Queering Holmes: the bibliography post

[damned_colonial]

This is a round-up post for suggested reading related to this community's subject matter.



Queer history

Harry Cocks, "Nameless Offences: Homosexual desire in the 19th century", I. B. Tauris, 2009.

Matt Cook, "London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914", Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Graham Robb, "Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century", W. W. Norton & Co, 2003.


If you have suggestions for additions to the bibliography, please drop us a comment. The bibliography tag on this community is another place to look for book reviews and the like.

Comments

[oursin]

Oldies but goodies:

Jeff Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the C19th to the Present (1977)
Timothy D'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English 'Uranian' Poets from 1889 to 1930 (1970) - and, should you ever come across a copy of this small press collectors' item, check out his intro to Elysium Press's lovely edition of The Quorum: A Magazine of Friendship

More recent:
Charles Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform (2009) - the period is the earlier part of the century, but it's all excellent stuff
Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (2008)
Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 (2005)
Morris Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (2005)
Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Psychiatry and the Making of Sexual Identity (based on detailed research in the Krafft-Ebing papers) (2000)
Angus McLaren's Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History (2002) has some material on gay blackmail cases.

The best study of Havelock Ellis, to my mind, is Chris Nottingham's The Pursuit of Serenity: Havelock Ellis and the New Politics (1999) (Grosskurth's bio is terribly Point Thah U Hav Misst It - Ellis was not aiming to be Freud, srsly) - but it's more about wider late C19th progressive circles. I am slightly hesitant to recommend Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition (2007) on account of history with the editor - he does do solid research, but tends towards a rather odd theoretical framework.

I don't think there's anything in the way of biography on George Ives out there - but I know Matt Cook has an article or two about him in the pipeline.

You all know already know about Rictor Norton's massive website on gay history, right? I refer here especially to the section on John Addington Symonds.

And probably not entirely finally: has anyone else ever read Chris Hunt's novel Street Lavender (1990), about a late Victorian rentboy? As I recollect it seemed fairly well-researched. I have an idea there may have been a sequel, but don't have the details.