improvement,
this is positive eugenics?
Yeah. Eugenics is Galton's coinage,
and the word itself means "good genes,"
so it's not regarded as a sort of toxic concept
that we think about when we talk about eugenics today. Mmm.
Back in the late 19th century, and well into the 20th century,
people across the political spectrum - both left and right -
are talking about eugenics as a positive force
for improving the quality of populations.
Surely, he'd be aware that
he was straying into dubious territory, wouldn't he?
He was definitely a racist. Erm...
But we have to contextualise that,
because everyone was more racist then than we are today.
I think that Galton was particularly racist, even for the 19th century,
and that's documented in various things that he wrote.
When he was younger, he travelled in Africa extensively,
and he came back more assured of
the natural hierarchy of people
around the world. More convinced. Yeah.
And these are all part of the ideas which are rooted in
what we now call scientific racism.
And they're also massively tied into the whole concept of
European expansion and empire and colonialisation. Yeah. Yeah.
Inevitably, the use of scientific racism
to bolster imperial rule will come under attack from
Britain's colonial subjects themselves.
But the work of another scientific racist
provokes a more unexpected response.
Cesare Lombroso is the founder of
the Italian School of Positivist Criminology.
He's convinced that the so-called "born criminal"
is identifiable by certain anatomical features -
such as handle-shaped ears,
protuberant jaws,
and even excessive tattooing.
The notion that someone's moral character could be manifested
in their features sparks the interest of a certain young writer,
soon to become one of the 1890s' most iconic figures.
An idea begins to form in the mind of Oscar Wilde.
What if a painted portrait
could capture its subject's moral decay and degeneration,
while the sitter himself remained unblemished?
The idea quickly becomes the basis for The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Wilde's first and only novel.
The story revolves around
the handsome title character, Dorian Gray,
and the fashionable society painter Basil Hallward, who paints
Gray's portrait and becomes infatuated with him.
Gray soon embraces a life of hedonism,
but, to do so, he sells his soul in a Faustian pact,
ensuring that the picture, not he,
will bear all the physical signs of his immorality.
He found himself at first gazing at the portrait
with a feeling of almost scientific interest.
That such a change should have taken place was incredible to him.
Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms
that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas
and the soul that was within him?
He shuddered and felt afraid,
and, going back to the couch, lay there,
gazing at the picture in sickened horror.
The novel divides opinion,
condemned by critics as
unclean and effeminate,
for its homoerotic undertones.
Some people even begin to wonder whether Dorian Gray
is, in fact, a portrait of Oscar Wilde himself.
In a taste of things to come, Wilde is forced to defend himself.
He states, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
"Books are well written or badly written. That is all."
Wilde's book is one of the first works to be feverishly discussed
by a select gathering of self-styled Aesthetes
and self-proclaimed Decadents.
Embracing what others regard as affected, even offensive,
they want to liberate art and literature
from staid Victorian convention and morality.
Inaugurated by the poet WB Yeats,
the Rhymers - as this group is called - often convene here,
at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub, on Fleet Street.
Tucking themselves away
in an upper smoking room.
And these Rhymers, and the Decadents and the Aesthetes,
were they, I mean, are they one in the same,
are they all the same people?
The Aesthetes had ideas of aesthetism,
love of beauty for its own sake.
The important thing, if you were painting pictures,
was not to tell a story, but just to be beautiful.
The idea that if you were writing, it was to write beautifully.
Decadents, I think, have sort of more of an idea of trying to,
as it were, change things, undermine old and established,
and boring and stale ideas.
So, what did they actually publish?
What was completely different was The Yellow Book,
which became the great symbol.
This is the first number of The Yellow Book,
with a cover by Aubrey Beardsley,
the most significant
1890s Decadent artist.
The Yellow Book sort of became
almost symbolic of the age.
We still talk about the Yellow Nineties, even now.
And why yellow? What was the significance of that colour?
Yellow wrappers were the way in which
lubricious French novels were published,
and I think it's certainly the case that they could
suggest that here was something new and modern and slightly dangerous.
And of course, in many ways,
The Yellow Book was actually
launched on the back of the notoriety that Beardsley
already achieved a few months earlier,
when he'd illustrated Oscar Wilde's play Salome,
a set of illustrations which he made for the book
which were absolutely scandalous.
The publisher, John Lane,
said that you have to look at
all of Beardsley's drawings upside down and through a magnifying glass,
to make sure that he's not slipping in something...
Sneaking something through! The wonderful thing is that
half the time, they did all miss these details.
I can show you a typical example.
Here's one of...
Beardsley's drawing of Herodias,
appearing with this very dubious
effete page.
Here we see Oscar Wilde caricatured,
as though he's a sort of vulgar showman,
putting on this tawdry play.
And then if you look across the bottom here, you can see
the candlesticks are all, quite clearly,
indecent little penises.
Well, I'm shocked. Think how shocked they were in the 1890s.
Absolutely.
You know, here's another example, which we can see.
This is called The Toilette of Salome,
and he's got Salome here,
sitting at a very modern-looking
dressing table.
This is a little hermaphrodite.
Yes, he's very clearly
a hermaphrodite figure.
But this figure here,
this is the one that really upset people. Why?
Because if you see,
this is sort of a strange boy,
who's got a curved spine...
Looks very vulnerable. Well,
you see, the curved spine, at that time,
was an absolute indicator of degeneracy. Ah!
And if you think about, sort of,
the writings of Lombroso,
Galton, all those sort of people,
who were studying
the decline of the race in a scientific way,
the curved spine was supposed to be
indicative of constant masturbation.
So, Beardsley's playing with
current ideas that were quite coded.
You mentioned Galton and Lombroso,
so it's like you have art and science
almost talking to one another.
I think that's very much a thing of the time.
The writers and artists thought that they were doing something
interesting and clever but, at the same time,
scientists begin to look for signs within art and literature
of the decline that they've been describing scientifically.
But what if art isn't just a sign of racial decline,
but an actual cause, like heredity?
In early 1895, one man -
drawing on the latest scientific thinking -
takes a vehement stand against art for art's sake.
This is Degeneration,
by Austro-Hungarian physician Max Nordau.
And in it, he argues that society is suffering
a severe mental epidemic.
A kind of Black Death of hysteria and degeneration.
And it's on the Aesthetes and the Decadents
that Nordau firmly pins the blame.
"Books and works of art," states Dr Nordau,
"exercise a powerful suggestion on the masses.
"And it is from them that an age derives its ideals
"of morality and beauty."
Degeneration goes down a storm.
This is the seventh edition,
printed just six months after
the first English publication,
in February, 1895.
And here, you can see the dedication to his great mentor,
Lombroso.
Nordau argues that degenerates are not always criminals,
prostitutes, lunatics or anarchists.
Sometimes, they're authors and artists,
and if their works are absurd
or anti-social, they exert
a "disturbing and corrupting influence" on a whole generation.
And there's one artist in particular who Dr Nordau singles out
as the epitome of this corrupting influence.
"The ego-mania of decadentism,
"its love of the artificial,
"its aversion to nature
"and to all forms of activity and movement
"have found their English representative among the Aesthetes,
"the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde."
"It is asserted," continues Nordau,
"that he has walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon,
"dressed in doublet and breeches,
"with a sunflower in his hand,
"the quasiheraldic symbol of the Aesthetes."
Nordau couches his attack in
the scientific terminology of the time...
..denouncing Wilde's attire as,
"the pathological aberration of a racial instinct".
But Nordau's stance is that of the stiff Victorian reactionary,
Wilde - who'd lectured widely on fashion -
was forging a look, a persona, an identity.
And as he said himself,
"A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life."
For Nordau, the sartorial aesthetic of the dandy
is at odds with a natural instinct for sensible, practical clothing.
Yet, despite their differences,
he and Wilde agree that clothes maketh the man.
I think for anybody that puts on a performance,
clothes, costume, help build a character.
Or as my favourite Soho tailor says, "It's your armour".
And Wilde seems to be in a combative mood
on the opening night of his first hit play, Lady Windermere's Fan,
in February, 1892.
The play, which explores the hypocrisy of Victorian attitudes
to women and sex, is the first in a series of popular
social satires.
APPLAUSE
I suppose, Windermere, you'd like me to retire into a convent,
or become a hospital nurse,
or something of that kind! LAUGHTER
That is stupid of you, Arthur!
In real life, we don't do such things, not as long as we have any
good looks left, at any rate. LAUGHTER
No, what consoles one nowadays
is not repentance, but pleasure!
Repentance is quite out of date. LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
At the final curtain call comes rapturous applause
and cries of "Author! Author!"
Oscar Wilde steps out on stage
and addresses his public
in typical fashion.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have enjoyed this evening immensely.
LAUGHTER
The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play.
LAUGHTER And your appreciation
has been most intelligent. I congratulate you
on the great success of your performance...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
..which persuades me that you think
almost as highly of the play as I do myself.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
The evening is a triumph, but there are those who are outraged,
not by the play, but by the playwright.
Some find Wilde's impromptu speech patronising and impertinent.
Others are scandalised at the lit cigarette that Wilde puffs at
in the presence of ladies. But what really seems to get to them
is the vibrant flower Wilde sports in his lapel.
A dyed green carnation.
With its unnatural hue,
Wilde is playing with one of
his most decadent ideals -
that life should imitate art,
and not the reverse.
He's arranged for some of the male leads to wear them.
He's out to provoke, hoping this "speck of mystic green,"
as he calls it, will annoy his critics,
and it does.
Normality, in the way of asceticism, recalls to mind various...
The ghastly green carnation.
It is crude enough to set one's teeth on edge and affect
the observer with...
Outrage public opinion and propriety of behaviour,
he would do anything...
The green carnation may have caused offence,
but more subversive was Wilde's portrayal of the Victorian woman.
Lady Windermere's Fan, and his plays that followed,
challenged the conventions of marriage and motherhood.
Wilde seems to be in solidarity with
the growing movement of female writers,
who are known as the New Women.
These writers - such as Sarah Grand,
Mona Caird
and George Egerton -
portray new ideas of femininity.
Their heroines are independent,
educated and sexually autonomous,
and reflect the new-found freedoms of the middle-class woman,
such as cycling, practical or rational dress,
and even, for some, smoking.
The New Woman is endlessly discussed and debated.
Some observers think she's but a passing fashion and,
like Oscar Wilde, she quickly becomes an easy target
for Punch magazine and its leading cartoonists,
such as Edward Linley Sambourne,
who completed his drawings here,
at his London home.
And here we have the caricature of the New Woman.
And so, we... She's holding a key.
Yes. Yes, well,
this is George Egerton,
and she had published Keynotes -
a collection of short stories - the year before,
and they were disruptive, experimental
stories, with strong female protagonists.
But you can see around her
the products of a riotous imagination.
So, we have tyrant man slain,
decorum slain.
Punch is expressing
hostility to the intellectual woman. And the quotation here,
from Don Quixote,
"A world of disorderly notions, picked out of books."
The suggestion that her ideas have come from her reading.
And that was considered a threat. Yes.
She's being lampooned because she's a threat. Yes.
So, this is another one lampooning the New Woman.
This is by a different artist.
It's by George du Maurier.
But you also see very mannish women here.
These two are wearing ties
and they're smoking,
and they're repellent to a man of their own class.
Jack would rather take tea with the servants
than spend time with them.
And who coined the term, where did the term come from, New Woman?
Well, Sarah Grand introduced the phrase New Women
in her bestselling novel of 1893, The Heavenly Twins.
By the end of the century, over 100 novels have been written
by or about the New Woman.
But if there were only novels, why the threat,
why the perception of threat?
Well, they weren't only in novels. And there was so much change,
in urban spaces in particular. You had so many more workers
and consumers that were women,
so even if you hadn't read any New Woman fiction, you would have had
a sense of the New Woman, in some guise.
So, is Sarah Grand at the forefront of this movement?
She is, yes, though she distances herself from the term.
So, she had meant something very different
from the caricature of femininity that you see in the pages of Punch.
What she meant by the New Woman was a new type of duty.
She wanted a citizenship of contribution,
rather than entitlement.
And at the centre of her politics was a racial idea,
the idea of eugenic feminism. Meaning?
That she thought that women should play a leading role
in regenerating the British imperial race.
The middle class should breed more
and the working class should breed less.
This unsettling idea about the New Woman's role
in selective breeding runs through much of Sarah Grand's fiction.
It even inspires the heroine's name
in her short story, Eugenia.
"She was, in fact, essentially a modern maiden,
"richly endowed with all womanly attributes,
"whose value is further enhanced by the strength
"which comes of the liberty to think.
"With such women for the mothers of men,
"the English-speaking races
"should rule the world."
It comes of the liberty to think.
I mean, this is progressive. Yes, that's right.
She did have some progressive ideas,
but it coexists with a deeply repressive idea of eugenics.
Sarah Grand imagines a future where the health of the nation
is secured through the sexual choices of middle-class women.
Such freedom is not for those they consider to be of lesser stock.
For eugenicists, one way of keeping a degenerate working class in check
was incarceration which, in the Victorian age,
meant either prison or, increasingly, the asylum.
When it opened in 1848,
Denbigh Asylum accommodated a mere 70 patients,
but by the 1890s,
the site had been expanded to serve the whole of North Wales
and houses over 500 patients.
According to records,
the most frequent cause of admission to Denbigh
during this period is "hereditary influence,"
which essentially meant that degeneration was inherited.
If left unchecked, physical, mental and moral defects
would be passed down,
creating an increasingly unfit population.
The situation is critical.
Overcrowding and severe staff shortages mean that,
in one women's ward, there are but three nurses
supervising 46 very troublesome female patients.
In a case that could have come from the pages of a New Woman novel,
one female patient, Janet Maude Wise, was admitted here
having become so intent on doing the things that people do in books
that she'd taken to stalking young men.
Janet's case notes describe her as
"deluded, often abusive,"
and they also state that
at one point, she asked the doctor
to cut off a piece of her tongue
because she said
she could no longer control it.
But it isn't just female transgression that is treated here.
Sexual intemperance
and sexual self-abuse
are listed as causes of male admissions.
And among the preventative devices
used in asylums is one
which can, quite literally,
stem the flow of man's moral weakness.
Now, this might look like a pocket watch
without its inner workings, but it is, in fact,
a device to prevent
what many Victorians saw as
a symptom of degeneracy - masturbation,
or "self-pollution", as they preferred to call it.
These anti-masturbation devices
were often worn at night,
to prevent nocturnal emissions.
It doesn't leave a lot to the imagination.
Essentially, the old chap is held in place by this inner ring
and was quickly subdued by
this outer barbed ring
at the onset of an erection.
Renouncing masturbation
was one of the aims of
new Social Purity groups,
who pledged sexual restraint
among married men
and chastity among unmarried ones.
But their crusade wasn't just Victorian prudishness.
It reflected a growing belief that masturbation
was highly injurious to health
and could even be sapping the vitality of the nation.
Doctors warned men to conserve their essence,
stating that the wanton waste of semen
can lead to a range of disorders,
from nervousness to paralysis
and, ultimately, the descent into madness.
The case notes for 19-year-old Norman Owen -
a vicar's son admitted here in October 1890 -
refer simply to the "insanity of masturbation".
His notes go on to describe him pacing the ward,
head hung down, needing to be force-fed
and even placed in strong clothing,
in a padded room.
After just a year in this place, he was deemed incurable,
but perhaps the most telling document
concerning poor young Norman is the copy of a letter
that he wrote to his parents.
It says, simply,
"Dear Papa and Mamma,
"Of course you know that I'm a devil
"and that I will go to eternal hell."
The asylum helps keep so-called "degenerate behaviour"
out of sight and out of mind.
But sexual transgression
is about to intrude into the Victorian consciousness
as never before.
It will take the form of one of the
most infamous trials of the 1890s.
The opening of The Importance of Being Earnest,
in February 1895, sees Oscar Wilde
at the height of his fame.
Victorian society is in thrall to him.
All except for one man.
The Marquess of Queensberry has become incensed by
his son Bosie's intimate relationship
with the playwright.
On February 18th, he seeks out Wilde at his club
to confront him, but without success.
So, Queensberry asks the staff
to pass on an inflammatory message.
When Wilde arrives at the Albemarle Club some two weeks later,
he's handed an envelope, containing...
Queensberry's visiting card.
The message reads,
"For Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite,"
clearly meant a sodomite.
You can imagine Wilde staring at this little scrap of card,
wondering what his next move should be.
It's a defining moment,
and one that could have had a very different outcome
if Wilde had simply...
done this.
But he does no such thing.
Encouraged by Bosie, who detests his father,
Wilde launches a criminal libel suit against Queensberry,
at huge personal risk.
To avoid conviction,
Queensberry need only prove his accusation of sodomy to be true.
His lawyers set about gathering evidence
of Wilde's illegal assignations with young men,
many of which began here, in Soho.
It was often here, at Kettner's restaurant,
that Wilde would lavish his young lovers with dinners
and gifts of silver cigarette cases,
before plunging into an illicit sexual underworld.
It was like "feasting with panthers," he said.
The danger was half the excitement.
All of these encounters - including
when Wilde reportedly fed preserved cherries
to rent boy Charles Parker here in the champagne bar -
would, over the coming weeks,
be dredged up by Queensberry's legal team,
who seemed hell-bent on destroying Wilde.
Queensberry is speedily acquitted
and Wilde himself now put on trial.
His private life is exposed
in salacious detail. Order, order...
His work is used against him,
Dorian Gray cited as proof enough
of unnatural vice.
It's not just Wilde in the dock,
but everything he stands for.
The judge describes it as
the worst case he's ever tried.
Found guilty of gross indecency,
Wilde is sentence to two years, with hard labour.
In his prison cell,
Wilde now looks to science to exonerate himself.
He composes a petition, in which he states...
he's been suffering from the most horrible form of erotomania,
and that this sexual madness is a disease
to be cared for by a physician,
rather than a crime to be punished by a judge.
And to lend weight to his argument,
he even cites his great critic
Max Nordau's damning attack on him in Degeneration.
But it's a desperate plea for clemency,
and ignored by the Home Secretary.
Wilde is to be an example to all,
a vindication of all that
Max Nordau had warned against.
Once free, though,
Wilde would have the last word.
On his release from Reading Gaol in May 1897,
Wilde told friends that the fact that he was a pathological problem,
in the eyes of German scientists,
was interesting only to German scientists.
"I quite agree with Dr Nordau's assertion," he says,
"that all men of genius are insane,
"but Dr Nordau forgets
"that all sane people are idiots."
Fearing further persecution,
Wilde goes into exile,
travelling under the name Sebastian Melmoth,
never to see England -
nor his wife and children - again.
Wilde's story, as the most famous
gay writer of the late-19th century,
stands in sharp contrast to that of
an altogether less ostentatious author.
One who draws on Victorian theories of sexuality,
in a quiet, but genuine, attempt to make sense of his own experience,
and who leaves a ground-breaking legacy,
despite being all but forgotten today.
John Addington Symonds was
a highly respected man of letters,
and an expert on the Italian Renaissance.
Symonds was married with children,
but, like his near-contemporary Oscar Wilde, he lived a double life.
Since his youth, here in Bristol,
he'd harboured strong desires for men.
But Symonds conducted his liaisons
with far more discretion than the flamboyant Wilde.
There were no public displays of affection,
no preserved cherries, no green carnations.
Symonds left behind an extraordinary document,
which could have seen him suffer the same fate as Wilde,
and which survives intact -
under lock and key - at The London Library.
So, this is the actual memoir of John Addington Symonds?
It is, the handwritten document itself.
Of course, this was all illegal. The way he was living was illegal,
him writing about these things was illegal, so if this was so...
dangerous and incendiary, why did he write it?
It's either a very brave or a very foolish thing
to do, but I think it's brave. So, he writes...
He sets aside all his paid work in 1889
and spends three to five months
just writing this really feverishly,
and what he says is that he's writing it for a future audience,
a scientific audience,
that might use this as primary evidence of the development
of sexuality. He tracks his sexual development
from very, very young and starts with early sexual fantasies.
He says they're essential for a "proper understanding
"of my vita sexualis,"
my sexual life.
His earliest sexual experiences at school,
sort of cultures of abuse and bullying and blackmail
at Harrow and then at Oxford.
And this page is one of my favourites,
because it's got a hole in. Oh.
You can actually see
a cut-out hole in the middle here,
where a name has been removed.
The name is Vaughan, and that was
his headmaster at Harrow... Blimey!
..and he's at the centre of a sexual scandal.
So, there might be a reason why
he would remove his name.
Look at that!
Was homosexuality used then as a term?
It's... It exists by this point.
The word homosexual exists, and Symonds doesn't like it.
He doesn't like it... Why? ..because it mixes Latin and Greek,
and that's his reasons for not liking it! So, he was sniffy!
He's very sniffy about it.
The term that he finds, that he discovers in his reading
and that he really latches onto,
is "sexual inversion."
And what's actually meant by the expression?
What did he understand it to mean?
Sexual inversion literally just means the normal sexual instinct,
the so-called normal sexual instinct, the wrong way round.
But Symonds, I think, is interested in its vagueness,
that it's not naming a specific type of practice, or type of person.
It's kind of poignant, isn't it? It's like it hasn't stopped.
We're in this age where we have myriad names for sexualities,
like we're still looking for a term that's non-judgemental.
Inspired by his research, Symonds has a daring idea.
He approaches a leading physician,
Henry Havelock Ellis,
proposing that they collaborate on
a scientific survey of homosexuality.
The resulting book
gathers 36 anonymous case studies,
first-hand testimonies,
drawn from ordinary members of the public.
And what's really amazing is that
Symonds includes himself.
He's Case Study 18 here.
"Englishman, independent means, aged 49."
It's incredibly sexually explicit,
and it even includes a list here
of the kinds of sexual activities
that Symonds preferred -
in later life, in particular. So...
"In the third period the gratification became
"more frankly sensual.
"It took every shape - mutual masturbation,
"intercrural coitus, fellatio, irrumatio...
"always according to the inclination
"or concession of the beloved male."
And this book is very rare,
because most copies of this edition
were bought up by Symonds' family and friends and destroyed,
because they were very nervous about
having his name on a title page
next to the word sexual inversion.
They were trying to protect his posthumous reputation.
Symonds' material and his contribution remains in print,
but he's just not given the credit for it.
He becomes a footnote.
He actually becomes a footnote.
His material moves into the appendices
and he gets written out of
the history of this book.
Published in Britain in 1897,
Sexual Inversion is now acknowledged as
the first English medical textbook
on homosexuality.
Questions of sex and gender
also lie at the heart of
a very different kind of book.
Unleashed on an unsuspecting public
that same year,
in a fashionably decadent yellow cover,
Bram Stoker's Dracula.
When he leaves England for Transylvania,
the main protagonist, Jonathan Harker,
is portrayed as masculine, rational,
but during his stay - or, rather, imprisonment
at Castle Dracula -
his gender becomes confused.
Harker becomes slowly transformed -
not into a vampire,
but progressively feminised.
The Count takes his possessions,
begins to control his every move.
And Harker becomes hysterical and passive,
like the archetypal Victorian woman.
This gender fluidity in Dracula is just one of its many topical tropes.
Stoker clearly has his finger -
or should that be teeth -
on the pulse of the age, and infuses Dracula with
many of the decade's chief preoccupations,
including the New Woman.
Lucy Westenra is the racy young temptress,
toying with three suitors,
whose promiscuity - or moral weakness -
enables Dracula to prey on her.
Then, as one of the undead, she becomes the monstrous antithesis of
the ideal Victorian mother, leaving her tomb each night
to prey on a succession of defenceless children.
"With a careless motion, she flung to the ground,
"callous as a devil, the child that up to now
"she had clutched strenuously to her breast,
"growling over it as a dog growls over a bone."
Lucy's friend Mina, on the other hand,
stands for everything Stoker sees as morally upright and respectable.
She retains a job, she's devoted to God and her husband.
And when she records her impressions of Dracula,
she draws on the pseudoscientific theories of the period.
The Count is "a criminal" and a "criminal type,"
she tells Professor Van Helsing.
Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him,
"He is of imperfectly formed mind."
The Count, wishing to invade
a new land, makes for London,
there to satiate his bloodlust
among its teeming millions,
and propagate his kind.
The Count creates several lairs across the metropolis.
Six great wooden boxes, filled with so-called mould,
are sent here, to Chicksand Street in Whitechapel.
The mould is, in fact, Transylvanian soil,
with which to line the Count's coffin bed
and enable him to regenerate his powers.
It's significant that the boxes are sent to Whitechapel,
an area at the time predominantly populated by Jewish refugees
from Eastern Europe.
Bram Stoker is tapping into racial prejudice
and a growing fear of immigration.
Dracula is portrayed as a dangerous foreign intruder,
here to drain Britain of its imperial vitality.
But whether in literature, society,
or the so-called social Darwinism
of some scientists,
racism is now being challenged,
together with the very idea of Empire.
Victoria Park, in Hackney,
which rivals Hyde Park as a centre for political rallies,
becomes the stage upon which
a visionary campaigner imagines a new world.
In the early 1890s, one speaker here
began to draw increasingly larger crowds.
Notable not only for the content of his speeches,
but also for the colour of his skin.
His name was Celestine Edwards, and he was on a mission.
Originally from Dominica,
in the West Indies, young Celestine
had stowed away aged 12,
travelling the oceans for several years,
before fetching up in Edinburgh in the late 1870s.
As a temperance evangelist,
he had ambitions to become a missionary
in Africa. But instead, he came to London, to study at King's College.
Slowly but surely permeating society,
I will, in the hearts of good men...
Celestine worked as a builder's labourer
to fund his studies, but he also used the money
to finance the printing of penny pamphlets,
which he would hand out to people who gathered here to hear him speak.
The British Empire will come to grief
unless it changes its methods of dealing with the aboriginal races.
The day is coming where all Africans will speak of themselves.
The day is breaking, and the despised African,
whose only crime is his colour,
will yet give an account of himself.
Powerful words.
How much of a pioneer was he?
I think he's one of the most inspirational people
to come from the Victorian era.
He was a solitary, er, soldier.
He's the, er, epitome of someone who was on a mission -
protesting, speaking,
er, involved in campaigns.
Did he tour? Did he lecture? Oh, he did, yeah.
It was a real accolade when he was given the, er,
moniker as "The Negro Lecturer",
because he was the only one at that time
in the 1890s actually there
standing - whether here in Victoria Park,
or in the various, erm, halls around the country -
speaking against social Darwinism and imperialism.
Wherever he spoke, hundreds would, er,
turn up to... Overspill. Yeah, overspill. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
In 1892, he became the first ever
black editor in this country,
and that was through editing a journal called Lux.
The remit was that black people
would be able to speak for themselves in this newspaper,
to kind of denounce all these theories of white superiority
that came with social Darwinism and imperialism.
He said that, kind of, if people of African descent were given
the same opportunities as white people and were given time,
they will be able to kind of raise their level, erm,
the same as a white person. So, he was basically saying that there was
a lack of opportunity, which then kind of
relegated people of African descent to, er... Yeah.
..the lower levels. Yeah.
Celestine Edwards argues that racial theories
are being used by the Empire to justify a massive act of theft.
We think it no crime for Africans
to look with suspicion upon the European,
who has stolen a part of their country,
and deluged it with rum and powder,
under the cover of civilisation.
Edwards' mantle is taken up by a fellow West Indian
and graduate of King's College called Henry Sylvester-Williams.
In 1897, he forms the African Association.
It aims to promote and protect
the interests of all subjects claiming African descent.
Whilst many expect the association to be short-lived,
by 1900, it's ready to hold the first Pan-African Conference,
here at the former
Westminster Town Hall.
And this is the invitation that was sent out, calling for...
the discussion of "the Native Races question"
to be "addressed by those of African descent
"from all parts of the British Empire,
"the United States of America..."
and several other countries too.
Perhaps against all odds, the conference proves a huge success,
reported widely in leading British newspapers.
It's remarkable to think that here, right in the heart of
the British Empire, a member of its native races
had set in motion a public debate
on the treatment of its oppressed subjects.
As Williams said himself, this was the first occasion upon which
black men would assemble in England
and speak for themselves,
and endeavour to influence public opinion in their favour.
These black Victorians are imagining a world
where they're seen not as subject peoples,
or racial types, but as human beings...
..and their vision will reverberate throughout the coming century.
The 1890s brought to the fore a range of social and cultural issues
we still seem to be addressing.
Questions of race, gender, and immigration.
The decade was, in many ways, one of extremes.
While the interest in
scientific racism
and eugenics would lead to
some of the worst horrors of
the 20th century, the 1890s
also saw the continued march towards women's emancipation,
and sowed the seeds of anti-colonialism
and gay liberation.
And it's perhaps typical of this contradictory decade
that one of its leading figures,
Oscar Wilde, lingered - largely forgotten -
in his Paris hotel room, as the new century dawned.
From his bed, despite great discomfort,
Wilde still held court to a small coterie of loyal friends,
remarking to one the immortal line,
"My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death.
"One of us has to go."
Wilde succumbed on November 30th, 1900.
He was 46 years old.
To the Victorian establishment, Oscar Wilde had been
the hideous embodiment of moral degeneracy.
To his admirers, the dazzling icon of a daring aestheticism,
and an even more daring personal freedom.
Before he died, Wilde told a friend,
"I have no doubt that we shall win,
"but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms."
Next time,
on Victorian Sensations...
Psychotherapist Philippa Perry... BANGING
..explores scientists obsessed
with spirits...
..and communication with other worlds...
It's amazing!
..and witnesses the birth of new mass media, using
an extraordinary collection of
rare Victorian films from the BFI National Archive.