In this clearly written and well-organized study, Charles Upchurch sets out to explore the ways in which British society understood sexual intimacy between men in the earlier and central decades of the nineteenth century. By focusing mainly on the period that stretches from Waterloo to the 1860s, Upchurch's discussion aims to fill a conspicuous gap in gay male historiography. In many respects, his attentive analysis of press reports, police records, and courtroom accounts helps us create connections between the influential research contained in Rictor Norton's Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in Britain, 1700–1830 (2nd ed. [Stroud, 2006]) and H. G. Cocks's Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2003). Whereas Norton's study shows that the last assault on the molly houses established in the eighteenth century took place with the Vere Street raid of 1810, Cocks's discussion concentrates much of its attention on later Victorian homosexual scandals, such as the ones at Dublin Castle and Cleveland Street. Before Wilde builds on the achievements of these distinguished books by unraveling the complicated manner in which the reform era “witnessed a profound shift in the practice of law enforcement, from a system reliant on relatively rare but brutal displays of punishment on the offender's body to one that sought to reform behavior through a system of observation and regulation” (7).

Like much of the impressive new gay history produced by scholars such as Ivan Crozier, Upchurch's inquiries enable us to see that legal developments such as the Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), which banned sexual relations between men even in private, did not accomplish a decisive shift when it specified a maximum sentence of two years with hard labor for men who were found guilty of committing acts of “gross indecency.” Upchurch reminds us that the Hard Labour Act of 1822 enabled magistrates to impose forced labor on men who had committed sexual misdemeanors. Moreover, the Offences against the Person Act of 1828 stipulated two years’ imprisonment, with or without hard labor, as the maximum sentence for quite a number of misdemeanors, which could of course include cases of unnatural assault. These observations put into perspective the emphasis that critics of Wilde have placed upon the definitive impact that the 1885 law, under which Wilde was tried, had on modern understandings of male homosexuality. Moreover, Upchurch's comments on the wording of several 1820s legal acts (such as the Larceny Act of 1827), which elaborated the “abominable crime of Buggery,” point to the fact that, even if such legislation “marked a significant break with earlier statute law,” it “does not seem to have greatly affected the common-law practice of prosecuting cases of attempted sodomy and unnatural assault” (92).

Most of Upchurch's findings converge on the prosecution of cases of unnatural assault that took place in London, particularly in West End locations such as Hyde Park, where members of the recently established Metropolitan Police would steal upon unsuspecting heterosexual and homosexual couples. He points out that, in the wealth of sources he has consulted, it is evident that the “sexual encounters between men in London that were most often uncovered, disrupted, and discussed involved two men of different classes” (64). Class differences in such sexual encounters caught greatest attention when an exchange of money had taken place. Upchurch infers from his materials that it was not uncommon for men of higher rank to make financial offers to working-class men and soldiers for sex. As a consequence, this kind of sexual trade could encourage men who were made such offers to try their hands at extortion. Later in the period, the systematic construction of municipal urinals offered fresh challenges for men seeking sex with other men in negotiating urban spaces whose sex-segregated nature promised greater erotic opportunities at the same time as these locations were subject to increased surveillance. Upchurch mentions cases from the 1840s and 1860s where witnesses’ statements reveal that, while some of the sexual liaisons that occurred in these facilities were opportunistic, others were carefully designed to obviate scrutiny.

Throughout this assessment, Upchurch refrains from making overbold claims on these reports of men's sexual involvement with other men. In his view, patterns of behavior varied depending on locations as different as public houses and shop windows. But his careful evaluation of the diverse ways in which men sought homosexual sex tends to return to a single preoccupation: the centrality of anonymous erotic interaction in the city. By making such encounters the staple of his research, Upchurch tends to draw attention away from the development of homosexual subcultures, such as Druids’ Hall in Turnagain Lane. Even though, as Upchurch observes, in 1854 the The Times reported that this meeting place witnessed a “frequent congregation of certain persons for immoral practices,” the fact that some of those “who were present in female attire were of the male sex” was much more the exception to the rule when it came to this newspaper's accounts of male homosexuality (75). Press representations of cross-dressed men, we learn, “were comparatively few,” amounting only to 4 percent of the stories included in the The Times, though slightly higher in other sources such as the Weekly Dispatch (74).

Arguably, Upchurch's decision to prioritize the interests of the courts, the press, and the police has the unfortunate consequence of making it hard for scholars to grasp the forms of sociability that men-loving men could and did enjoy in Britain during the decades before Wilde's involvement in London's homosexual network was uncovered much later in the century. Moreover, the drift of Upchurch's account can give the impression that male brothels, clubs, and patterns of prostitution—all of which could and did provide networks among homosexual men in London—did not really matter quite as much as research on the periods before and after the era of reform has led us to believe. But, then, in fairness, it is the implicit purpose of Before Wilde to explore the sexual practices rather than sexual identities or subcultures that men-loving men enjoyed, often at great risk, in a culture of reform. The value of this study lies in the ways in which it shows that the changing emphases in legal enforcement during this era become particularly noticeable in the state's treatment of men charged with unnatural assault.