Burton's ‘execrabilis familia pathicorum’

After being expelled from Trinity College, Oxford, for going to see a steeplechase race, Richard Burton joined the East India Company army. As a child, he had already proved himself a talented linguist, and whilst in India he became a proficient speaker of several Asian languages. Burton was marginalised by the other soldiers, who felt that he took too keen an interest in the people they were meant to be ruling. Recognised for his eager erudition, however, he was appointed to survey the Sindh province, which had recently been subjugated by the British forces. At this time, he began to travel in disguise, adopting the alias of Mirza Abdullah, apparently fooling local people and fellow soldiers. Amongst other duties, he participated in an undercover investigation into the boy brothels of Karachi, apparently not far from the British encampment. Although the report now no longer exists (as we will see, Burton's reportage implicated himself awkwardly in relation to the subject matter), it was his first foray into sexual ethnography and anthropology. Burton became famous for his audacious journeys to Mecca and Medina disguised as a Persian pilgrim. He was one of the leading explorers of his generation until a public spat with his fellow-explorer John Speke about the source of the Nile. The controversy ended his career of exploration and he spent the rest of his life in obscure, but comfortable, consular service. The safety of such a position induced a heavy liking for alcohol. At the same time, however, Burton produced a large number of ethnographic publications, and brought out seminal translations of erotic classics such as The kama sutra of Vatsyayana.

Written in 1886, the ‘Terminal essay’ that concluded The Arabic nights is a dense, scholarly, albeit eccentrically written, investigation. It discusses the cultural origins of The nights (Burton argues for Persia); the date of composition (by Burton's reckoning, no later than ‘A.D. 1400’, arguing from ‘a study of the vie intime’Footnote ²⁸ of Islamic culture, that is, the fact that syphilis, coffee and tobacco are barely if at all mentioned in The nights); the authors (about which next to nothing can definitively be known); the history of their reception and translation into European languages (French, German, Spanish and Italian); a classification of the types of tales contained in The nights (the ‘beast-fable’; the ‘fairy tale’; and the ‘historical stories of great men’); the language and style of the stories; the social context of The nights; and finally, an erudite discussion of prose-rhyme and prosody. It is in his examination of The nights' social contexts that we find discussed ‘the pornology of the great Saga-book’.Footnote ²⁹ This was Burton's idiosyncratic way of introducing the subject of sex.

He enters into this section entitled ‘Pederasty’, by contrasting the objectivism of his inquiry with the ‘Cant [sic]’ of ‘the late Mr. Grote’, who ‘had reason to lament that when describing such institutions as the far-famed ἱερός λόχος of Thebes, the Sacred Band annihilated at Chaeroneia [sic], he was compelled to a reticence which permitted him to touch on the surface of the subject’.Footnote ³⁰ George Grote (1794–1871) was, of course, the author of the voluminous History of Greece (1846–56), which aimed at historical objectivity whilst at the same time seeing Athenian democratic culture as a meaningful exemplar for Victorian democratic politics.Footnote ³¹ Although Grote's work emphasised a relativist, utilitarian ethos, radically encouraging his readers to look beyond Christian eyes at antiquity, Burton suggests that Greek pederasty was the limit case for such historicism. And Burton's contention is telling: whereas for Grote's historicism, Athenian democracy positions ancient Greece as the ancestor of modern British politics, for Burton's anthropology, Classical Greece was located within the ‘Sotadic Zone’, making it the oriental other to modern British culture. Grote's historical narrative that links ancient and modern politics is countered by Burton's anthropology which emphasises the difference between ancient Greece and modern Britain.Footnote ³² As Burton explains, the ‘Sotadic Zone’ comprises

Burton's argument was that pederasty mainly occurred and was even culturally acceptable within these geographical parameters. This was, however, Sotadic love, not Socratic. Nor Platonic. Burton named the phenomenon after the third-century BCE poet Sotades. Not only had he been a writer of obscene, pederastic verse, but he was a Greek poet who was productive in ancient Alexandria. Burton's Greece is in Egypt, not the progenitor of Europe. The Greeks are not cordoned off from the Near East and North Africa. Ancient Greece is best understood within a geographical region, not as a historical ancestor. Burton does not see Greek culture as originary and foundational. Rather ‘the ancient Greeks … invented nothing but were great improvers of what other races invented’.Footnote ³⁴ His emphasis is on ‘the proximity of Persia and the close intercourse with the Greco-Romans’.Footnote ³⁵ Whereas Herodotus thought that the Persians ‘learned from the Hellenes … a passion for boys’, following Plutarch (On the malice of Herodotus 13), Burton argues ‘with much more probability that the Persians used eunuch boys … long before they had seen the Grecian main’.Footnote ³⁶

Burton's rationale for explaining the prevalence of pederastic activities and desires in the Sotadic Zone is, however, complicated. He underlines that pederasty is to be considered within a ‘geographical and climatic, not racial’ framework.Footnote ³⁷ At the same time, however, Burton also suggests a ‘physical cause’, though it ‘must be owned purely conjectural’:

Burton posits the existence of a particular sort of physical body that exists within the Sotadic Zone. It is Greek and Latin terminology (‘patiens’, ‘agens’, ‘tribade’, ‘Frictrices’) that exemplifies these bodies and their behaviours for the rest of the Zone. Burton relies on the work of Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910), an Italian neurologist and anthropologist. He was known for his (scientific) experimentation with cocaine and founded the first museum of anthropology and ethnology in Italy. In one of his books, Gli amori degli uomini (which appeared around the time Burton was writing his essay), he argued that same-sex desires arose from an anomalous nervous constitution between the rectum and the genitals. Although Burton calls the theory ‘superficial’ (p. 209, as Mantegazza does not explain the reason for that physical constitution), he nevertheless subscribes to a theory of ‘mixed physical temperament’:

Despite his insistence on a physical cause, Burton's ethnography of the Sotadic Zone reveals contradictions and inconsistencies. Although pederasty was not to be defined racially, he calls the Turks ‘a race of born pederasts’.Footnote ⁴⁰ And then, he offers a quasi-sociological analysis: ‘Le Vice of course prevails more in the cities and towns of Asiatic Turkey than in the villages’.Footnote ⁴¹ At other times, he offers a diffusionist theory: ‘Roman civilisation carried pederasty also to Northern Africa, where it took firm root, while the negro and negroid races to the South ignore the erotic perversion, except where imported by foreigners into such kingdoms as Bornu and Haussa’.Footnote ⁴² And after having circumnavigated the Sotadic Zone, Burton turns to ‘our modern capitals, London, Berlin and Paris’ where ‘the Vice seems subject to periodical outbreaks’. To add further confusion, then, Burton now characterises pederasty as an illness like cholera or influenza. Just as Krafft-Ebing's medical study of same-sex sexuality suggested that it was both congenital and so potentially universal, and a cultural practice that had come from the east, so Burton's ethnography localises it within a specific zone, but then goes on to find it everywhere else.

This contradiction would have spoken clearly to Burton's reader in the 1880s and 1890s, concerned and interested as he was in the relationship between the West and the Orient. It is pederastic desire, in Burton's account, that puts this issue into painful focus. Indeed this very issue is apparent at the beginning of Burton's account, when he relates how in 1845, Charles Napier, his commander in India, appointed Burton to write a report on the brothels of Karachi, which ‘supported no less than three lupanars or bordels, in which not women but boys and eunuchs, the former demanding nearly a double price, lay for hire’.Footnote ⁴³ ‘Habited as a merchant, Mirza Abdullah’ (as we've already mentioned), Burton spent ‘many an evening in the townlet’, where he ‘visited all the porneia and obtained the fullest details which were duly despatched to Government House’. The authorities, however, got wind of the report and dismissed him from his service. Burton suggests that there were some dodgy dealings behind this dismissal.Footnote ⁴⁴ Even though he goes straight on to argue that pederasty is localised to the Sotadic Zone, his reader, at the same time, is, however, left wondering about this Englishman who impersonates the natives, obtaining ‘the fullest details’ from these brothels. It is this image that the reader holds in their head, as they read Burton's journey around the Sotadic Zone. On the one hand, we are peering into the Oriental Other, and yet, we can only see this Other if we ‘go native’. What actually went on in those brothels? What did Burton do to obtain his knowledge about sexual desire?

Burton had himself already warned his reader that The nights ‘arouse strange longing and indescribable desires; their marvellous imaginativeness produces an insensible brightening of mind and an increase of fancy-power, making one dream that behind them lies the new and unseen, the strange and unexpected – in fact, all the glamour of the unknown’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Reading Burton's Nights – entering oriental culture – will alter you – The nights will change the desires of you, the reader. It was precisely this issue that worried many reviewers of Burton's publication, which attracted the attention of the leading journals and papers of the day, despite its carefully limited circulation. The reviewer in the Echo complained that Burton ‘has produced a morally filthy book. What might have been acceptable to Asiatic populations ages ago is absolutely unfit for Christian populations of the nineteenth century’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The importation and translation of ‘Asiatic’ literature into a Christian modernity is seen as abhorrent. A pseudonymous reviewer, ‘Sigma’, in Stead's moralistic Pall Mall Gazette worried that it might fall into the hands of an ‘unripe youth, [or an] unsuspecting maiden’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Burton's text worryingly brought the imperial frontier into the hearths of British homes.

These worries were not unfounded. Although Burton seeks to locate Greece as other to British civilisation, his translation of The nights was to hold up a mirror to his readers, exposing the ‘perfect hypocrisy’ of British society.Footnote ⁴⁸ Taking up the opening of ‘Pederasty’, at its close, he laments about the ‘cant and hypocrisy’ of the British ‘censor morum’, who ‘reads Aristophanes and Plato, Horace and Virgil, perhaps even Martial and Petronius … “veiled in the decent obscurity of a learned language”’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Late Victorian readers might have recognised Burton's quotation as coming from Archibald Alison's Modern history of Europe from the French Revolution to the fall of Napoleon (1833–42), a very widely read work, appearing in numerous editions into the later nineteenth century, translated into several languages including Arabic and Hindi. The quotation originally appears in a section that compares the French monarchy's morals to the profligacy of the Roman emperors and the orgies of ancient Babylon. It is precisely this sort of behaviour, Alison argued, that triggered the French Revolution and that nation's subsequent troubles. Such sexual mores should play no part in British politics. For Burton, on the other hand, the history of western culture that educates our ‘boys’ and ‘youths’ is ‘soaked and saturated’ with ‘allusions to human ordure and the pudenda; to carnal copulation and impudent whoredom, to adultery and fornication, to onanism, sodomy and bestiality’.Footnote ⁵⁰ If ancient Greece and Rome are to be located in the Orient, and if modern Britain traces its cultural and intellectual origins back to Greece and Rome, then perhaps the difference between Britain and the Orient is thinner than once thought. Just as Burton himself adopted the dress of a Persian merchant, so he encourages his late-Victorian readers, steeped in the Greek and Latin classics, to wonder whether Britain was any different from the East.

Symonds's difficult Dorians

John Addington Symonds was one of the few public voices that praised Burton's Nights. Although not yet personally acquainted, Symonds lauded Burton's scholarship and ‘rare insight into oriental modes of thoughts and feeling’. He reiterated Burton's point about ‘our middle-class censores morum [who] strain at the gnat of a privately circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute study of Greek and Latin literature’. British imperialists reading the Classics in the desert, jokes Symonds.Footnote ⁵¹ Symonds subsequently corresponded with Burton on the subject, who admired Symonds's A problem in Greek ethics (which had already been published in a tiny, anonymous edition of 10 copies in 1883, thereby garnering virtually no public attention). In the Huntington Library's copy of The nights (signed ‘Isabel Burton's copy’, Burton's wife), we can read annotations in Burton's own hand planning a new edition in 1890. These notes say that his work should be ‘read in conjunction’ with Symonds's Greek ethics. Let us, then, follow Burton's suggestion and turn to Symonds's essay. We will see, however, that their accounts of Greek pederasty differ markedly on the issue of Greece's relationship to the East.

In trying to explain why male love was apparently so accepted in ancient Greek society, Symonds relies on nineteenth-century historiographical theory about the Dorian incursion from the north into the Mediterranean south. German histories of antiquity made use of an ancient myth about a Dorian invasion into the Peloponnese. Although the historicity of this settlement has never been proven, some nineteenth-century ancient historians thought they could detect a kernel of truth in the myth, and used it to argue for an Aryan presence within, and force behind, ancient Greek culture, thereby seeing modern north European culture as the heir of the ancient Greek. Karl Otfried Müller, the professor of philology at Göttingen, made much of this narrative in his Die Dorier, which was subsequently translated (with Müller's assistance) into English in 1830 and then in a second edition in 1839.Footnote ⁵² Müller was a villain in Martin Bernal's Black Athena, which sought to trace out how nineteenth-century classicists gradually excised ancient Greece from its relationships with Egypt and the Near East, in order to graft Greece into a racially inflected grand narrative for the history of Europe. Bernal's work has elicited much debate about whether one can label Müller and other classicists as ‘racist’ from a late twentieth-century perspective.Footnote ⁵³ Suzanne Marchand offers soberer analysis when she writes that it was a ‘fateful combination of cultural nationalism, philological scepticism, institutionalized philhellenism, and the beginnings of racialist thought’ that provided the context for Müller's scholarship.Footnote ⁵⁴

Müller's works were read by undergraduate students at Oxford. Along with other German scholars, Müller offered an example for historical scholarship.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed he was particularly daring since he did not refuse to discuss Spartan pederasty. But despite his commitment to historical objectivity, an important tool in the burgeoning discipline of History in the nineteenth-century European university, many of Müller's readers found his Doric Spartans too perfect and glorified. When he discusses pederasty, he emphasises the purity of the relationship, omitting any sexual suggestion:

Despite critiques of Müller's work for its obvious over-admiration of Spartan culture, Müller remained an important text in the second half of the nineteenth century, and so it is not surprising to find Symonds in writing in Greek ethics: ‘What I have to say, in the first instance on this matter is derived almost entirely from C. O. Müller's Dorians.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Here is Symonds's account for the existence of same-sex love and friendship in ancient Greek society:

Symonds adopts Müller's narrative, in order to show, however, how Classical Greek society did not practise a sex-less paiderastia. Müller himself noted that outside Sparta relations between men were not so pure and chaste. Whereas Müller does not seem to approve of such relations, Symonds is himself more interested to understand the origins of Athens's ‘mixed pederasty’, as he calls it, intellectual and sensual.Footnote ⁵⁹ For Symonds, it is the northern Dorian encounter with the ‘Phoenician vices’ in Crete that formed the basis for Greek paiderastia which spread ‘through the states of Hellas’. Symonds's story reflects Victorian orientalist concerns which imagined the corruption of the northern European traveller going south – the worrying prospect of ‘going native’. Robert Aldrich (Reference Aldrich1993) has discussed in great detail nineteenth-century anxieties and fantasies about travelling south and being seduced by Mediterranean sexual cultures. Richard Burton's own ‘Terminal essay’ examined (in his own inimitable style) how ‘for many years, also, England sent her pederasts to Italy, and especially to Naples whence originated the term ‘Il vizio Inglese’ [the English vice]'.Footnote ⁶⁰ He observed how ‘the [French] conquest of Algiers had evil results … [T]he result of the African wars was an éffrayable [sic] débordement pédérastique [horrifying flood of pederasty]’ into France itself.Footnote ⁶¹ The military man in both modern and ancient times was at risk when he went south.

Greek culture, then, was one that stood between East and West. But Symonds should not be seen as anticipating Burton's claim that Greece should be seen within an oriental context. According to Symonds, fifth-century Greek culture looked back in admiration at this earlier historic period, when Doric male love had not yet been debased by ‘sensuality and sanctified impurity’.Footnote ⁶² ‘The love of Achilles for Patroclus’, writes Symonds, ‘added, in a later [classical] age of Greek history, an almost religious sanction to the martial form of παιδεραστία.’Footnote ⁶³ There was something very special about Doric love. Symonds goes on:

Unlike Burton, who in Reference Burton1885 would write that the Sotadic Zone witnessed ‘a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments’, in 1883, Symonds had already countered this argument to suggest that the Doric phase of Greek love be explicitly not compared to other forms of ‘unisexual vice’. Whereas Burton makes Greece an example of oriental culture, Symonds exempts Doric Greek love from any relation with oriental and other global same-sex practices. ‘Dorian comradeship … remained on both sides masculine, tolerating no sort of softness.’Footnote ⁶⁵ Nineteenth-century ethnography and anthropology repeatedly depicted same-sex relations in the colonies and beyond as a relationship comprising a masculine active partner with a feminised or effeminate passive partner.Footnote ⁶⁶ Doric love, on the other hand, was a love between two virile equals, and so exceptional and unique. Symonds implicitly posits the existence of a manly love that might be exemplary for the imperialist, colonising modern Briton, a love that does not distinguish between male friendship and pathological vice. Symonds relied upon well-known nineteenth-century scholarship to support his thesis. ‘Mr Herbert Spencer's Tables’ refers to the multi-volume Descriptive sociology; or groups of sociological facts, a project overseen by the well-known Victorian intellectual Herbert Spencer. From Reference Spencer1873 until his death in 1903, he ran a scheme that aimed to collect all known facts, without judgement, about the world's societies for the use of sociological research. The volumes of the Descriptive sociology comprise tables of such information. In volume three, ‘Types of lowest races’, for instance, there were successive tables on seventeen different societies. As Turner and Maryanski explain, ‘By reading across each table, one can see the structural affinities within a society. By reading down a column for all or some portion of the seventeen societies … one can compare societies for that trait’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Although the aim was an objective description of global societies, ‘these descriptions draw upon accounts of travelers, traders, colonial administrators, and ministers, and other nonprofessionals, most of whom were convinced of their own superiority and who tended to look at the physical and behavioural patterns of non-Western people through very biased eyeglasses’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Despite the professed objectivity of the Descriptive sociology, it actually reflected a very Victorian worldview, organising the globe's peoples into strict racial categories. It supported Symonds's thesis about the essential difference between bonds between men in Dorian society and asymmetrical, pederastic partnerships that paired masculine and feminised men in other parts of the globe.

In the passage quoted, Symonds also refers to Adolph Bastian (1826–1874), a famous German ethnologist, who had obtained a medical degree from Prague and became a ship's doctor, travelling the world on an eight-year voyage. In 1859 he returned to the German Confederation where he published Der Mensch in der Geschichte (1860), a three-volume, very widely read account of his travels. The pages cited by Symonds include details about pederastic vice and effeminacy in Dahomey, West Africa. Bastian was particularly keen to produce ethnographic records of non-European societies, which were disappearing due to imperial contact and colonial engagement. Bastian's emphasis on the cultural differences between Europe and beyond would have supported Symonds's thesis.Footnote ⁶⁹ Julius Rosenbaum (1807–1874), the other author that Symonds mentions, was a medical doctor and medical historian in Halle. His Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume (or A history of the plague of lust in antiquity, 1839) was a history of venereal disease and sexual abnormalities and anomalies in antiquity. Along with Herodotus, it was from here that Symonds found evidence about ‘the Scythian disease of effeminacy’ (as Symonds puts it in the quotation above). Rosenbaum's book was a veritable catalogue of ancient sexual enterprises and escapades. It gave detailed accounts of phallic worship and Venus cults, information about ancient brothels and prostitution and pederasty in candid detail. It contributed to a literary culture in the early decades of the nineteenth century that endlessly marvelled at the erotic objects that had been dug up at Pompeii and Herculaneum half a century before. Even though Rosenbaum's book appeared well before the late nineteenth-century sexological catalogues, his work nevertheless offered a framework for the study of sexual perversion at the end of the nineteenth century, through its examination of ancient medical treatment of venereal disease. The first edition was read enough to warrant a second edition in 1845. But it was its use for the sex doctors of the fin de siècle that ensured the third edition came out some forty years later in 1882, reaching a seventh edition by 1904.Footnote ⁷⁰

It was in this specifically late nineteenth-century ethnographical context, then, that Symonds formed his account of Greek love. Spencer's Descriptive sociology tables, Bastian and the new edition of Rosenbaum would have led Symonds to further publications on the non-Hellenic peoples he refers to in his catalogue of effeminacy. And there were plenty for Symonds to consult.Footnote ⁷¹ After 1885, however, the urgency to theorise Greek love becomes even more pressing for Symonds with the Labouchère Amendment which criminalised gross indecency between men. Furthermore, the publication of Richard Burton's ‘Terminal essay’, which orientalised Greek pederasty, in contrast to Symonds's thesis which had been disseminated in a mere ten copies, required analysis. And so A problem in modern ethics appeared in 1891. It was still brought out in a tiny edition (50 copies), but it was the first study of contemporary homosexuality, and its legal and medical status. ‘Homosexuality’ is indeed just the right word to use, since it first appeared in print in Modern ethics. The essay offers a highly detailed map of theories of same-sex desire that were circulating at the end of the nineteenth century – criminological, medical, anthropological and literary responses. Explicitly, Symonds is concerned with extricating the homosexual from analyses that depict him as a criminal, insane, degenerate or foreign other.Footnote ⁷² In Greek ethics Symonds postulated a northern origin for Greek love, thereby embedding Greece in a European narrative, and cordoning it off from orientalist associations pace Burton. Symonds implicitly argued for the depathologisation of same-sex desires by reference to his manly Dorians. This aim to make Doric Greek love exemplary for modern Victorian men becomes stronger and more explicit in Modern ethics.

Symonds begins his critique with an account of Félix Carlier's book (Reference Carlier1887), which depicts the ‘tribe of people’ (as Symonds puts itFootnote ⁷³ ) that he had to deal with as chief of the Service des moeurs, the vice squad, during the 1860s in Paris.Footnote ⁷⁴ Symonds is also particularly worried by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso's much discussed theory that the criminal mind represents an ‘atavistic reversion to the state of nature and savagery’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although Symonds allows that ‘criminal atavism might be defined as the sporadic reversion to savagery in certain individuals’, he cannot agree with Lombroso's comparison of ‘the male savages’ of New Caledonia and ancient Mexico, who had sex with one another, with pederasty in ‘Hellas and Rome’. Symonds reiterates the differences between Doric love and effeminate, brutish lust.Footnote ⁷⁶ When he comes to Richard Burton's Arabian nights, which ‘made a considerable stir upon its first appearance’, he criticises his friend who ‘takes for granted that ‘Pederasty’, as he calls it, is everywhere and always what the vulgar think it'.Footnote ⁷⁷ Obviously, for Symonds, same-sex passion is not ‘everywhere and always … vulgar’. At the same time, however, Symonds also does not see the Sotadic Zone as a sustainable thesis precisely because same-sex desires and activities can be found elsewhere: Symonds remarks that ‘in the metropolis of England, London, inverted sexuality runs riot’, as if against legal prohibition.Footnote ⁷⁸

On the one hand, then, Symonds does not want the homosexual compared to the savage, just as he had wanted to differentiate Doric love from ‘savage tribes’ (in Greek ethics, quoted above). On the other, however, he does not support Burton's thesis. Vice appears in the imperial metropolis and the so-called Sotadic Zone (as Burton himself let slip). Furthermore, Symonds goes on to say that Doric love can too be found elsewhere, especially with ‘the fighting peoples of the world, Kelts in ancient society, Normans, Turks, Afghans, Albanians, Tartars’. Whereas in Greek ethics, Symonds distinguished the Doric Greek from the Orient, now in Modern ethics he sees virile male love which ‘popular prejudice [views] as an effeminate vice’ across Europe and the Orient.Footnote ⁷⁹ Symonds is now working hard to show that Doric love need not be consigned to the ancient past, but could be a model for modern male comradeship and love.

This move away from Doric exceptionalism occurs in the section of Modern ethics where Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's theory of the ‘Urning’ is discussed, a theory neglected by Burton, as Symonds notes. Ulrichs argued that homosexuality occurred naturally, an argument Symonds found useful for moving beyond Burton's orientalism in 1891 when legislation and medical discourse severely restricted homosexual rights. Ulrichs (1825–1895) was a remarkable figure. He was a civil servant in Hanover and later journalist in Frankfurt, who published a series of pamphlets between 1862 and 1879 on same-sex desire. These were initially written under a pseudonym, but Memnon, the 1868 pamphlet, in which his theories took definitive shape, was released under his real name. Just a year before, he had addressed the Deutsche Juristentag (the Congress of German Jurists) in Munich and candidly argued for the decriminalisation of sexual activities between men. He was, however, shouted down and not permitted to finish the speech. Then in 1871 with the unification of Germany, German states with more liberal laws found their penal codes overridden by implementation of Prussian legislation, including paragraph 175 of the Imperial Penal Code which made sex between men a criminal offence throughout all of Germany. Often characterised from a late twentieth-century perspective as a pioneer of the gay emancipation movement, Ulrichs was in the nineteenth century a well-known figure in sexological and legal circles.Footnote ⁸⁰ Arguing for a completely biological aetiology for same-sex desire, Ulrichs believed that a man sexually attracted to another male was an anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa (‘a feminine soul contained in a masculine body’), extrapolating from nineteenth-century embryology. Such a person he named an ‘Urning’, recalling Aristophanes' fable in Plato's Symposium, where love between males is related to Uranus. ‘Dioning’ was the name given to a man who was attracted to women (again recalling Aristophanes who related such desire to Dione). Ulrichs's thesis was complicated by the fact that there were several different types of Urning, as Symonds's summary explored.Footnote ⁸¹ Some Urnings were ‘Mannlinge’, that is, masculine men who were attracted to passive effeminate males, whereas others were ‘Weiblinge’, that is, feminine, passive men drawn to active, virile lovers.Footnote ⁸² As Sebastian Matzner explains, Ulrichs ended up preserving ‘the heterosexist male-female binarism’, ensuring that ‘the male cannot and must not desire another male’.Footnote ⁸³

Although he admires Ulrichs's conviction that Urnings were ‘abnormal, but natural beings’Footnote ⁸⁴ , Symonds found him too ‘enthusiastic for his physiological theory’.Footnote ⁸⁵ That is, Ulrichs's thesis offers no counterargument to the objector who believes that the ‘Urning must be punished’ even if he is a product of nature.Footnote ⁸⁶ For Symonds, Ulrichs's theory offers the objector nothing to believe in the inherent worth of the existence of such people. Moreover, Ulrichs's theory simply did not live up to Doric Greek love which ‘remained on both sides masculine, tolerating no sort of softness’, as Symonds had written in Greek ethics. And so it is at this point that we arrive at the final theory of male desire considered by Symonds in Modern ethics. And it is here that Symonds turns back to his beloved Dorians, as it is the American poet Walt Whitman who ‘has expressed so strong a conviction that “manly attachment”, “athletic love”, “the high towering love of comrades”, is a main factor in human life, a virtue upon which society will have to rest’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Symonds continues: ‘The language of “Calamus” [by Whitman] … recalls to our mind the early Greek enthusiasm – that fellowship in arms which flourished among Dorian tribes, and made a chivalry for prehistoric Hellas’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet again, then, Doric love comes out on top – it is a love between two men, who are completely men - not a structurally ambiguous version of masculinity as theorised by Ulrichs.Footnote ⁸⁹ It is at this point in Modern ethics that Doric love looks explicitly like an exemplary passion, an example for the modern. It is here, then, that the political dimensions of Symonds's discussion fully emerge: Whitman ‘expects Democracy, the new social and political medium, the new religious ideal of mankind, to develop and extend “that fervid comradeship”, and by its means to counterbalance and to spiritualise what is vulgar and materialistic in the modern world’.Footnote ⁹⁰ In Greek ethics, Symonds got caught up in differentiating Doric love from the effeminacy of ‘savage tribes’. Modern ethics, however, vacillates over the uniqueness of Doric love precisely because Symonds wants in the end to argue for its exemplary status for his modern, democratic age. When Symonds was writing Greek ethics in 1873 and had it published in 1883, he was more concerned with distinguishing Doric love. In 1891, however, Symonds was writing after the 1884 Representation of the People Act (known more commonly as the Third Reform Act), which considerably expanded the size of electorate, and after Labouchère's 1885 Amendment on gross indecency which imperilled homosexuals' rights in this political context (imprisonment would not permit the capacity to vote in an election). George Grote chose to pass over the love that bound the Sacred Band of Thebes in his analysis of their defence of Greek liberty at Chaeronea. Grote was of course writing not long after Greek independence from the Ottomans. Burton would criticise Grote's reticence, but would then go on to compare Greek pederasty to that of the Orient, including the Turks. In 1891, Symonds argues pace Grote and Burton that Doric male love is a bond that supports democratic values and structures for the West, as the American writer Whitman supposedly makes clear.

Symonds himself knew, however, that his thesis about the democratic nature of Doric love was tricky. Back in Greek ethics, his Dorians did not live in a polis.Footnote ⁹¹ Symonds was acutely aware of his Dorians' (non-)relationship to politics. In his 1883 edition, he wrote that ‘morality … certainly did not enter into the account’ of these ‘marauders’ who paid no ‘heed to the proprieties of civic life’.Footnote ⁹² Symonds's Dorians were originally a manly, nomadic horde who had no respect for law-abiding communities. However, when Symonds came to revise Greek ethics for its inclusion in Havelock Ellis's Sexual inversion in 1897, by which time Modern ethics had of course already appeared, Symonds removed the description just quoted, and toned down his portrait of the violent Dorians.Footnote ⁹³ If in Greek ethics the Dorians had no interest in ‘morality’, now in Modern ethics, they offer an example ‘whereby abnormal instincts may be moralised and raised to higher value’.Footnote ⁹⁴

To make matters worse, Symonds relates how he wrote to Whitman and received a response ‘dated Camden, New Jersey, U.S.A., August 19, 1890’ in which the poet denies Symonds's ‘morbid inferences’ as ‘damnable’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Although Symonds tries to read Whitman in spite of Whitman, the despondency in Symonds's prose is ultimately clear: ‘The world cannot be invited to entertain’ Doric Greek love.Footnote ⁹⁶ Symonds's Greek ethics implicitly positioned the Dorians within a western, north European locus, in order to suggest that Greek love might have something to say to the modern Victorian age. In Modern ethics, he makes an explicit argument about the exemplarity of the chivalrous Dorians. Richard Burton had located the Greeks within the Sotadic Zone, ostensibly orientalising the Greeks, whilst at the same time suggesting that modern male Victorian readers enjoyed the pleasures veiled under the obscurities of Greek texts, thereby questioning the relationship between Victorian British men and eastern Orientals. On the other hand, whereas Symonds argues that Greek love originated in a European location, and that that love might offer an example of democracy to 1890s Britain, he ultimately emphasises the sheer gulf between ancient Dorian and modern Victorian. As Burton and Symonds make clear, Greek pederasty and Greek love posed profound and difficult questions about oriental desires and democratic politics in late-Victorian, imperialist Britain. To add to all of this, a few weeks before Symonds received his letter from Walt Whitman denying the possibility of revivifying Doric Greek love in 1890, a very different Dorian had stepped into the London spotlight: Oscar Wilde's The picture of Dorian Gray, which first appeared in the July issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine.

Dorian Gray: ‘citizen of the world’

One thing Symonds could agree with Burton on was the hypocrisy of late-Victorian society. We saw Symonds complain in his review of Burton about ‘our middle-class censores morum’. In the final section of Greek ethics, Symonds asked, ‘Is Greek literature fit to remain the groundwork of the highest education in a modern commonwealth?’ Symonds worried about the Victorian double standard that taught its schoolboys to admire Greek male friendship, but demonised modern homoerotic passion. For Burton, reading Greek actually orientalises the Englishman, and for Symonds, the nineteenth-century education system produced the pederasts and sodomites that it despised. Oscar Wilde's novel responds to this issue about the relationship between Classical antiquity and the modern Briton: does a Classical education make or unmake the British? Wilde describes the beautiful paleness of Dorian's skin in contrast to his rose-red lips in terms that he would later address to Alfred Douglas. He paints a picture of a beautiful Hellene, the veritable descendent of antiquity, who degenerates into evil. Just as Symonds's Dorians travelled from the North into the Oriental South, so Wilde's novel begins in London's West End and slides into its East.Footnote ⁹⁷ Indeed Dorian looks like the late-Victorian, imperialist man, being ‘the true realisation of a type of which they [young men] had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world’ (emphasis added).Footnote ⁹⁸ At the same time, this cosmopolitanism leads Gray into eccentric directions as he becomes an expert in Roman Catholicism, mysticism, Darwinism, perfumes from the East, music from Tunisia back to Schubert, Chopin and Beethoven, musical instruments from South America, jewels, embroideries and tapestries, and ecclesiastical garments.Footnote ⁹⁹ This intellectual journey showed Dorian, the so-called ‘citizen of the world’, a ‘savage and animal’ interior to cultured man:

Dorian's ‘worship of the senses’ makes him conscious of what he shares ‘with the less highly organised forms of existence’ – that he is both savage and civilised. Indeed by the end of the novel, for Gray, an opium addict, beauty has become ugliness: ‘Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ There are, then, two Dorian Grays, the beautiful one, who resides in London's West End and Nottinghamshire, and the other, who frequents the dens of the Whitechapel in the East End, peopled by ‘Malays’, a ‘half-caste, in a ragged turban and a shabby Ulster’, ‘the twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes’.Footnote ¹⁰² Just as late-Victorian London is more than just itself, other to itself, so Gray is more than one.

Dorian Gray embodies Wilde's own thoughts about aesthetic form. In ‘The decay of lying’ (one of the dialogues in Intentions published in 1891), which lambasted the dreary realism of the contemporary novel, Wilde's characters explored the possibility of synthesising western and ‘oriental’ artistic ideals:

The picture of Dorian Gray elegantly reflected Wilde's aesthetic creed: it both exquisitely paints a portrait of a beautiful Greek boy, ‘the face of Antinoüs’, ‘Narcissus’,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Gray himself, and of course constantly reminds us that we will never see an ‘actual representation’ of the picture of Dorian Gray since we are reading a novel. The novel's language offers description of the minutest detail and yet by calling his novel The picture of Dorian Gray Wilde reminds his readers of the blind-spot at the centre of the novel, a painting which even most of the novel's world will never see. Dorian encapsulates this synthesised aesthetic: on his mother's side aristocratic and his father's side of unknown ancestry, both West End and East End, English and oriental(ised), beautiful and ugly, both dedicated to everything the ‘visible world’ has to offer, and invisible, beyond visual representation, a famous painting that has never been viewed.

This aesthetic call for synthesis between East and West, and Wilde's portrait of late-Victorian London, reflected the new-imperialist concerns of the 1890s. The novel was also influenced by Matthew Arnold's Culture and anarchy, which first appeared in 1869. Arnold's book represented one of the most important and widely read attempts to reify English culture. Written in the face of what Arnold perceived to be dangerously pluralising tendencies which were pulling England apart, Arnold sought to bridge those divides and bring England back to itself. He identified two fundamental strands of English identity, Hebraism and Hellenism. These terms take on different nuances throughout Arnold's book, but Jane Garnett usefully summarises: ‘Hebraism incorporated the tendency to sacrifice all other sides of our nature to the religious side … whereas Hellenism suggested the application of the clear light of the critical and expansive intellect’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ All the schisms that Arnold perceived in British life were secondary to this fundamental binary. All those dialectical relationships that defined British culture in the middle of the nineteenth century – Saxon and Celt, England and Europe, Anglican and Nonconformist, Protestant and Catholic, upper, middle and lower classes, Nation and Empire - could be subsumed, Arnold contended, under the overarching opposition Hebrew and Hellene.

This binary was far from accidental and insignificant. Indeed it reflected a long history in European thinking that specifically polarised Greek (Aryan) and Judaic (Semitic) cultures. It was the German Jewish, later Catholic, writer, Heinrich Heine, who provided Arnold with these terms. Lionel Gossman has pointed out that Arnold's use of the Hebrew/Hellene opposition makes use of the anti-Semitism present in previous German constructions of the binary: German philhellenism was so often accompanied by marked anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic sentiment.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Arnold was writing not long after the political emancipation of Jews in England in 1858, and Benjamin Disraeli (born Jewish) would be serving his first tenure as Prime Minster. Interestingly, Arnold's text wavers between suggesting Hebrew and Hellene are cultural characteristics and racial types. Quite how metaphorical or literal Arnold meant to be has provoked much debate. His hope for a harmonious synthesis in English culture between the two sides suggests that the English might be able to mingle their Aryan and Semitic cultural heritages. And yet a racial frame of reference bubbles to the surface of Arnold's writing:

Although, then, Arnold strove to characterise English and British society in cultural terms, these very terms were racial in origin, a basis from which Arnold never quite managed to depart. As Robert Young has summarised,

Wilde's engagement with Arnold was clear already in his essay ‘The critic as artist’, originally published in the Nineteenth Century in 1890 and later included in Intentions (1891). As Stefano Evangelista puts it, Wilde ‘fundamentally inherits Arnold's ideal of culture, repeating his calls for the reform of English middle-class attitudes towards the arts and intellectual knowledge. Behind the superficial hedonism that pervades the essays [in Intentions], Wilde comes out as a supporter of Arnold's belief that culture leads to the improvement of society and that the intellectual has a duty to be publicly involved in this cultural battle’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Combining Culture and Anarchy with Walter Pater's aestheticist philosophy, Wilde's aesthetic critic in his dialogue becomes the harbinger of a new age: ‘we shall be able to realize, not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the word modernity’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This accent on race reappears a little later in the essay: aesthetic criticism will ‘annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms… [and] bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give us the peace that springs from understanding’.Footnote ¹¹¹

In Dorian Gray, however, ‘race-prejudices’ are very much part of the picture, as Wilde paints a world in which the Hebrew and Hellene meet, a world which becomes a nightmarish inversion of Matthew Arnold's ideal synthesis. Wilde responds to the racial discourses implicit in Arnold's polarity. The application of the Hebraic/Hellenic binary is most clear in the novel when Dorian Gray frequents Mr Isaacs's theatre and falls in love with Sibyl Vane. The plotline, which Wilde added into the novel when it was first published in book form, is played out as a petty Victorian melodrama. Gray himself thinks that Sibyl is ‘absurdly melodramatic’.Footnote ¹¹² The narrative utilises literary stereotypes of English heroes and Jewish villains, well known by the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹³ Dorian Gray, the beautiful Greek, known as ‘Prince Charming’ (he never reveals his name) is contrasted with Mr Isaacs, ‘a hideous Jew’, who ‘had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond glazed in the centre of a soiled shirt’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As Dorian acts out his hackneyed play to his friend Lord Henry, he exclaims: ‘we must get her out of the Jew's hands. She is bound to him for three years’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As the novel progresses, however, the polarity between handsome Greek and ‘hideous’ Jew collapses as Gray becomes associated more and more with this adjective: he has a ‘hideous hunger for opium’; ‘with hideous iteration’ he anticipates arriving in the East End; the ‘half-caste’ in the opium den grins at him ‘with a hideous greeting’; there he also hears ‘a hideous laugh’ from ‘the painted lips of the woman who had taken his money’. It is this woman who says to Gray, ‘Prince Charming is what you like to be called, ain't it?’ This name rouses a ‘drowsy sailor’ who turns out to be James Vane, Sibyl's vengeful brother. Gray tricks Vane into believing he is not the man who caused Sibyl's suicide, and shows Vane ‘the hideous error’, a face that has not aged a day. That the opium den ‘looked as if it had been a third-rate dancing hall’ with ‘greasy reflectors of ribbed tin’ backing ‘shrill flaring gas-jets … making quivering discs of light’, associates the scene further with the ‘greasy’ Mr Isaacs's theatre.Footnote ¹¹⁶

My point is not to suggest that Dorian Gray actually is or becomes Jewish. Rather Wilde makes creative use of the Arnoldian opposition between Greek and Jew to show the doubled and divided nature of the Classically educated Englishman Dorian Gray. Taking Arnold's opposition, Wilde paints a nightmarish scenario, a London where Hebrew and Hellene intermingle all too frequently, to the horror of the late-Victorian imagination. Indeed the 1880s saw a marked increase in anti-Semitism in response to Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. ‘The Jew’ in this period and place became a contradictory figure: as well as representing a percentage of impoverished settlers arriving in London from the 1880s onwards, Britain already possessed well-established, but small, ‘assimilated’ Anglo-Jewish communities. And since the 1867 discovery of diamonds by Europeans in South Africa, Jews became closely associated with the imperialist trade in African diamonds. A little later, at the very beginning of the twentieth century, the British government proposed the ‘Uganda plan,’ stemming from real concerns for persecuted Jews in Eastern Europe, which examined the possibility of setting up an African Zion. As Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman put it:

Although eastern European Jews were not colonial subjects, the huge concerns about their presence on British soil pointedly reflected late-Victorian fears about reverse colonisation. The very slipperiness of Wilde's Mr Isaacs is reflected in his ‘greasy ringlets’, both an ugly outsider and participant in the imperialist-capitalist enterprise, ‘an enormous diamond glazed in the centre of a soiled shirt’, this Jew-ellery mirroring Dorian Gray's own obsessive collecting of jewels.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Furthermore, Gray's going native in the orientalised East End, which sees him collide into James Vane, makes Gray look very much like a vampiric Wandering Jew, who has made a pact with the devil, postponing indefinitely ageing and death. Wilde's interest in Charles Maturin's 1820 novel Melmoth the wanderer, based on this conceit, is well attested.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Wilde himself was related by marriage to Maturin, and Wilde renamed himself ‘Sebastian Melmoth’ after leaving prison when he lived in exile. The association between vampirism and Jewishness was made even more obvious in the novel Dracula. Bram Stoker (a friend of Wilde's) clearly plays upon contemporary fears about Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe.Footnote ¹²⁰ The association between academic aesthete and depraved, Gothic horror was also made clear in an 1887 burlesque called Frankenstein; or, The vampire's victim, put on at the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand, in which the well-known comic actor Fred Leslie played the Creature, dressed in many scenes flamboyantly with a sunflower in his buttonhole, along with a Wildean-looking hat.Footnote ¹²¹ The undead Dorian, whose ambiguous, transgressive sexuality preys upon both men and women, reflects contemporary stereotypes about effete, womanising and narcissistic Jews; anticipates the Transylvanian Count; and reflects Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's 1885 story ‘Manor,’ set in the Faroe Islands where a dead sailor returns as a vampire to suck the blood of his male beloved.Footnote ¹²² The ‘Wandering Jew’-type who refuses to grow old and die is a sharp inversion to the glorious timelessness of ancient Greece … not quite gods in exile.Footnote ¹²³

John Gray: A mixture of white and black

Although the reviews of Dorian Gray passed judgement on the sexual suggestiveness of the story, at the same time, readers were also just as disturbed by the protagonist's racial degeneracy, and wondered what this meant.Footnote ¹²⁴ As one critic derisorily noted in the Daily Chronicle, ‘Man is half angel and half ape, and Mr Wilde's book has no real use if it be not to inculcate the “moral” that when you feel yourself becoming too angelic you cannot do better than rush out and make a beast of yourself.’Footnote ¹²⁵ The racialisation of the Wildean aesthete was not uncommon practice in the press both in Britain and the United States. Cartoonists, enjoying the late-Victorian dandy's open display of artificiality, took pleasure in drawing Wilde as a primitive ape in contrast to his witty, metropolitan performances, as the 1882 satire in Harper's Weekly shows.Footnote ¹²⁶

Such images are a visual pun on the ‘aping’ of an identity performed by Wilde and other aesthete dandies. And yet these cartoons suggested that behind Wilde's performances there is nothing more than a primitive ape, underlining and questioning at the same time the literalness of race. In 1882, whilst on tour in America, Wilde's unusual behaviour alerted such attention. The Washington Post included a cartoon of a monkey from Borneo holding a piece of fruit above a picture of Wilde holding a flower, with the caption ‘How far is it from this to this?’ punning on Wilde's name.Footnote ¹²⁷ Another American illustrator, Charles Kendrick, in a picture called ‘A symphony in colour,’ depicts Wilde waltzing around in front of enthralled black housemaids, one of whom is holding a sunflower, linking Wilde to contemporary American stereotypes of racial inferiority and feckless effeminacy and performance.Footnote ¹²⁸ Wilde's Irishness certainly contributed to contemporary reactions to his performances and writings.Footnote ¹²⁹ At times on his tour, Wilde seemed to align himself with American racism, yet at other times he challenged it: as Nicolas Mirzoeff observes, ‘Wilde had employed an African American valet called W. M. Traquair, whom he made perform as a minstrel for his visitors, even though he also unsuccessfully challenged segregation on the Pullman cars in Georgia’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Wilde's difficulties in understanding his own ethnic identity in nineteenth-century America are reflected in a broader, political context, where Irish Americans struggled to be seen as white.Footnote ¹³¹ In his 1889 essay ‘Ireland and the Irish during the latter half of the eighteenth century’, Wilde explicitly comments on his feeling of homelessness, of living beyond national borders: ‘What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish.’Footnote ¹³² Despite the perception of increasing Jewish immigration into 1880s London, Wilde turns back to ancient Jews to make a complex identification between them and the late-Victorian Irish.

One of Wilde's followers was John Gray, whose 1893 short story ‘The Advantages of Civilization’ shows how racialised depictions of 1890s aestheticism had become. Gray himself was a self-educated working-class man who had grown up in London's East End, and had been apprenticed to a metal-turner as a teenager. He managed to transform himself into an aesthetic poet, having learnt French, German and Latin at evening classes and having passed the Civil Service exams, becoming a librarian in the Foreign Office.Footnote ¹³³ Indeed Gray sought to erase his past to such an extent that Arthur Symons called him an ‘apparition’.Footnote ¹³⁴ If the ‘Dorian’ of Dorian Gray refers back to the ancient Greeks, then many have suggested, since 1890 in fact, that ‘Gray’ is linked to John Gray himself.Footnote ¹³⁵ Just as ‘Dorian Gray’ degenerated back down to the depths of John's East End, so John sought to move from the East to the West in an attempt to become ‘Dorian’.

That John's move from East to West felt like moving from the edge of the Empire is reflected in a short story he wrote called ‘The advantages of civilization’, about Dr Zaccheus Bishop, a celebrated Fijian doctor, who was educated at great expense by the ‘New Methodist Missionary Society’ – to such an extent that he outstrips his colonial masters. The tale explicitly responds to contemporary concerns about reverse colonisation, as the Empire expanded so the differences between the coloniser and colonised shrunk. In the story, Dr Bishop takes a group of theology students on a tour of the British Museum. To the discomfort of their English theology teacher, Bishop candidly asks them if they had ‘heard of the Faustinas’, alluding to the infamous wife of Marcus Aurelius, as well as pointing out the busts of the far from exemplary emperors Caracalla, Hadrian and his boy-lover Antinous, and finally, Caligula. At the end, he takes the students to see the ‘Apollo Citharaedus’ (Apollo was, of course, by the end of the nineteenth century a subtle nod to ancient homoerotic interests). The dark-skinned antiquarian, Dr Bishop, fulsomely admires the sculpture: ‘A late Greek thing … as you see’ (emphases original). In turn, the theology teacher, Mr Smith (a typically English name), ‘gathered a very decided impression from the statue, but it was not of an archaeological character’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Gray very obviously re-plays the Wildean paradox of getting his reader to see and yet not see a beautiful Greek male body, and yet here the ecphrasis does not come from the mouth of a British scholar, but a Fijian aesthete, whose buttonhole holds three orchids, a suspiciously shaped flower that alluded to contemporary dandyism and sexual dissidence.Footnote ¹³⁷ Gray's story playfully responds to the contemporary racial stereotyping of Wilde and his aesthetic apostles and decadent disciples. The tale questions the purpose of the late-Victorian colonial mission: does an education in the classics really civilise the colonised, or does it grant permission for the admiration of ‘primitive,’ backward, altogether uncivilised nudity? Does Dr Bishop's enjoyment of Apollo show that an education in the classics can produce men more English than the English? Or is the story suggesting that a Classical education is actually just a ‘primitive’ barbarism hidden under a veneer of cultural sheen? The politics of the message behind Gray's story is difficult to read: was he imagining himself as a racial other from the East End, who felt utterly misplaced in Wilde's society, or was Wilde himself the butt of the joke? Whatever was to be read into Gray's tale, by the 1890s, Classical education was fast becoming an odd and marginalised business.