Abstract
In 1917 George Ives (1867–1950), the well-heeled early campaigner for homosexual law reform, gave a roll call in his diary of his ‘family’ home, a large suburban villa in Adelaide Road, Swiss Cottage. Using pet names for his co-residents, he wrote: ‘Kit has been with me some 35 years. His wife over 20. Pug 9 or 10. […] and the 2 Kit girls all their lives’. ‘Kit’ (James Goddard) had been a servant at the Ives’ family seat in Hampshire and then moved with George to London. When he married he bought his wife Sylvie into the household too; ‘the 2 Kit girls’ were their daughters. ‘Pug’ (Harold Bloodworth) was a working-class former footballer who eventually outlived Ives and inherited the house jointly with a later addition — ‘Elephant’, an apparently lovable but nevertheless difficult alcoholic called Stanley Suanders. A few other working class men lived with this group for longer and shorter periods over the years. Together they formed what Ives called ‘my little circle in the world’.1
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Notes
For more on Ives’ diary see: Matt Cook, ‘Sex Lives and Diary Writing: The Journals of George Ives’, in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006).
On this point see especially: John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 41.
Roy Porter, London: a Social History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 282
Alan Crawford, C.R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer & Romantic Socialist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 4, 185.
Cited in: Karl E. Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York and London: Norton, 1993), 210.
Henry James Forman, London: An Intimate Portrait (1913) cited in: Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People (London: Vantage, 2008), 17.
On the correspondence of household and family see: Michael Gilding, The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family (North Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 2–4
G.K. Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–1940 (Standford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 26
T.M. McBride and P. McCandless, ‘The Domestic Revolution: The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France 1820–1920’, History: Reviews of New Books 4, no. 10 (1976): 16; Tosh, A Man’s Place, 196.
Matt Houlbrook observes a similar inclusiveness in some of his case studies. Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 185.
Michael Roper, ‘Maternal Relations: Moral Manliness and Emotional Survival in Letters Home during the First World War’, in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. S. Dudink, K. Hagemann, and J. Tosh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 295–315.
As Ralph LaRossa and others observe, see: Ralph LaRossa, The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 15
Eva Paulina Bueno, Terry Caesar, and William Hummel, Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies, and Explorations of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Literature (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000), intro, 8.
Tim Fisher, ‘Fatherhood and the British Fathercraft Movement, 1919–1939’, Gender & History 17 (2005): 441–462.
See: Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service (London: Fig Tree, 2007).
Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 8.
Paul Sieveking, Man Bites Dog: The Scrapbooks of and Edwardian Eccentric (London: Jay Landesman, 1980), preface, 5. The scrapbooks are now held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy, and Catherine Donovan, Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments (London: Routledge, 2001), 9.
On this point see: Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 13.
Other examples include Reginald Brett, the second Lord Esher, and the writer Edmund Gosse. See: Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 161
Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape 1849–1928 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1984).
See Felicity Ashbee, Janet Ashbee: Love, Marriage and the Arts and Crafts Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002); Crawford, C.R. Ashbee.
Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 59.
There is evidence that people were increasingly exercising this choice: family sizes were declining in the interwar period, and in 1930 40 per cent of middle-class couples and 28 per cent of working-class couples were thought to be using some form of contraception. See: Holden A, The Shadow of Marriage, 89; Juliet Gardiner, The Thirties: An Intimate History (London: Harper Press, 2010), 563.
See Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885–1914 (London: Penguin, 1995), chap. 1 & 4.
Lynn Jamieson, Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 27, 43; Brady, Masculinity, 37.
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 1992)
Joseph Bristow, ‘Fratrum Societati: Forster’s Apostolic Dedications’, in Queer Forster, ed. Robert K. Martin and George Piggford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
H. Cocks, ‘Calamus in Bolton: Spirituality and Homosexual Desire in Late Victorian England’, Gender & History 13, no. 2 (2002): 191–223.
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman (London: Century, 1991), 63.
Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 26.
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, vol. 5 (London: Verso, 2005), 306.
A.T. Fitzroy, Despised and Rejected (London: C.W. Daniel, 1918)
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (Paris: Pegasus, 1928).
This sense of rhetorical restriction was theorised in relation to the chartist movement by Gareth Stedman-Jones. See: Gareth StedmanJones, ed., ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Carol Smart, Personal Life: New Directions in Sociological Thinking (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 167.
On these issues see: Janet Finch, Passing On: Kinship and Inheritance in England (London: Routledge, 2001).
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Cook, M. (2014). George Ives, Queer Lives and the Family. In: Queer Domesticities. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316073_5
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