#graham robb

[nortism]

Are you telling me Victor Hugo doesn’t always tell the truth?!

[thefisherqueen]

"Self-censorship was a practical necessity, but it was also part of the process of self-discovery, which makes it doubly unreasonable to accuse writers like Proust or James of failing to support the cause. Far more damage was done by the mutilations and incinerations of embarrassed readers. A diarist might turn his closet into a time-machine, but when it arrived in the future heirs and editors would be waiting to barricade the doors.

Some crude attempts at censorship are easily reversed - hims replaced with hers, and so on - but a great deal of the unread corpus was destroyed forever. Edmund Gosse and the librarian of the London Library organized Symond's papers into a pile in the library garden and set fire to them. Richard Burton's extensive research notes on 'pederasty' were probably destroyed by his widow. Minnie Benson's son Arthur left behind 'a packet of letters of very dangerous stuff' and another packet 'that had to be burned unopened', according to his brother Fred. Edward Lear's papers seem to have been selectively destroyed after his death by the man for whom Lear had harboured a 'twarted, frustrated, impossible love'.

To judge by the large number of known destructions (most presumably went unrecorded), at any moment in the 19th century someone, somewhere, was burning the papers of a homosexual relative. People who were almost certainly homosexual, like Thomas Gray or Thomas Lovell Beddoes, can now have no firm place in the record, especially since the standard of proof demanded of biographers is far stricter for homosexual than for heterosexual subjects. It is almost as if the surviving testimonies to forbidden love were written 2000 years rather than four or five generations ago. Ancient Greek literature and 19th-century confessional gay literature probably survive in approximately the same proportions."

From: 'Strangers. Homosexual love in the nineteenth century', by Graham Robb

Crying a little at the thought of all the queer records we've lost

[eirinstiva]

The Man with the Watches

Five years after the supposed death of Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, this story featuring a quote from an un-named criminal investigator appeared in the Strand Magazine. Could this person have been Sherlock Holmes? You may decide for yourself…

New letter from my dear friend Watson and... surprise! It's "The Story of the Man with the Watches", part of Round The Fire series. This is the third time I read this story and always lefts my heart aching.

This start with a very tall man and a woman who looked like father and daughter. They arrived at the station and refused to share a smoking compartment with a very surprised man.

[Illustration by Frank Craig in The Strand Magazine (1898)]

The train stops briefly at Willesden at 5:12pm, and then again at Rugby at 6:50pm where the open door of a first-class carriage attracts notice. The three passengers have now vanished, and in their carriage is the body of a young man who has been shot through the heart. There is no clue to his identity but, oddly, he is in possession of six valuable gold watches, all of American manufacture…

[llustration by Manuel Orazi in Du mystérieux au tragique (1911)]

Mystery murders on trains are a classic trope, probably the most famous is Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. Similar cases can be found in Detective Conan and Moriarty the Patriot. There's a reference too in Ron Kamonohashi's: Forbidden Deductions opening:

What makes this story peculiar is the subtext in the relationship between Sparrow MacCoy and Edward. There's an older and captivating criminal with a younger man crossdressing doing crimes in different cities. His brother James tried to get Edward back in "the right way", but everything ended with the tragic death of Edward in the train. MacCoy is shown as a ruthless criminal, expert card-sharper and very bad influence for young Edward, but after the murder we see a sensible side of MacCoy, who takes care of James after they fell from the train.

[Illustration by Frank Craig in The Strand Magazine (1898)]

Maybe Arthur Conan Doyle wasn't a writer of queer stories, but this one follows the typical "gay tragedy" trope that it was pretty common until last years. As Graham Robb said in Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteeth Century:

"Gay tragedy is a tradition, not just a circumstantial feature. This is one of the clearest signs that 19th-century gay literature was not a parasitic sub-section of 'serious' literature. It had a discret life on its own and was far more influential that it seems."

Also: who is this "well-known criminal investigator"? Sherlock Holmes? He was in some part of the world dismantling Moriarty's criminal organisation. Mycroft Holmes? Maybe Watson trying to follow Sherlock's style, or Lestrade... This is a new case to solve. ✨

[haveyoureadthisqueerbook]

Have you read Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb (2003)?

YES

NO

Voting ended onOct 8, 2024

[adrianicsea]

from Graham Robb’s Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (photo ID under read more)

[Photo ID: an excerpt of a page from the book cited above. it reads:

William Beckford to William Courtenay, Rome, 1 July 1782:

I read your letter with a beating heart, my dearest Willy, and kissed it a thousand times. It is needless for me to repeat that I am miserable without you. You know that I can scarcely be said to live in your absence. […] What have we done, Wm., to be treated with such severity! I often dream after a solitary ramble on the dreary plains near Rome, that I am sitting with you in a meadow at Ford on a summer’s evening, my arm thrown round your neck. […] You will hardly be able to read this letter: it is blotted with my tears. My William, my own dear Friend, write to me for God’s sake.

The passage has a bracket drawn around it, as well as a star next to the last few sentences. End ID.]

[throwing-roses-into-the-abyss]

[finalgirldean]

Graham Robb Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century

[lafcadiosadventures]

That one time Balzac almost killed Hugo from the grave