Home and the Muddle of Identification

Shannon and Ricketts first met at the City and Guilds Technical Art School in Kennington Park Road, south London, in 1882. Shannon had been studying there for a year when Ricketts, aged 16, arrived to start an apprenticeship to a wood engraver. Ricketts had recently lost his father (a naval lieutenant-turned-painter) and, two years previously, his (probably illegitimate and aristocratic, certainly penniless) French mother. Ricketts spent much of his childhood in France and Italy, though for periods the family lived near the relocated Crystal Palace (which the young Ricketts loved for its concerts and exhibitions) and then in Kensington (the capital’s new cultural quarter). Shannon, meanwhile, had had a more settled, less peripatetic upbringing as a vicar’s son. Brought up in the Lincolnshire countryside, he attended a boarding school for the sons of the clergy in Leatherhead before going on to study in Kennington.Footnote ¹⁰ The training Shannon and Ricketts received there was resonant with the intersecting aesthetic, applied, and practical aspirations of the Arts and Crafts movement. That influence endured. We see it in the way Ricketts talks about refurbishing Chilham Keep some thirty years later, and in the interim the men—and especially Ricketts—earned a living through design, illustration, and theater work. Ricketts in addition received an annuity of one hundred pounds from his grandfather. They considered income from these sources to be joint once they started living together in rooms at 164 Kennington Park Road in 1886. Over the years, this income “rarely exceeded a thousand pounds per year, and [was] seldom half this.”Footnote ¹¹ This was a reasonable sum and would have put them “into the comfortable end of the middle classes,”Footnote ¹² but it was uneven and sometimes felt precarious. At first, they relied on sharing their homes with other artists to cover costs, and they would sometimes scrimp on basics to purchase arts, collectibles, and (“exotic,” “queer dear”) plants and flowers. As their reputations grew (both became fellows of the Royal Academy; Ricketts was offered but turned down the directorship of the National Gallery in 1914), their income became more stable and their homes grander. They were also able to afford live-in domestic help, which meant that in more than forty years together, between the housemates and the servants, the pair never lived alone. Home was for them and for others of their class and status not the private secluded realm that many couples of the post–World War II generation found or aspired to.

Neither Shannon nor Ricketts described himself as homosexual, Uranian, or inverted, nor did they allude to the sex they might have had together.Footnote ¹³ Ricketts playfully refused to answer the classicist John Addington Symonds’s pleading questions on the subject, though in relaying the anecdote down the years indicated an ease and a certain mischievousness about the topic.Footnote ¹⁴ Instead, Shannon and Ricketts’s bond and relationship was articulated by the men themselves and by their circle of friends in terms of their coresidence; their emotional, practical, and aesthetic investment in their homes; their vast collection of art and antiques; and the artistic and design work that was closely identified with the places where they lived (their Vale Press, for example, was named after their first Chelsea home).Footnote ¹⁵ Shannon and Ricketts sustained their coupledom and also protected it from criticism in part through what literary scholar Sharon Marcus describes as “their intensely domestic existence” and also their open, visible, and highly cultured rendition of home.Footnote ¹⁶

In the sections that follow, I examine some of the ways in which home functioned for the couple as a symbol and material indicator of queer alienation, belonging, difference, and normalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I take my cue in part from recent pieces by Marcus and by design historian John Potvin. Marcus uses novels, memoirs, and case studies to argue that “the relationship between homosexuality and domesticity was far more variable and complex than one of simple exclusion.”Footnote ¹⁷ Marcus crucially nuances analyses of queer lives that foreground the closet or else public or liminal realms and that consequently leave the domestic to heterosexuals and the middle classes whose ideal and domain it seemed to be. Potvin, meanwhile, uses the homophile American collector Edward Perry Warren, Oscar Wilde’s codefendant Alfred Taylor, and Shannon and Ricketts to discern the ways in which home might articulate queer difference.Footnote ¹⁸ By elaborating the Shannon and Ricketts’s case further, I echo and elaborate Marcus’s arguments about queer investments in established domestic patterns and sentiments and Potvin’s about a queer particularity in interior design choices in this period. I explore further the queer twist this couple executed in the organization and look of their homes and suggest how house and home might speak to us now of queer lives, identifications, subjectivities, and subcultures in the past and across the twentieth century. I do this by looking first at Shannon and Ricketts’s aestheticism and collecting, then at some putative queer domestic sensibilities, and then at their everyday domestic and home-orientated social lives. This is not as straightforward a division and structure as it might at first seem. The interplay of art, collecting, presumed queer sensitivities, friendship, intimacy, and the everyday is one of the most striking and, I will suggest, telling things about their households.

In this, I am drawing substantially as well on J. G. P. Delaney’s beautifully detailed biography of Ricketts, on a number of hagiographic pieces by the couple’s friends, and also on Ricketts’s own writings, especially the posthumously compiled Self-Portrait (1939). Because of the available source material, this article is skewed in its focus. Ricketts was the more prolific of the two men in his diary and letter writing, and he attracted more attention from commentators and critics in his lifetime and subsequently. This coverage and his own life writing has perhaps bolstered perceptions that he was the queerer of the two men, raising questions about how we think about intimate domestic relationships between couples whose desires and sexualities do not ostensibly match.Footnote ¹⁹ Shannon had affairs with women and contemplated marriage on more than one occasion, giving Delaney cause to suggest that he was basically heterosexual. He makes sense of Shannon’s (apparent) “sacrifice” of the “ordinary joys that his life with Ricketts denied him” through their joint and home-based passion for art and collecting.Footnote ²⁰ This does indeed help in understanding some of what energized and underpinned Shannon and Ricketts’s relationship, but Delaney’s fixing of Shannon and Ricketts’s sexuality does scant justice to the intensity of their bond, or to how they and others perceived it. Assessing such relationships in the past via the heterosexual/homosexual matrix and an associated exclusionary notion of coupledom misses too much.Footnote ²¹ We need, Eve Sedgwick suggests, “to do justice to the depth and sometimes durability of non-marital and/or non-procreative bonds, same-sex bonds, non-dyadic bonds, bonds not defined by genitality, step-bonds, adult sibling bonds, non-biological bonds across generations.”Footnote ²² If this couple did not have a sexual relationship (which is possible), that should not detract from the strength of their connection and intimacy. Neither should their bond with each other diminish the significance of their other multiple and differently organized and appreciated friendships and relationships. While we have tended to look to homosexual sex, homosociality, and homosexual couples in our analyses of queer lives in the past, for example, it is worth remembering that Shannon and Ricketts and their friends and acquaintances—Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds, and Robbie Ross among them—had connections and affections that cut across gender, sexuality, age, and class divisions in conventional and also less conventional ways. Incorporating and accounting for these connections and affections does not necessarily mean these men were any less queer but might instead be part of their queerness, as we discern, for example, the particular value placed on friendship over or in addition to family. Relatedly, it is not necessary to prove that someone like Shannon had sex with other men in order to view him queerly. He, Ricketts, and their circle were accommodating of different configurations of intimacy, and they marked out their disjunction from perceived norms or expectations in multiple and not only sexualized or eroticized ways—via art, collecting, and literature, most notably.

We need to think about the multiple threads of identification and belonging within groups and between individuals that might signal homosexuality or represent a homosexual milieu but not in precise or exclusive ways. Such threads of identification and belonging related not just to sexuality and desire but also to class, national, Bohemian, artistic, religious, metropolitan, familial, and many other affiliations (and disaffiliations). These might, of course, be traced in the lives of men who lived and had relationships with women, and yet expressions of sexual and relational difference relied in part on the modulation and weaving together of some of these factors in ways that, however continuous with wider cultures, also allowed for the articulation of something distinct. Part of my argument in this piece is that home allowed this to play out in more nuanced ways than was being suggested in contemporary court cases, sexology, and the newspaper press. Examining the lives of Shannon and Ricketts through the prism of domesticity allows us to comprehend their subjectivity, relationships, and milieu in rather different and more complex ways than if we were to look at them via the public realms more generally used to understand queer identity and identification. Their homes are akin to the queer and queering spaces Diana Maltz associates with “the proliferation of meaning and the unsettling of desire.”Footnote ²³

Partly because of this and partly because they were part of a small elite, I am not trying to claim Shannon and Ricketts as typical. They and their homes are not reducible to wider cultural and subcultural concerns, pressures, shifts, and patterns. Identifying the resonances and dissonances between their local and particular lives and these broader currents is, though, suggestive of the ways in which the pair shaped a sense of distinction and difference while also fitting in. These twin currents of conformity and nonconformity are key to understanding Shannon and Ricketts, and this meant for them tuning into theatricality and aestheticism and developing a bohemian network of tolerant friends. It also meant resisting lower-middle-class mores and forging a kind of queer reproductivity through art, collecting, and patronage. As I have suggested, theirs was no blueprint. Other queer men modulated their connections to mainstream culture and marked out their idiosyncrasy in different ways because they had different means, backgrounds, experiences, and aspirations. For all queer men, though, home had real potency as an actual place or as an idea in the way they thought about and defined themselves. “Even the most scandalous gay lives had a domestic component,”Footnote ²⁴ Marcus observes, while the American collector and acquaintance of Shannon and Ricketts, Edward Perry Warren, remarked that the Uranian’s “home-life has a different colour from that of most homes which women control, but it is, none the less, a home-life.”Footnote ²⁵

Queer men had (or aspired to have) homes, and they made them in various ways and in various places. They found security, safety, intimacy, conflict, misery, and happiness there as surely as “normal” others did. The case of Shannon and Ricketts signals commonalities in domestic expression while also alerting us to the ways in which these experiences had different dimensions because of the social, cultural, and legal status of queer love and sex. Legal prohibition and social disapprobation hedged the ways Shannon and Ricketts constituted their homes, opened them to visitors, and presented themselves as a partnership. Though far from representative, unpacking Shannon and Ricketts’s homes provides a model for discerning the multiplicity and complexity of queer identification and difference. It is also a means of signaling and historicizing some (and only some) dimensions of a queer attachment to the domestic in the twentieth century.

The House Beautiful

Ricketts declared himself (it is tempting to say “came out as”) an aesthete and atheist at age 15, and art and the pursuit of beauty became his own and the couple’s preoccupation.Footnote ²⁶ They prioritized these things in their domestic expenditure, judged, and analyzed the world and the people around them on these terms, and were in some ways guardians of the aesthetic and Wildean “house beautiful.”Footnote ²⁷ In his Oscar Wilde: Recollections (1932), Ricketts aligned himself with the disgraced playwright through their domestic aestheticism. He first noted Wilde’s approval of the Vale (which they had taken over from the aesthetic artist James McNeil Whistler): “what a charming old house you have and what delightful Japanese prints. … And you have yellow walls, so have I—the colour of joy!’” A few days later, Ricketts went on, “we were invited to hear him read A Portrait of Mr WH. His small study was painted buttercup yellow. … On the walls hung a Monticelli, a Japanese painting of children at play, and a drawing by Simeon Solomon of Eros conversing with some youths.”Footnote ²⁸ Aesthetic and queer markers converged: they had gathered to hear Wilde’s Platonic and homophile reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a study hung with a homoerotic piece by the disgraced artist Simeon Solomon, who was by this time living in penury following his prosecution for having sex with another man in a public urinal in 1873.

The pair coveted beautiful things long before they met Wilde, though. In Kennington Park Road, and with limited funds, they covered the walls with prints of classical statuary. At the Vale, there were the Japanese prints of which Wilde approved.Footnote ²⁹ Then, with more money, they began to accumulate art and antiques in a collection initiated with purchases from the sale of Frederic, Lord Leighton’s effects in 1896 and ultimately valued for probate at £36,203—very roughly £1.75 million today.Footnote ³⁰ The collection was displayed at their homes at Beaufort Street, Chelsea (where they moved in 1894), at Spring Terrace in Richmond (from 1899), from 1902 at the “palatial studio-flat” in Lansdowne House, Kensington (built by their patron Edmund Davis),Footnote ³¹ and ultimately from 1923 at Townshend House, Regent’s Park. Always alongside the collection and throughout their homes were gorgeous displays of flowers, which Ricketts described in florid prose. In a thank-you letter to a friend in 1902 he wrote: “Shannon joins me in grateful acknowledgment of your superb gift of flowers. It looks as if you had ordered all the flowers to be picked, just as an Eastern Potentate orders the execution of all his wives. The Blue salvia is still alive and perpetuated in one of Shannon’s canvasses. It is a most noble and haughty flower, at once half a nettle and half an exotic; it looked precious and blue blooded when brought next to some quite haughty foreigners I had brought back from Regents Street, these last being profoundly undemocratic flowers with tyrannical scents.”Footnote ³²

Such descriptions recall late nineteenth-century decadent literature and the lush exotic interiors of J.-K. Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and the anonymous pornographic novel, Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal (1893)—interiors that seemed to suggest and produce sensual and sexual excess.Footnote ³³ Such decorative perversions were by this time recognizable, if imprecise, signifiers of sexual dissidence and had been stacked up in the gross indecency case against Wilde and his codefendant Alfred Taylor in 1895.Footnote ³⁴ Ricketts’s rhetorical flourish here and in his writing more generally marked a connection to these figures and this recent literary history and suggested a distance from the nation of philistines who had (in his view) prosecuted his friend in a “social vendetta” born of “a deep hatred of the artist in the British mentality.”Footnote ³⁵ His own heritage and upbringing allowed him to imagine himself as an outsider to this and suggested too an associated politics: he indicated in his description of the flowers the value he placed on the exotic and exceptional, the “elite,” the “blue-blooded,” and the “undemocratic.” These social and cultural values and hierarchies were eroticized, brought home, and encapsulated in this bouquet and in the extraordinary collection the couple accumulated.

Despite these various indicators, however, Delaney suggests that “it was not an aesthetic house that they made for themselves”: “No fashion ever imposed on [Ricketts], he never accepted or rejected artists, movements or period wholesale.”Footnote ³⁶ If there was a suspect tinge of louche fin de siècle decadence in their domestic display and certainly in the way they described it, there was also a compensating seriousness, eclecticism, and austerity, which commentators observed carefully (as indeed others did in relation to Lord Leighton and his house in London’s Holland Park).Footnote ³⁷ In Cecil Lewis’s preface to Ricketts’s Self-Portrait, he describes a series of rooms at Townshend House that frame the couple—and Ricketts especially—in legitimizing ways. They kept, he wrote, a “small museum” there:

Like the aristocratic private house collections of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the room signaled exquisite taste and culture and also substantial knowledge, restraint, refinement, and a sense of a mission to save and preserve.Footnote ³⁹ Shannon and Ricketts recognized the seriousness of their endeavors: they carefully photographed the artifacts and bequeathed these along with much of the collection itself to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. All this aligned Shannon and Ricketts with an established masculine and highly respected pursuit.Footnote ⁴⁰

The dining room at Townshend House was, meanwhile, “a bridge from [this] work to entertainment” and was “the most perfect” Lewis had ever seen:

The aesthetic, decadent echoes were there, and the arrangement was (Lewis repeats and repeats) not one “you” would think of. The room and its contents were luminous (“lustr[ous],” “lit,” and “radiant”) and marked Ricketts—and Shannon and Ricketts as a couple—out as exceptional. The society painter Jacques-Emile Blanche had felt a similar “air of culture and refinement in the surprising and eclectic choice of drawings” in the hall of their earlier home at Lansdowne House.Footnote ⁴² There is certainly a nod in both houses to an earlier and broader late Victorian fashion for domestic eclecticism, but Shannon and Ricketts’s persistence with it into the 1920s set them apart. They shaped Townshend House at a juncture when an interest in interiors and aesthetics had been more determinedly feminized and when the individualism and eclecticism prized by the late Victorians and Edwardians had given way to a modernist suspicion of such idiosyncrasy.Footnote ⁴³ The couple were crafting their own objects, art, collection, and rooms in an act of very particular self-fashioning.

Importantly, though, these domestic arrangements were not about the “indulgence of luxury.”Footnote ⁴⁴ “The rooms where they habitually spent their days,” wrote Lewis, “would be almost poverty-stricken puritan in their simplicity.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Ricketts observed that Wilde had “smiled at the austerity of my habits,” and the painter Edmund Dulac caricatured the pair as monks.Footnote ⁴⁶ Their homes were, in part, about hard work and productivity, suggesting a laudable and respectable “protestant austerity … [and an] uncompromising work ethic.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Ricketts’s studio was “Spartan,” furnished with easy chairs “almost devoid of padding” and a sofa “as uncomfortable as a waiting room seat at a railway station.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Blanche echoed this in his description of the couple’s simple bedroom at Lansdowne House with its “twin bedsteads of spotless white [and] two washstands”—similar, in fact, to the portrayal of Lord Leighton’s cell-like bedroom in his Holland Park mansion.Footnote ⁴⁹ Blanche, like Lewis, seized on such elements of domestic asceticism as tacit evidence of respectability. They intimated in this way that there was nothing going on behind the scenes and that Shannon and Ricketts’s passion was front of house, associated with art, culture, and collecting. Potvin argues something similar in relation to Edward Perry Warren’s “Spartan simplicity of interior and furnishings” at his house in Lewes, Sussex, which provided “an alternative queer domesticity” to that represented in the trials of Wilde and Alfred Taylor. Such furnishings, he observes, could “stave off any pejorative connotations … associated with both the domestic realm and queer bachelorhood.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The careful note taken of asceticism, simplicity, and propriety hinted too, though, at a certain queerness—rather as Hussey had done in his Country Life piece. Blanche, Lewis, Hussey, and Ricketts himself were both signaling and redressing the couple’s queerness in their commentaries.

“Domesticity,” writes Marcus, “celebrated privacy that could be put on display.” The emergent homosexual type, meanwhile, “coalesced around secrecy.”Footnote ⁵¹ Shannon and Ricketts in part sidestepped an association with the latter by conforming sufficiently to the former: they “cultivated domestic aestheticism, interiority, and sentiment, and protected their domestic privacy without cultivating secrecy or isolation.”Footnote ⁵² They displayed a serious and expert appreciation of art and beauty, demonstrated a “healthy” disregard for passing fashion and decorative unity, and disdained luxury and extravagance. As is becoming clear, there are pressing similarities between Shannon and Ricketts and Lord Leighton in this regard. Art historian Jason Edwards shows how Leighton modeled and modulated these elements in ways that rendered him and his bachelor status respectable yet spoke, if not of his own queerness, at least of his expansive attitude to friendship and his impatience with closed and prurient attitudes to desire and relationality. As in Shannon and Ricketts’s homes, there was a fusion at Leighton House of aesthetic and arts and crafts influences, connoisseurship, and a more rarefied pursuit of beauty, simplicity, and conformity sitting alongside (and perhaps reining in) extraordinary flights of domestic fancy. The home was a space of work, of retreat, and of display. There was in all this, Edwards writes, a playful interweaving of secrecy and revelation that was “pleasurabl[e]” rather than “defensive” because there was nothing specific to be exposed in terms of, for example, a particular identity.Footnote ⁵³ What was suggested instead was a rather more diffuse sense of difference and distinctiveness.

Like Leighton, Shannon and Ricketts keyed into prevailing markers of Victorian and Edwardian middle- and upper-middle-class masculinity and domesticity that allowed them, in Potvin’s phrase, to “pass below the radar” while also articulating something a little different. They were, he observes, “collectors in the queerest understanding of the term.”Footnote ⁵⁴ I have noted already some of the aesthetic and decadent resonances, and in other and associated ways, we can discern queer threads running through their configuration and conception of the domestic. Their collecting and artistic fervor was, first, exceptional. It certainly connected them to a long-standing male elite tradition of connoisseurship as well as to the imperial project; collecting was not a queer pursuit per se. It nevertheless had a whiff of nonconformist masculinity to it and a loosely associated queer pulse. Barrett Kalter locates something queer in the eighteenth-century antiquarianism of Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, and William Beckford, and aspects of Victorian fin de siècle decadence seemed to underscore this.Footnote ⁵⁵ Cohen observes the bachelor status of many contemporary antique collectors who saw themselves as “married to their collections.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In a riff on legal and newspaper rhetoric about gross indecency between men, meanwhile, Shannon and Ricketts’s friend Sydney Cockerell (director of the Fitzwilliam Museum between 1908 and 1937) quipped to Ricketts that the price he paid for an object had been “unnatural and indecent.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Collecting, Susan Pearce argues, is “a reification of thoughts and feelings,”Footnote ⁵⁸ and for Shannon and Ricketts it was a mode of articulation. Through the portrait of the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell hanging in their “small museum,” they linked into the London theater scene (and a queer campiness settling around it), while the Hellenic sculpture and art in the collection affiliated them to a self-consciously cultured homophile milieu. Ricketts described himself as a “confirmed Greco-Roman”Footnote ⁵⁹ and, like some of his similarly classed queer contemporaries, orientated himself toward these ancient civilizations. Wilde famously evoked the ancient Greeks in his courtroom defense and in elements of his Chelsea home, while Charles Kains Jackson celebrated them in the tellingly titled Artist and Journal of Home Culture, which he edited between 1888 and 1894.Footnote ⁶⁰ George Ives, an early campaigner for law reform, established the elitist homophile Order of Chaeronea (named after the last battle of the Sacred Band of Thebes in 338 BCE) and held early meetings in his bachelor chambers in Albany, Piccadilly.Footnote ⁶¹ Edward Perry Warren became a famed collector of Hellenic artifacts and figured his home in Lewes, Sussex, in ascetic classical terms as an “all male ‘monastery’” where “the outside world shrank to a memory”Footnote ⁶² and which Ricketts visited twice. These men—who either knew or knew of each other in what was a relatively small network—differentiated, elevated, and separated themselves by configuring Hellenism in one way or another in their homes. It provided a ballast and idealized model for a sense of self, desire, and community. It was not, then, a deflection or a repression of erotics, passion, and homophile attachment but instead a means of expressing these things in a way which had subcultural as well as broader credence and currency.Footnote ⁶³

Domestic Sensitivities

Ricketts sought visitors who, like himself, had a capacity to appreciate culture and beauty and to “understand its rarity.” These visitors were men (chiefly) who had a sensitivity to art, and its arrangement and display, and also a responsiveness to particular and particularly exceptional spaces. Such qualities were already being tacitly aligned with a queer sensibility. Marcus convincingly argues that Addington Symonds’s Memoirs “attempt[ed] to reclaim a version of the domestic, compatible with his gay desires,” and that Symonds displayed a “particular susceptibil[ity] to his environment.” He wrote that “places exercise a commanding influence in the development of certain natures.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Wilde, in “The Decay of Lying” (1891), argued that such susceptibility was intrinsic to aestheticism and to the aesthetic perspective, which in turn was tacitly bound to sexual and sensual difference.Footnote ⁶⁵ Max Nordau made a similar connection in more pathological terms in Degeneration (1895),Footnote ⁶⁶ while sexologists Henry Havelock Ellis (whom Shannon and Ricketts knew slightly) and Richard von Krafft-Ebing both observed such heightened artistic and environmental sensibilities in the invert or homosexual.Footnote ⁶⁷

Ricketts keyed into these broader emerging assumptions about the particular sensitivities of the queer subject—or rather the elite, cultured queer subject. He had, Lewis observed, a “unique quality of taste,” and Ricketts recounted the environmentally transformative effect of listening to Wagner (already by this time a queer icon)Footnote ⁶⁸ at the home of a female friend in Plumpstead, Essex: “Magic lakes, subterranean seas, rushing waterfalls, twilight forests, and starlit peaks of ice, where strange flowers blossom under the snow, became visible to me in this humble seven roomed house.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Spaces, for Ricketts, could be wildly recreated through art, music, and beauty, and the home, already more broadly conceived as a retreat and sanctuary, gained additional significance as a place that could produce these distinguishing and individuating effects in the face of a “philistine” society and culture.Footnote ⁷⁰ Ricketts’s arrangements of art, objects, and flowers, and his decorative flourishes (those “huge stalactite-like falls of curtains” at Chilham Castle Keep, for example) were thus far from incidental. Rather, they actively produced a sense of himself for himself and for those who visited. There is a sense of theatricality in this that is apposite. Ricketts was passionate about the theater and opera, and the Ballet Russes especially—all early twentieth-century queer markers—and he gained a reputation as an innovative and striking set and costume designer.Footnote ⁷¹ He often strove in this work for continuity between the two. For Laurence Binyon’s Atilla at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1907, for example, set and costume for one scene were both almost entirely blood red, in a merger of actor and setting, individual and environment that suggested an ineffable connection between them. It was possible, Ricketts suggested in this design, to read place and person off each other in an aesthetic interplay of color, surface, appearance, and character. It followed that the domestic environment would produce the inhabitant and his or her perspective, modulating mood, feeling, and persona. Rather predictably, then, Ricketts measured his affinity with others partly on the basis of their homes. The queer aunt and niece couple Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (who together wrote poems about their erotic love for each other under the name “Michael Field”) were described and rendered sympathetic to Ricketts through a depiction of their cottage in Reigate, Kent: “Its interior showed the modifications brought by my two friends on a typical, comfortable English home as it then was, Morris curtains and wallpapers, on the walls photos of Italian pictures. The place spoke of a love of books, art, travel and flowers. I noticed on one of the tables one of those early paper covered editions in which Nietzsche first appeared; otherwise the general atmosphere was that crystallised by Walter Pater, a survival of the less flamboyant phase of the Aesthetic movement.”Footnote ⁷² Bradley and Cooper were produced as aesthetic, artistic, cultured, and different through their home, and simultaneously Ricketts showed himself to have the requisite sensitivity and critical acumen to read the signs (“I noticed,” Ricketts wrote, whereas perhaps others might not). This reading of the self and others off the domestic certainly relates to a broader and burgeoning sense of the home as an aspect of interiority and part of the expression of individuality.Footnote ⁷³ But it becomes especially significant for those with the heightened artistic, nervous, or theatrical sensitivities supposedly possessed by degenerate, grossly indecent, inverted, or homosexual men.

If from Krafft-Ebing’s or Nordau’s perspectives these sensitivities were pathological and socially deconstructive, for Ricketts they distinguished him from “suburban minds” and from the mundane, philistine “normal” home. When Ricketts visited Wilde in prison, he channelled his upset by fixating on the dour décor: the “small putty coloured waiting room, decorated with a chocolate dado and an ebonised clock.”Footnote ⁷⁴ His disdain for such “suburban” interiors was edged or even underpinned by misogyny and dismay at the effect women could have on the domestic and intersecting cultural life of men. In 1900, Ricketts recorded in his diary a schema for a possible novel that had come to him in a dream. It featured a man trapped in a marriage with “one of those common, coarsish, lower middle class types that develop with age a half masculine appearance”: “I realised in this common case of a loveless home [the husband’s] days would grow more and more grey and cold … the wife grows hard and dull, engrossed in the badly managed circumstances of her home. The happiest moments of his life will be in his solitary walks to and from work. … The wife’s vanity never leaves her. She is of the type which howls and fumbles over a piano she is unable to play when nobody is in the house but the servant who laughs in the kitchen.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This man is thwarted in homemaking by his wife, and what results is quite different from the artistic and cultural productivity of Ricketts’s own domestic relationship with Shannon. The home in Ricketts’s imagined novel is robbed of cultured, masculine input and receives instead the clumsy attentions of this “coarse” “type.” “As soon as a woman is concerned in a man’s life,” Bradley and Cooper reported Ricketts saying, “it becomes unintelligent and trivial from the senseless marriage festivities onwards. Marriage ought to be forbidden by law.”Footnote ⁷⁶ To the Sturge Moores, he promised to “make for your wedding the pendant of pendants which will tear all lace and scratch babies”—imagining a piece of jewelry that would rip at the normative domestic fabric.Footnote ⁷⁷ Like Ives and Warren, his near contemporaries, Ricketts saw men together achieving something politically, artistically, and domestically that was not possible with a woman.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Uranian, Warren wrote: “despises the pretty, the unnecessary, the superficial, the artificial, the accessories of decoration and manners, which [woman] is apt to import. But he goes further than most men, because the instinct for the beauty of the masculine drives him on.”Footnote ⁷⁹

In contemporary commentary, the emergent figures of the invert and homosexual were commonly depicted as antidomestic and an enemy to the home and all it represented.Footnote ⁸⁰ Shannon and Ricketts refused to stand outside, however, rejecting not home, but what they saw as a mundane lower-middle-class English version of it. As Potvin observes, they did not “necessarily refute societal norms, more expressly the ideals of domesticity, but transformed them, making them their own to accommodate a community itself at odds with culture.”Footnote ⁸¹ When, for Wilde, Ricketts painted The Portrait of MR WH and Shannon provided the frame, the playwright exclaimed gleefully: “our English homes will totter to their base when [the story] appears.”Footnote ⁸² The couple colluded with Wilde in the desecration of this wider English domestic and also imagined and produced alternatives in the way they shaped their own homes and validated the unusual or eccentric domestic intimacies of others in and beyond their circle—of Wilde, of Michael Field, of the artist couple Glyn Philpot and Vivian Forbes, and more distantly of a tragic pair of female lovers Ricketts read about: “Have been aghast at tragedy in the paper,” he wrote:

This kind of intimate configuration was for Ricketts where exceptionalism, inspiration, escape, and a poetic sense of tragedy come from. The tangled web in this case—like the homes filled with art, antiques and music—transported Ricketts to “some corner of the world lit by midnight sun.”

On the one hand, then, Shannon and Ricketts’s home-based collection gave them a position within a certain masculine tradition and within metropolitan bohemian and artistic cultures that linked also to national and imperial investments in particular histories and civilizations. It was part of their legitimacy and, to quote Claire Whittle, an “act of public relations.”Footnote ⁸⁴ And yet, on the other hand, this was not an open collection. It was housebound, which meant they could be proprietorial, amassing it and arranging it to their lights, being discerning about who could view it, and using it in particular ways to speak somewhat theatrically of and for them. There was, I am suggesting, a queer strand to this.

In his analysis of the artist duo Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), Jonathan Ned Katz describes the way in which “as a couple they were able to reap the benefits of a shared subjectivity without having to identify or affiliate with a larger gay or lesbian community.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Without collapsing two very different places and eras, Katz’s analysis is suggestive. Shannon and Ricketts were part of a milieu familiar from subsequent analyses of the queer 1890s, but the pair did not link into this grouping specifically in terms of sexual difference. Instead, it was their investment in aestheticism, in collecting and art, and in exclusive and exquisite homes that affiliated them to these others and which was a mode and means of articulation. This was true too of some readers of the Artist and Journal of Home Culture under Kains Jackson’s editorship when, Laurel Brake observes, “the address to gay men [was] a distinctive and reiterated discursive strain.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The conjunction of art, high culture, and the domestic sphere specifically signaled in the title of this journal was especially potent for Shannon, Ricketts, and some of their similarly classed queer contemporaries.Footnote ⁸⁷

Everyday Lives, Everyday Intimacies

Shannon and Ricketts’s domestic aestheticism and collection were integral to the couple’s home and everyday life together. Their correspondence with each other was alive with new purchases and accounts of antiques and works of art, and through these things they articulated both their affection for each other and their troubles. Ricketts reported that when Blanche “heard that Shannon and I had lived together for twenty years and that our collection was in common said, ‘mais c’est alors une existence ideale que vois menez—tout por l’art’ [but this is an ideal existence that you lead—everything for art].”Footnote ⁸⁸ They were, Blanche later wrote, “two inseparables … who had amassed a princely legacy”—bracketing again the couple’s intimacy with their treasures and gesturing to what this proffered for the future.Footnote ⁸⁹ When Shannon contemplated marriage to one of his female models, meanwhile, Ricketts honed in on the collection they had amassed and spoke metonymically of the impossibility of dividing it. Shannon did not leave; the collection (or perhaps rather the relationship with Ricketts) won out.Footnote ⁹⁰ Edith Cooper wrote that Ricketts had again been “frightened” at the prospect of Shannon marrying in 1905: “what would become of the collection?” he had asked her.Footnote ⁹¹ Whatever Shannon’s desires (and in pondering marriage he was not necessarily indicating that he was “really” heterosexual), the collection and their homes together provided an impetus for their relationship, a joint passion that allowed them to endure even as both also had intense emotional and sexual relationships with other women (chiefly for Shannon) and men (for Ricketts).Footnote ⁹² There was something similar, Potvin suggests, in the connection between Warren and his secretary and companion John Marshall: “collecting and subjectivity,” he writes, “quickly became mutually sustaining aspects of their joint venture and reciprocal feelings.”Footnote ⁹³

If Shannon and Ricketts’s relationship was couched in and sustained by collecting, art, and culture, however, it was also the product of muddling through in the everyday with each other. In letters and diaries we see snippets of conversation, annoyance, and teasing, and touches of concern and intimacy between the two men. “Remember my instructions about Calais,” wrote Shannon to Rickets in 1900, “and mind you arm yourself with port. It makes one much younger towards the end of the journey.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Ricketts wrote romantically from Florence: “Dear Old Chap … At each meal time they plonk down a plate of strawberries which make me think of you—no, this is not quite accurate. I really think of the strawberries. Only when they are done, ‘I think of thee.’”Footnote ⁹⁵ Ricketts mentions in passing “the shouts of laughter” together as they read from the paper and of “making [Shannon] drunk.”Footnote ⁹⁶ When Shannon buys pet Japanese mice, they together hope their “very intimate conversation” “may have been unnatural vice,” lest they be overrun by “mouselets.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Both men talk in the plural: “Captain Brinkley’s sale. One of the greatest hauls of our lives,” wrote Shannon in his diary in 1898; Ricketts added a note—an intimate act in itself—that “both our banking accounts vanished in this sale.”Footnote ⁹⁸ There were the decisions they made as a couple about the division of domestic tasks, pooled income, the support of one by the other (the early arrangement was for Ricketts to work so that Shannon could paint), how to sustain their expenditure on collecting, and where and when to move (Shannon was generally keen, Ricketts less so, as moves tended to upset and depress him in ways resonant with those presumptions about queer hypersensitivity, or what Freud described in a 1911 letter to Jung as “homosexual touchiness”).Footnote ⁹⁹

There was in Shannon and Ricketts’s homes a ready interplay of friendship, socialization, art, and collectibles. The latter were sometimes described as intimates: Shannon and Ricketts introduced Michael Field to “Fatty,” “Swallow,” and “Bullfinch,” three Staffordshire jugs; to Jennie, an old chair; and to Dr. Ibsen, a jack-in-a-box (in a telling reference to the Norwegian playwright whose contemporaneous plays had lifted the lid on the idealized middle-class home and family).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Conversely, visitors and co-residents were sometimes objectified, becoming part of the collection. Two new servants in 1923 were “useless, ugly” but their replacements, Mr. and Mrs. Nicholls, were “two new treasures.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Earlier, Ricketts described “John arriv[ing]”: “a beautiful, untidy looking chap who would make a good model for Christ, only his nose is too small and weak.”Footnote ¹⁰² We again get the sense as at Chilham Keep of interiors, objects, and residents coming together to animate each other. The materiality of the collection itself energized and provided a context for enduring friendships and thus carried a cargo of affection.Footnote ¹⁰³ This ebbed when it was transferred from the final house the couple shared to the Fitzwilliam Museum after Ricketts’s death. Lewis described entering the “Shannon and Ricketts Room” as akin to “going to a cemetery, gazing at a mummy in a crystal coffin”: “The presence that once informed it all, the daily life which flowered among these things, the flow of conversation, of laughter, the sense of being in the intimate company of great art collected by a zealot, himself a genius, all that is gone, gone. … It is cold when we come out into the street again and I am tired.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

As Lewis suggests, Shannon and Ricketts’s homes were the core of their social life. Though the couple were reclusive at first (something the Vale—“a shady, time forgotten lane”—seemed to facilitate), as their work became better known “the legend of … the two young artists completely devoted to art and to each other” attracted more attention—and a growing numbers of visitors.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Vale became, Potvin observes, “one of the most socially important and vibrant homes in Chelsea.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ If the pair, and Ricketts especially, could sometimes feel out of place or uncomfortable elsewhere (after the Wilde trials, Ricketts observed that “anything unusual, an Inverness coat, for instance, or longish hair, would elicit from the street arabs the cry ‘hello Oscar’”)Footnote ¹⁰⁷ they could socialize at home more exclusively and with more latitude and less propriety. The pair was often as “merry as boys” in company at home: “there was a great deal of teasing and pantomime between them.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ John Gray described being transported by his visits to the Vale: “how many times did I walk home to the Temple in the small hours dreaming sunnily all the way from the palace of enchantment which the old hygienic Vale really was.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Wilde observed to a guest he took there that “this is the one place in London where you will never be bored, and where you will not be asked to explain things. Nothing should be explained.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ If Shannon and Ricketts’s “at homes” were a version of the Victorian tradition of artists opening their studio-houses so their work could be viewed in situ, theirs were less publicized, less public, more intimate, and more bohemian.Footnote ¹¹¹

There was a strong queer contingent in the roster of visitors. Wilde, of course, was a guest, but also Gray; Robbie Ross; Kains Jackson; on at least one occasion, Addington Symonds; Roger Fry (in a link to the Bloomsbury Set), Forbes, and Philpot, and Vaslav Nijinsky and Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballet Russes.Footnote ¹¹² Aside from fostering artistic collaboration (both men worked with Wilde on various books; Ricketts designed Symonds’s In the Key of Blue [1893] and Gray’s Silverpoints [1893]; Gray was supposedly the model for Dorian Gray and Shannon for Basil Hallward in Wilde’s novel), the gatherings allowed Ricketts especially to meet, befriend, and guide a new generation of artists and writers—Lewis, Philpot, Forbes, Roger Fry, and Gordon Bottomley among them.Footnote ¹¹³ There was a fantasy of (queer) reproduction in Ricketts’s anticipation that these men would carry on his artistic lights in the face of what he saw as the travesty of modernism. If Fry was errant in this regard, Forbes and Philpot would, he hoped, become “the Shannon and Ricketts of the near future”;Footnote ¹¹⁴ he was delighted when they took over their home and studio at Lansdowne House in 1923. Lewis was “adopted” by Ricketts when he was in his early twenties and was given various treasures and a small property in Italy. Lewis was in awe of him; he seemed to fulfil a paternal, or perhaps better, an avuncular role for him. Riffing on the reproductive theme, he wrote that Ricketts had “midwived my earliest efforts.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ As with Warren and his acolytes in Lewis, there was something of the Hellenic pedagogical bond in these relationships in a now largely changed pattern of queer relationality where cross-generational bonds were idealized rather than denigrated.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Shannon and Ricketts’s friendship network was not only male and queer, however, and it included a number a married couples (including George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, Thomas and Marie Sturge Moore, Sydney and Alice Cockerell, and Edmund and Mary Davis, their own patrons), single women like Ricketts’s friend in Plumpstead, and of course Michael Field. These friendships again focused on the home front, and Shannon and Ricketts were seen by these others as arbiters of domestic and artistic taste. Michael Field asked Shannon and Ricketts to help them to find and furnish a “home for our marriage,” and this is precisely what they did in a high cultural and Edwardian version of a home makeover.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Ricketts, as we have seen, took careful note of the couple’s Reigate home when he first met them, and thereafter the domestic was a constant pulse in their correspondence in terms of décor and collectibles, of course, and also in their day-to-day domestic lives as couples (in a postscript note to Michael Field, Ricketts quipped that “Shannon would send his love but is just now thoughtless from having shampooed his head”).Footnote ¹¹⁸ The potency of this and other friendships was especially evident when Wilde died in 1900. “I am too upset to write about it,” observed Ricketts; “I feel wretched, tearful, stupid.” “Moore had hardly finished giving us the news when a loud ringing was heard and Michael Field arrived, sobbing loudly in the hall.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

The nature of these bonds was marked in part by the artistically oriented pet names they gave each other. “Shannon and I were called ‘the painters’; sometimes I was called ‘the lizard’ or ‘the basilisk’” by Michael Field, noted Ricketts—omitting to mention two of their more suggestive nicknames, “fairyman” and “fay.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Such nicknaming was part of a trend in their milieu—Rickets and Shannon did it too, as did Wilde and Ives. It suggested a heightened and artistic connection that was distinct from but parallel to the familial. “I think,” wrote Ricketts, that “the private nicknames given [by Michael Field] to their friends carried with them a separate and legendary view of their lives and characters.”Footnote ¹²¹ Relatives, meanwhile, were to Ricketts like “cinders, ashes, dust,” and the deep connections that developed between Shannon and Ricketts and their friends, protégés, and co-residents perhaps created an alternative mode of relationality that we can also identify in the homes established by Ives and Warren.Footnote ¹²² These structures of intimacy and the ways in which they were established and sustained is yet another tentative but significant queer marker—one that, as Jeffrey Weeks and Kath Weston suggest, became more visible, overt, and politicized in the later twentieth century.Footnote ¹²³ Shannon and Ricketts’s use of home as a base for “shared tastes and emotional bonds” was certainly in line with broader conceptions of the domestic, as Marcus argues, but the nature of those home-based bonds also marked out a distinction and difference.Footnote ¹²⁴ Their homes were in this way not orientated toward the procreative family but rather to a cultural legacy and the nurturing of collectors and artists who were usually male and often queer. The flow of men and women, queer and “normal,” in and out of Shannon and Ricketts’s homes, meanwhile, suggests degrees of queer knowledge and localized acceptance that underscored the frequent heterosociality of many queer lives—a heterosociality that served to lend some legitimacy and to affirm a difference.Footnote ¹²⁵ Ricketts noted with a certain satisfaction that his friend in Plumpstead (whose love of Wagner transported him) was “a declared atheist … , had distrust for her sex and a liking for exaggerated character in men, and, for that matter, men without character.”Footnote ¹²⁶ He was, in this, measuring their connection to each other, but also observing and confirming, something about himself. He was one such man.

When Shannon suffered a fall in 1929, Ricketts shifted his gaze from aesthetics to the practicalities of nursing or finding nursing care for Shannon. This involved the sale of parts of the collection that had been so central to their bond and life together. The domestic and work rhythm of their lives changed, as Ricketts revealed movingly in his letters from this period:

And again:

The rhythm of daily life—shaving, feeding, and “epidemics of small bothers”—take on a new, even sustaining, significance for Ricketts in these changed circumstances. Shannon, meanwhile, in Ricketts words, “developed a subconscious resistance to doctoring; he refuses point blank to be punctured anymore and argues over everything.”Footnote ¹²⁹ With nurses and doctors resident and visiting, there were now different sorts of intrusion into their home space, which were less desired and less artistic. When Lewis came to stay, Ricketts was “cheered”: “I feel less in the hands of paid persons,” he said.Footnote ¹³⁰ Soon after, twenty-five-year-old Henning Nyberg moved in as Ricketts’s secretary, companion, and possibly also sexual partner. He was, Ricketts wrote to a female friend, “tall and masculine, with rugged good looks, but gentle and quiet in character.”Footnote ¹³¹ Nyberg brought a gramophone with him to Townshend House, and the pair went out to the theater and cinema at least three times a week. Ricketts was nostalgic (“I now view old Vale work with a sort of affection, and the past seems flooded with sunlight”)Footnote ¹³² but also resigned: “I realize that, viewed as a whole, this trial is small compared to the forty years of perfect companionship I have enjoyed.”Footnote ¹³³ In these later years, Townshend House in London was no less queer, but there were new dimensions and relational dynamics, a reminder that the way the self is experienced, the way lives are lived—queer or otherwise—change markedly over the course of life, due to the pragmatics of money and health and the tensions between such contingencies and what is idealized, sought, and chosen. When Ricketts died of heart failure at Townshend House on 7 October 1931, the house he and Shannon had shaped together was sold to pay for a new home for Shannon in Kew, West London, and for his care there by two nurses and the loyal Mr. and Mrs. Nicholls. Shannon lived there without his lifelong companion for a further six years until his own death on 18 March 1937.

Returning to Chilham

Shannon and Ricketts clinched the deal on Chilham Castle Keep days after the armistice. It was a literal and symbolic retreat for them, addressing a sense that Ricketts now had of belonging to a different age. He was horrified by the lack of care for the nation’s treasures during the war—a sign to him of a growing disregard of art and beauty, and of the loss of a body of cultured men who could “properly” appreciate it. “We are all suffering from Democracy,” he wrote; “I read every morning whatever news there is from Italy, re: Musolini [sic] and his incomparable fascisti. Are they the counter revolution? Are they the sign of a world returning to order, duty, sense of real values, a return to constriction and to veneration for firm things?”Footnote ¹³⁴

This hoped-for “return” to earlier and supposedly less compromised cultural forms and structures says something about the way Shannon and Ricketts constituted their homes and shared them with others. They looked to a cultured elite with an appreciation of beauty, set apart and above the rest in ways that related to a particular strand of queer affiliation and expression. At the keep, the talk was of restoring, of securing something otherwise endangered, coupled with a nostalgia and yearning for friendships now over (“how it would have excited Oscar, the Michaels and Robbie Ross,” Ricketts wrote).Footnote ¹³⁵ Ricketts was looking to forms of cultural, artistic, and queer identification at home that were being challenged, modernized, and reinflected in the interwar years. The Bloomsbury Group (including Roger Fry, one of Ricketts’s errant protégés), for example, represented a different milieu, a different politics, a different kind of queer relationality, and, as Christopher Reed shows brilliantly, a very different set of interiors.Footnote ¹³⁶ If there was something forward thinking and socially Utopian in that grouping, Ricketts looked to the past. There was nevertheless a forward impulse. The pair were outlived by their protégés and of course by their collection.Footnote ¹³⁷ There were, in addition, muted echoes of Shannon and Ricketts’s particular investment in the home to be heard down the queer generations: in the “pretended family” of Ives;Footnote ¹³⁸ in the outlandish snobbery of antique collector and Mass Observation survey diarist B. Charles in the 1940s;Footnote ¹³⁹ in the classical and Renaissance prints plastered on the walls of playwright Joe Orton’s Islington bed-sit in the 1960s;Footnote ¹⁴⁰ in filmmaker Derek Jarman’s creation of an extraordinary garden at Dungeness in Kent at the height of the AIDS crisis in Britain;Footnote ¹⁴¹ and in novelist and playwright Neil Bartlett’s accumulation of a “bricolage” of objects and photographs that he saw fortifying a sense of gay identity in the absence of stronger validation from elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁴² Ives, B. Charles, Orton, Jarman, and Bartlett are very different men from Shannon and Ricketts and from each other, but in the threads of connection there are elements of a particular queer investment in the home and a closely related reimagining of intimate ties in these contexts.

Matt Houlbrook and Frank Mort convincingly depict a shift in queer identity and identification in the postwar period—the period in which all these men except Ives and Shannon and Ricketts lived. Mort observes “a more distinct and privatised version of homosexual identity” than had been apparent, common, or possible before.Footnote ¹⁴³ Houlbrook shows how the terms of the Wolfenden Commission recommendations on the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in 1957, the legislation that followed ten years later, and the models of homosexual respectability touted in the literature and debate surrounding legal change in the 1950s were grounded primarily in a companionate, private, and domesticated model and expression of queer love. This shift owed much to a changing social and cultural climate in which home and family were being placed front and center in the rhetoric of national reconstruction in the postwar period. It also speaks to the increasing, though by no means ubiquitous, phenomenon of couples living together alone, either because it was becoming more affordable or, at the other end of the spectrum, because live-in domestic service was in steep decline). In light of my analysis of Shannon and Ricketts, I would also add that these postwar changes brought to greater visibility a preexisting pulse in the characterization and lived experiences of queer men. Home, it seems, is a good place for rooting through—if not quite sorting out—the muddle of queer identification across the twentieth century.