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Queer life in Georgian Britain
00:50:40
Anthony Delaney explores the lives and loves of same-sex attracted and gender non-conforming people in the Georgian period
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- [00:01]
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- [00:34]
Podcast Host Isabel King
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. How did same sex couples in the Georgian era express their love in the face of the law? Did class, sex or race impact how someone could express their true identity? And just what was the so called third sex? Dr. Anthony Delaney answers these questions and more in conversation with Isabel King in today's podcast discussing his new book, Queer Georgians.
- [01:11]
Interviewer Isabel King
Anthony, you've recently written a wonderful book all about the lives and loves of several interesting and important people during the Georgian period. We'll get into discussing the lives of these characters soon, but before we do, I just wanted to take some time to address the use of some terms when discussing same sex relationships in the past. In the title of your book you use the word queer. Why was this your chosen term and to what extent do you think that we can place modern day labels onto people's sexualities or gender identities in the past?
- [01:44]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
I think one of the most important things that we can do, regardless of the terminology that we're using, is talk about and tell these histories. I think that is first and foremost. The second thing I would say about the use of the word queer, which was in use in the 18th century but not necessarily in the same context that we use it today, is that I've had conversations with people about the title Queer Georgians and people often say to me, so why queer? Obviously queer is not a word that they were using in this context in the 18th century, but nobody ever says, why have you used the word Georgians? They wouldn't have known themselves as Georgians either. So therein lies your answer. I think as historians we often have to use terms, terminology, words that are anachronistic to the time that we're talking about. You could even stretch this example so far as to say the understanding of the word family in the 18th century does not align with our understanding of the word family in the 21st century. But we use that term because it's what we they're the words we have to communicate events, people, places, things in the past. And so I think when we're telling queer histories, the most important thing is the telling and we have to give queer histories the same allowances that we offer to every other form of history telling. So I use queer in the way that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick uses queer, and that is the gaps or dissonances or the ways in which people's gender or sexuality can't be made or won't be made. And these are Kosofsky Sedgwick's words to signify monolithically or as we might understand it, to give a CIS heterosexual heteronormative outlook. So that's the way I use queer. I think it's as valid as using Georgian. And it's just a way for us to communicate the history. Let's not get too tangled up on the terminology and let's make sure that we're sharing the histories. That's the most important thing.
- [03:44]
Interviewer Isabel King
Absolutely. The subtitle of your book is A Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers and Homemakers All. Why were these the three categories you wanted to highlight?
- [03:54]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
Do you know what, it's funny because I didn't necessarily go in knowing that these were going to be the themes that really stuck out throughout the whole of the book. It became apparent towards the end of the first draft that these were the themes that were really presenting themselves. And the reason we put it in the title is because many people mightn't expect, okay, maybe the lawbreaker is part of it. Yes, they might expect that bit to be in the history. But love and homemaking are not necessarily words that people associate with same sex attraction in the 18th century. Often people will associate things like public cruising, molly houses, which are also in the book, but they don't necessarily have an idea of what intimacy was happening between same sex attracted people in the 18th century, what expressions of love were occurring, what homes they were making together. And actually people I think, don't know that these things were happening. That same sex attraction could only be an illicit public affair, which, by the way, that was in there too. But what we need to do now, I think, is start moving beyond the attitude in the, say, the 70s and 80s and even into the 90s where we were trying to find the gaze in the past. That was kind of the remit. I'm boiling it down a little bit too much, but that was the remit of historians then. We're moving beyond that now, I think, and we're looking for some nuance, we're looking for some subtlety, and we're trying to give a much, much more rounded version of these queer histories. And for Me the most striking thing was how domestic and loving and intimate some of these histories are. In fact, most of them are, despite some of the hurdles that they come up against.
- [05:33]
Interviewer Isabel King
You just mentioned their Molly houses and you open your book with a story about another claps Molly house. Where does the term Molly come from and why was it used to describe men in same sex relationships during the Georgian period?
- [05:46]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
Well, that is the $64,000 question, whatever that phrase is. Where does the term Molly come from? There are a few theories that are flying around, one of which is that it comes from the Latin for soft mollus. So saying that these men are soft, there's something effeminate about them, I think that's certainly part of it. I also think there might be something in female naming rituals which you see an awful lot of in chapters one and chapters two of the book, where, you know, these men are named the Duchess of Camomile or Orange Deb, or they have. They take on these female monikers amongst men like themselves. And Mol is obviously a derivative of Mary. And often gay men today, particularly in America, will affectionately refer to one another as Mary. And again, I'm just thinking about the links between Moll and Mary, wondering if there's anything there. Yeah, a lot of people think that probably the strongest idea is the Latin meaning soft. I'd like to think it's more dynamic than that as well. It's not just that, but we don't know for certain. But certainly a Molly was a man who had sex with other in the 18th century. It's very concentrated around London, very concentrated in urban areas in particular. And it's interesting because Mali appears again and again, but not in the legal documentation there. They're sodomites. So it does suggest to me that Molly is potentially something that these men are using amongst themselves. But we do find some examples of ways in which Molly is used in a derogatory fashion in the 18th century as well. I'm thinking there's a hack journalist, Ned Ward, and he talks about the Mollies as well as the Sodomites. So we don't know. But I think it's probably multilayered and it survives over a century or so before it starts to die out. But it's not the only term that was applied to same sex attracted men in particular. Amalia is only a same sex attracted man. So it's not the only term. And that was one of the revelations that led to this book. I supposed in my PhD research, I encountered the term the Cock Queen and a Cock queen is also a same sex attracted man, which I think people probably haven't heard of at all. But the cock queen was a far more domestic creature. He occupied house space. He was concerned with baking and cleaning and interior design and all that kind of fabulous stuff. So these were different types of same sex attracted men that were operating in the 18th century, and people knew the distinction between those categories of men.
- [08:27]
Interviewer Isabel King
And was the idea of the cot queen that he was more like a woman? Was it supposed to suggest a femininity?
- [08:35]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
Yeah, absolutely. So cot queen comes from two French words, cotte, an old version of French word meaning home, and queen meaning woman. And you'll find in the 16th century, Cot Queen was applied to women, and for some reason we're not sure why, over the course of about 150 years, it starts to be applied to men. And then by the 18th century it's used as a derogatory term for same sex attracted men. If you were a cock queen, you were seen as a bit of a joke. You were seen as somebody who you should not marry, you should not have access to political power. And as you say, it was seen as a very feminizing position that you were giving up some of your masculine ideals by occupying the space that a cock queen would occupy.
- [09:21]
Interviewer Isabel King
A lot of the characters that you cover in your book are what we might now consider to be gay men due to their close, seemingly romantic relationships with other men. But what was the importance of male friendships in this period? And how might that impact how people understood same sex intimacy?
- [09:38]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
Male friendships are very important during this period. And I think it's important to draw a distinction between same sex attraction and male friendship, but also see where the overlaps lie, because of course, there is an overlap. Male friendships are important, important for many reasons. Just let's talk about a more kind of personable level, first of all, where you are getting some form of comfort, some form of fun, some form of shared experience, all of those things. They're important in the 18th century, but depending on your social level, it's important for gaining work, for instance. So a lot of people in the lower working classes might be finding work through their male friends at the upper end of society, then we know that people are also benefiting from these close personal connections where there's no same sex attraction involved here at all. It's just a network of old boys, basically, and they're benefiting from those connections. So in that sense, male friendships are, you could argue, shaping the history of a nation where it starts to overlap with same Sex attraction, I think, is in a very key element of queer histories that's often overlooked and that's in intimacies and the importance of intimacy and the expressions of intimacy that we see. And so we know that there are men in the 18th century who are dedicated bachelors and they have chosen not to marry. There are tracts written upon this by an Italian named Antonio Cocci. And he asks the question in his tract, why is marriage not fit for literary men? And you can read into whatever you want to read into what literary men means. But these men have very deliberately chosen not to enter into marriage with a woman. And as a result they share so much of their own intimacies, their own personal domestic work, all kinds of intimacies with the other men in their lives. They live together sometimes, they take on shared surnames at other moments in time, and they help to decorate each other's homes at times. So this is where that line starts to become blurred and becomes brilliantly queer and where we're able to start looking at different opportunities within the queer historical canon in order to diversify and to nuance some of the queer histories we already know about, particularly where it's same sex attracted men that we're talking about.
- [12:00]
Interviewer Isabel King
We've just discussed the concept of marriage being an important part of understanding intimacy. And you discuss in the book a lot of marital behaviours, such as John Shute and Frances Whithead, who were known as the shoot heads. How did attitudes towards marriage in general affect feelings towards gender non conforming people and queer relationships?
- [12:24]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
It surprisingly was part and parcel of the expression of those relationships. Now that might not be so surprising if you think about companionships between women at this time. There was, and has been for quite some time an acknowledgement that in the 19th century at least, there were what has been referred to as plastic marriages between, or Boston marriages between women. So because women who had not married were sometimes expected to, or at least they could happily enter into a household together financially, there is an opportunity there for same sex attracted women to live in a spousal unit within those accepted norms. It's one of the reasons why same sex attracted women were never legislated against in the same way that same sex attracted men were. But what we see again and again there is constant language of marriage used by and about these same sex attracted and gender non conforming people. So let me give you an example. In the Molly house, when a couple are going into their private rooms, they come out and whatever they have done, which is, you know, we think probably sex but we're not sure. Whatever they have done is referred to by the other Mollys as marrying. So they are using the idea of the terminology that wider society knows to cement the relationships between themselves. So that's just one example. You mentioned the shoot heads there. John Shute and Francis Whitheads coming together to be the shoot heads. Their friends are referencing them as the shootouts. They're going to the shoot heads houses, they're relaxing with the shoot heads, they're taking their shoes off and just kicking back with the shoot heads. It's this tantalizing glimpse into that world. And then we have an outsider view. So we have Princess Caroline referring to the ladies of Llangollen in the early 19th century. And the ladies have become famous at this point. But she says, I can't believe, because I can't imagine this for myself, that they have decided to spend their lives together. But she says, each to their own taste. She says, I could never marry a female friend because they're too overbearing. Basically, she says, if you think men are controlling, try being a woman married to another woman. Now that's incredible. It seems like such a simple detail, but if you think about it, that is Princess Caroline, somebody who's at the elite part of society, making no bones about the fact that a marriage like union has been formed between two women in the early 19th century. That's radical. But it's so simple that it's so easy to just blunder over that blast through and going, well, they weren't legally married. So, you know, what is she talking about? She's talking about an acknowledgement of their companionship, an acknowledgement of their union. And they are understanding this in spousal terms, in marital terms. Is there a legal piece of paper? No, there isn't, but that's how they're seen. But then let's talk about something that has a legal piece of paper. If we push forward a little bit, we will see marriages that are enacted in Glasgow, for instance, between what we would now term a trans man and a woman who were legally married at the time. And I have found their wedding certificate. I was a little worried for a while that it was all just a story that had been concocted to conceal identity. But no, in the archives I stumbled across that there it was, they did get married. So marriage and the language of marriage is definitely used and being used in the 18th century to acknowledge the spousal units and the companionship that are happening between these same sex attracted or gender non conforming people. It's incredible.
- [16:05]
Interviewer Isabel King
I think one such marital behaviour, as we've already discussed, was living together. And as you've already said, it may have been a bit easier for to women to do this. But something that caught my attention was the role of adult adoption. Can you explain what this was and how it enabled queer couples to cohabitate more easily?
- [16:24]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
Well, I suppose when people hear about adult adoption, you immediately go to the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, or maybe a little bit later, pushing into the 1990s. So if we look at that time period, you'll often find gay men adopting their younger partner and this will then allow them to be at bedside when they're dying, for instance, or to inherit everything that they want to leave them after they have died. And there's no way to circumvent that because it's legally bound. And one of the surprising things that I found, or I found a hint of in the archive at least, was around John Shute and Francis Whittehead, the shoot heads, as we've already discussed, and it is intimated in their circle that Chute had adopted Whithead. Now, that isn't necessarily that unusual in many ways, because this was happening in the 18th century in order to secure inheritances, in order to pass on property and all that kind of thing. But what makes it more unusual is by injecting this queer element into it, Right? And we talked about how gay men in the 80s and 90s were trying to circumvent the law for their own ends. And it seems to me there's at least a suggestion that this was happening as far back as the 1780s. And what it says is that queer people have always had to be quite fluid in the ways in which they interact with the law and with legalities, because they've had to circumvent things that appear to be in their way by using the mechanisms that are available to them in order to get what they want. Is it always possible? No. Is it a little bit easier if you're an elite man in the 1780s? Yes, it is. Legally it is. So there are caveats to this, and they're important caveats to bear in mind. Nonetheless, there are definitely these hints that are left in the archive that what we see happening in the 80s and maybe in the early 90s, is not necessarily a new thing. And again, it's just tantalizing because we are told that so much of our history as queer people is new or is, you know, Oscar Wilde happened and then we were all gay kind of a thing. But no, this isn't the case. And by the way, the Georgians aren't the start of this either. This is just me beginning to push back that time frame a little bit more and somebody else hopefully at some point will continue to push and continue to push. So it's just about showing we have always been here, We've always had to circumvent these legal problems. And for me there was inspiration in that we have a legacy of persisting and resisting that rollback. So I think we can find some strength in our history. And we've been denied that because history is a powerful thing and it benefits people to keep us away from that history. So that's kind of what I mean by feeding back to that, you know. Okay, queer is a contentious term and some same sex attracted people do not like the term queer themselves and that's fine. They shouldn't use it for themselves then. The main thing is tell these histories.
- [19:40]
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- [22:23]
Interviewer Isabel King
Of course, with this having to circumvent laws and restrictions on their sexuality or gender, many people would have faced being what we would now call outed. And how could this damage a person's reputation in the Georgian period?
- [22:40]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
Let's start with men, I suppose because they are at the apex of power in many ways. You could argue that they stand to lose the most. It's not that straightforward, but let's use that as an example. So what we often see, we see this in relation to John Lord Harvey, for instance, who's an MP in the 1730s into the 1740s and he is outed by William Pulteney, his one time friend and then very much his political enemy. And for Harvey, what it does is a, it threatens his relationship with Stephen Fox. Because now this has been spoken about or written about in pamphlets and this has been circulated around London. It also calls into question, as I said before, is he a cart queen? Has he been diminished in the power that he's allowed to hold because he's effeminate? And it's, you know, in Harvey's case in particular, it's really important to remember that he was referred to by contemporaries as a member of the third sex. So people said of him, there are men, there are women, and there are Harveys. So here we are again, knowing that there's this lack of a binary in the 18th century that's then kind of reimposed in the Victorian period. That's simplifying it a little bit, but generally that's how I feel about it. And they are exercising this power despite their gender nonconformity. And actually, sometimes Harvey uses his gender nonconformity to exercise that power. He uses his femininity to gain and control as much as he possibly can. But by being outed, as we would say, others hope to bring about his downfall. Others hope to discredit him. Well, he's effeminate. You can't trust anything he's saying. He's shape shifting. What even is he? Is he a man? Is he a boy? Is he a girl? At one point he's referred to as a teenage girl. And I mean, he was very much, you know, a man in his late 30s by that point. So that's the point of outing for non legal reasons. Then there are other reasons that someone is trying to pursue a legal agenda. For instance, trying to get somebody hanged because that. That was very much a possibility, or sending somebody into exile. Usually people would take exile themselves and just hightail it out of there as soon as they could. If, if they heard that legal proceedings were underway, then they'd often. They'd often just leave the country to avoid that scandal and, you know, potentially losing their lives. So there were a number of reasons that people might be outed and there were a number of consequences. I think, again, the reasons and the consequences might all depend on social status. So you might find that it's different for working class men than it is for aristocratic men. For women it's different again because there are no real legal consequences. But at the same time, there are social consequences and financial consequences. We see with the ladies of Llangollen, for instance, their stipends are much lower than they would have been if they'd married men. They don't return to their hometown of Kilkenny, where I'm from myself. They never get to go back there because they are told, you can go, here's the agreement, but you must never come back here. So they weren't outed in the same way as Harvey, but there was certainly an outing of sorts amongst the family where this agreement was agreed upon. So it can be very complicated and it could cost somebody their lives depending on where they sat on the social ladder.
- [26:09]
Interviewer Isabel King
You said there that someone could potentially lose their life if it was found that they were attracted to the same sex and somebody else that you discuss in the book is Gabriel Lawrence, who was imprisoned in Newgate Prison after a raid at a molly house. What other people would have been housed in Newgate at this time? Would he have been there with violent criminals, for instance?
- [26:31]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
Yeah, absolutely. All kinds of everything were held at Newgate. He would have been there with absolutely everybody from all walks of life. There were two sides to Newgate. There was the master side and then the more working class side. Gabriel was a milkman, so he's very much on the working class side, but he definitely would have been in there with murderers. There was something that I came across in my research on this, and I hadn't seen it anywhere before, that men like Gabriel were held in what was called the buggering close. And this was written by another inmate around a similar time that Gabriel would have been held there. And he assumed it was because the men who were held there were same sex attracted and this was a place that only they. So that was really interesting to hear, that they were kind of kept apart. But there was a lot of divisions at Newgate, so it wasn't unusual to be segregated when you were in there. But certainly Gabriel, who, you know, is such a fascinating figure and amazing that we have insight into his life, albeit through court records, but he would have been in one of the worst conditions. According to this source, no sunlight whatsoever was available in the boogering hole, so they were kept in this dark, damp cell and disease was rampant. Just as many people would have died from jail fever during this time as ended up going to the Old Bailey for trial afterwards. I mean, you were taking your life into your hands by being in there. And we believe that some of the Mollies who were taken up in that particular raid on Mother Claps, that some of them did die before they could be brought to trial. But in Gabriel's case, we know that he did survive, he did go to trial, but his time in Newgate would have been pretty harrowing. There are things to do because you have to prepare in Newgate for your trial like this. You're giving your own defense. There are no barristers, there are no solicitors coming in to say, no, he didn't do this. I'm gonna really defend his honour here. You have to do that yourself. So it's one of the things that people did while they were in the boogering hold, we think, is practice their defenses and potentially practice their defenses amongst one another. Because what we see is a pattern of some of those defence mechanisms being used again and again, which is quite interesting.
- [28:46]
Interviewer Isabel King
Do you think people were organising these defences within themselves at Newgate because they saw something of themselves in each other.
- [28:55]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
I think in Gabriel's particular case, there's a possibility that because he was taken up with other Mollies, they knew each other anyway and they would have been familiar with each other's lives and they would have been aware that they are now both in the same situation and their lives are at stake here. And if they are going to have to offer their own defense, then potentially, who knows, they rehearsed that defense between themselves. They knew they were going to have to say it up in front of a crowd of people that they didn't know. So who better to practice in front of than people you do know? It also gives you something to do and maintains in this dankest and darkest of places a tiny, tiny shred of hope. And I think that's really important. I also think people clamor on to hope. So it strikes me we don't have documentary evidence for this, but it does strike me that it's entirely possible that these same sex attracted men were in the buggering hold together, helping one another decide what their, their defence was going to be. And it appears to me that what they often fell upon was the fact that they either were or had been married and had then, or at that moment or in the past had had children who had passed away. So wives and children became a really key part of the defense of some of these men. I think they had this idea that they could say, if I'm capable of being married to a woman and having a child, then you couldn't possibly think that I'm capable of living this other life. I mean, of course we know that that's not the case and let's not underestimate our 18th century ancestors. They probably very well knew that too. Nonetheless, it seemed like a strongish argument for people to put forward. We have father in laws testifying in court, saying, yes, he was married to my daughter. They had two children, one of them has passed away, but there's one of them still living. She's 13. You know, it begs the question, where's that daughter? Does she come to the trial? Does she? Because she can if she wanted to. Does she come and see her father in Newgate? We don't know. But you know, there are families at the heart of this, not just the same sex attractive men, there are families that they belong to and that they have produced themselves. So it makes it all the more heartbreaking.
- [31:00]
Interviewer Isabel King
I'd like to go back to Something we mentioned earlier, which was this Georgian concept of the third sex. Would you be able to just give me a little bit more detail on what this was and whether it was a negative or a positive concept or if it was simply just a descriptor?
- [31:14]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
It was simply just a descriptor. It's one of the things you'll find with the Georgians. The Georgians are incredibly curious about these types of things. They are asking a lot of the same questions that we are asking today about gender, particularly. Unlike us, however, the Georgians don't really seem to demand answers from their questions. So when you are asking me what the third sex was, the answer is many things and not necessarily something that could easily be categorized. So what we have is this idea that there are men, women and people of the third sex. So people of the third sex will generally have occupied a male space in society until that point. They may continue to occupy that space as they continue on in their lives. But it was applied to a variety of people at a variety of times. And I think it's really interesting to see it fall away. The concept fall away in the 19th century and is replaced by something that's far more medicalized and far more misunderstood in many ways, because we start to see the introduction of the term hermaphrodite. Now we have reference to what Georgian people refer to as hermaphrodites in the 18th century too. But that starts to take on a far more quasi scientific basis in the 19th century. And that seems to replace ideas of people of the third sex. But that's not what Georgians were talking about. Georgians were not necessarily talking about sex, they were talking about gender identity. And so often you'll find in Georgian archival material that sex and gender identity are very closely conflated. And in. In terms of the third sex, that's absolutely the case. So it's fascinating. It's a bit of a mystery. It's mentioned again and again. You don't have to look that hard to find it. So it's certainly something that was acknowledged amongst our Georgian ancestors, but something that the Victorians, I think, want to control a little bit, potentially, because it's a little bit difficult to understand what the Georgians mean exactly, but what they definitely mean. And there's a lot of variation within this, but what they definitely mean is somebody that is gender non conforming, somebody who is not applying themselves, as Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick would say, to the norms. These people do not fit into those categories. The Georgians were, I don't want to say obsessed, but they were certainly intrigued by this not fitting in. And then the Victorians come along and have to try and control it. And I think we're still sadly trying to control it today to a certain extent.
- [33:53]
Interviewer Isabel King
Speaking of gender nonconformity, someone you discuss in the book is a name that many listeners will probably be familiar with, which is Anne Lister. You take a slightly different view of her, suggesting that perhaps she has been remembered in a slightly more positive light that doesn't reflect the nuanced complexities of her life. Why do you think it is important for us to be able to change our perceptions of queer people in the past?
- [34:19]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
So it's interesting. Anne has had a kind of a mythologizing in the last decade or so, and of course she has, because there was an incredible period drama that was built all around her diaries. And the function of that drama is to entertain and, yes, to inform, but it requires us to do a little bit of our own digging, I think, if we want to get to the real history. So, yeah, one of the things that sort of. I did my master's at University of York and I used to retreat sometimes when I was like, oh, I can't do any more Civil War history, thanks very much. And I'd retreat to Gudrum Gate Church. I'm in no way religious, but it's the most beautiful place. And I did not know at the time that this was the location of the supposed marriage between Anne Lister and Anne Walker. Now, I've since found that out and I was like, oh, my God, that's where I used to go. And how did I not know it was so queer? But then when I went and looked, I was looking at research for, during my PhD for Anne's Land ownership and how she owned land and what she did with land and how she managed basically her power structures that she was operating within. And it struck me when the issue of the marriage came, or the supposed marriage at Goodrumgate Church, I went, hold on, that's not what people think has happened. It's definitely not what gets shown in Gentleman Jack, which, by the way, is absolutely fine, because Gentleman Jack is a period of drama, so we're remembering the term drama. There is key in the actual archive, Lister goes to Gudrum Gate with Walker. She says she prays for them and their union, but she blatantly says, well, Anne Walker didn't think to do the same. So there is no joint union at Goodrum Gate Church, as far as I'm concerned, despite the fact that the book is full of marital type unions and they do have, we think there's an exchange of rings, but it doesn't happen on that day. We're not even sure if it does happen. We're not even sure how many rings are exchanged. Anne's diary is unclear, but what is clear to me at least, and, you know, people might feel a little uncomfortable with this, there are times at which Anne Lister is coercive and controlling when it comes to Ann Walker. And in that way she is a true patriarch. She occupies a space in society that is about control, that is about land ownership, that is about who has what votes and who can influence what. And of course, as a woman, she's well versed in what she has been denied in that sense.
- [36:39]
Interviewer Isabel King
And.
- [36:39]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
But despite her womanhood, she is a patriarch, she is also masculine and people at the time know that. And she wants to uphold some of those traditional institutions and one of those traditional institutions that she seeks to manipulate slightly, I think, is marriage. So it's not always a positive. I think if you read Anne Lister's writings alongside Ann Walker's writings, you will get two very different accounts of their relationship. Anne Lister saying constantly, oh, she's stupid, I want to leave her, she's boring, she's crying too much. At one point, after she has. After they have moved into Shibden hall together, Anne Lister says, I like people to think she's the wife in the house and that she's running the household like a wife should, but she's not. Anne's sister Marion is running the house as she always had, and she blatantly says that Anne Walker fancies herself under restraint. And, you know, you might think, well, you know, we're on the brink of this kind of stern Victorian husband. And Anne Lister is just trying to replicate some of those husbandly tropes that she has seen in the past. But no, because an idea of this, what we would now term abuse of Victorian husband, is far outdated by this time. Love is a big part of the Victorian union and as we're told, it is in Gentleman Jack, but the archive doesn't bear it out. What Anne Lister wants more than anything else is Ann Walker's money, and she's very clear about that throughout her diary. She's very insulting to Ann Walker. I think she has her purposely contained in York under, essentially sectioned, although not formally, by a family doctor, Dr. Balcombe. And the reason that I think she has her deliberately restrained is because she has another Dr. Balcombe, this Steph Balcombe's father has also institutionalized one of Anne Lister's former lovers before Eliza Raine. And so we have a pattern. It's two. So it's the beginnings of a pattern. Let's say we have the beginnings of a pattern that Anne Lister, when women become a little bit inconvenient, for whatever reason, they end up in some kind of psychiatric care, as it would have been in the early 19th century. So I think there's some dark, shadowy stuff going on. I think Lister is a patriarch. I think Lister can be abusive, even by 19th century standards. But that doesn't make her any less important a figure, and that doesn't make her any less pivotal a figure for our understanding of queer histories. For me, it makes her all the more interesting. What have we missed? How do we nuance this history? We demand it from other histories, so we should demand it from queer histories too. So we have to move beyond this. Just finding the gays and the lesbians in the past and just being like, there's one, let's move on now. No, what were they doing? What were they like? How did they interact with the world? How did they occupy spaces of power? And with Lister, that's really interesting.
- [39:40]
Interviewer Isabel King
Another person that you feature in the book is Mary Jones, who is what we would now consider to be a black trans woman. Can you tell me a little bit more about her and her story?
- [39:50]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
So Mary is the person who persists with me the most from having written Queer Georgians. She comes into my mind every now and again, and she just inspires me in the simplest of ways, because Mary Jones ended up in prison countless times. Not for her gender nonconformity, and not that she was a flawless individual. She stole a lot of money from a lot of people, but she had to survive in the world that she was placed in. And in many ways, the legal records show us what her life was like as what we would now term a trans black woman in the early 19th century. And she is incredible. She's so inspiring. So, you know, I think she ends up getting arrested about 20 something times overall. I've read somewhere else, it's 48 times. So, you know, it could be anything, but a lot, a lot of times. And what Mary does time and time again is she keeps on keeping on. She comes back again, she gets arrested again, she comes back again, she gets arrested again. And you might be thinking to yourself, why is he celebrating this criminal? Because Mary had no choice but to survive. And that is admirable. The instinct to survive when the world was against her to the extent that she was, because of her blackness, because of her what we would now term her transness. She wasn't supposed to survive this system. And yet she does. And she does it with. I always get the impression she does it with a smirk on her face. And when you get the description of her trial, she's tried for stealing money from one of her male clients. And she did steal the money. There's no denying that. But when she walks into that courtroom, she is so well put together. She has such a presence about her that she's infectious. You're just drawn into her orbit. And they were, too. But because of her gender nonconformity and because of her race, they did not know what to do with her. And so they labeled her the man monster. And they ripped her wig off and they made jokes about her beautiful clothing that she was wearing. And we have a rendering of those clothes that she wore in that trial. And she looks incredible. And she says during that trial, this is how I appear amongst the people of my own kind. So she means black people when she's saying that this is how I appear amongst other black people most of the time, as Mary. And I just think it tells us something about community. It tells us something about race that we're not overly exposed to. In all our conversations and really important conversations on race. We don't see these trans histories coming in early 19th century conversations around race. And here we have Mary telling us what's happening. And then, of course, the persecution that she endures because of her race and because of her gender nonconformity. But she is never tried for gender nonconformity. There is no law against that. She is tried for stealing and other soliciting at times. But sometimes, I think I say in the book something along the lines of sometimes all it takes to make history is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. And that is what Mary does. And they literally try to erase her from history because her name, Mary Jones, is listed alongside her male name that she still uses at times. She uses it herself at times. She says, I am Peter Sowally. I am a man. She says that I use Peter in the book sometimes, too, because she did. But it brings into focus a history that is all too easily overlooked, especially when people at the time tried to erase her name, physically erase it. You see, there's this one document in particular, which is shown in the book. They have tried to erase the name with some kind of an eraser, Mary Jones, from the legal documentation and Just leave Peter Sowally in there. But the trace of Mary is still there. And then all the other arresting material, Mary Jones name is listed alongside Peter Sowelli's name. So she is there in that legal documentation. And there is, you know, there's an argument to be said that transgender people aren't recognized in legal documents until the 1960s. That's what we've thought. Well, here's Mary recognized in legal documents in the 1830s. So her name is there. This is the name that she has chosen. And there it is in legal documentation in New York in the 1830s. And it comes back again and again and again. Each time she gets sent to prison. But she doesn't give up. And that's why she's so inspiring. And that's to me at least, and that's why I admire her so much. Mary Jones is, I think, my queer Georgians hero.
- [44:28]
Interviewer Isabel King
Are there any key figures in this history that didn't make it into your book but you think listeners should still know about?
- [44:35]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
I love Princess Seraphina. She doesn't make it in because it references some of the same tropes that are in other stories. So I felt like I was covering some of the old grounds of Princess Seraphina takes a man to. It's her court case. She brings the court case. She has had some clothing stolen from her. This man steals some clothing and she brings him to court and she gets justice. Her gender is not on trial. That's not what's on trial here. She wants her clothes back or financial equivalent. So she didn't make it in, but she would have been in Molly Houses. So her history gets covered in that way. Then there are other people who I expected to include, who once I actually looked at their archive in a more robust way, didn't really meet my criteria for what I see as a queer life at this point. So I'm thinking about General von Steuben. It's an American history. I thought I was entering into a queer founding father's history. That's what I had heard, that's what I had read about General von Steuben. But when I read his archive, it just, it didn't look. It's not me saying he wasn't same sex attracted. I couldn't find proof of it in the archives, therefore he didn't get included. So there may be people that some people expect to see in there. And you know, there are other figures who appear in poetry, for instance, who. I think it's useful contextual information, but I didn't want to include. I wanted this to be so clearly, archivally grounded that it was almost impossible to argue any of the points where it's like, well, here we have them. They're standing there. They're sitting there, they're writing there, they're riding in a horse and carriage there. This is. We have them doing it. So I steer away from queerings, which is kind of a more literary exercise, and really hone in on the queer archive that we go. This is happening. Look, read about it, see what people are saying about it. So that's what I've tried to stick to.
- [46:28]
Interviewer Isabel King
So we've covered many different people in this interview and several others that are featured in the book that we haven't discussed. But I just wanted to ask you to sum up, what's the key message that you want to send about queerness in the Georgian period and its impact on history?
- [46:44]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
That this is our inheritance as queer people and as people who have queer people in their family. And that's stretching things quite wide. So this is a history for everyone. This is our inheritance. This is how deep our roots run. Not even a portion of how deep. Actually, they run so much more deep. But this is maybe what people have overlooked in the past. And for me personally, when I think of myself, although I'm not blood related to any of these people, when I think of myself as standing on the shoulders of. Of what we would now term a trans black woman in New York named Mary Jones, who's just the most inspirational person, or I go home to Kilkenny, and, you know, there was times in my teenage years where I felt I didn't belong there because of my queerness. And yet here, these two 18th and 19th century women who are from the same limestone crags as I am from, we belong. These are our roots. And if there's only one thing that I would hope that people would read in this or see in this, it's just that feeling of how deep our historical roots run. And maybe in the face of so much opposition now, be that only rhetoric, opposition, you know, online hatred, that's meaningful, that's powerful. But we have endured and we have persisted against similar things in the past. And they're detailed in the book, you know, people being afraid to go to certain areas because of the proto homophobic violence they're going to endure. And we know what that's like as queer people. We experience it today, ourselves. And so that's not to say that that's okay. But what these histories have shown me is that we insist on persisting. We will not be cowed by these ugly flares of hatred that come up again and again throughout history because these people endured and then their Victorian ancestors endured, and then our 20th century forebears endured and now we're enduring too. We want to get beyond enduring. Don't get me wrong, we're not just looking to endure, but there are lessons in these lives that help shape what we are capable of and help to solidify our existence in a world that sometimes doesn't accept queer and gender non conforming people in the ways that they might. And there's opportunity in this for those people too. This is an invitation to those people too to read this book, to look at the history and to see the ways in which some of these incredible inspirational people have conducted themselves in the past. And I defy them to not be inspired by some of their actions.
- [49:31]
Podcast Host Isabel King
That was Dr. Anthony Delaney, an honorary fellow at the University of Exeter. His new book is Queer Georgians A Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers and Homemakers. And that's out now. He was speaking to Isabel King.
- [50:02]
Dr. Anthony Delaney
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