Decadent Historicism

In what respects might we consider decadence as a historical concept? And in what ways do literary writings associated with the fin-de-siècle decadent tradition approach the question of history? In response to these two interrelated questions, ‘Decadent Historicism’ discusses the manner in which writings and artworks identified as decadent reveal a preoccupation with the historical authority that four different gender-transitive icons from Classical Rome and a broadly conceived Renaissance exert upon late-Victorian sexual modernity. The first example is the young transgender Syrian emperor known posthumously as Elagabalus, whose sexual insubordination fascinated Simeon Solomon, J.-K.Huysmans, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Oscar Wilde. The second case study is the sexually ambiguous Elizabethan boy-actor ‘Mr. W. H.,’ who emerges in the short homoerotic fiction that Oscar Wilde wove around him in 1889. The third section of the presentation shifts to Vernon Lee’s long-standing interest in the legendary castrato Carol Boschi (Farinelli), in both her early story ‘A Culture Ghost; or, Winthrop’s Adventure’ (1881) and its subsequent recasting as ‘Voix Maudite’ (1887) and ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1890). The final instance is the ‘fair girl-boy’ pantomime dancer Pylades in Michael Field’s Roman Trilogy (1898-1903), whose politically contentious performances reveal his power as a bearer of cultural and historical knowledge. In each case, these performers exist in perilous proximity to pain, punishment, and death

Homosexual Blackmail in the 1890s: The Fitzroy Street Raid, the Oscar Wilde Trials, and the Case of Cotsford Dick

On Saturday, 11 August 1894, twenty men were arrested at a party that John Watson Preston hosted at his rooms at 46 Fitzroy Square, London. Two of the partygoers, Arthur Marling and John Severs, were dressed in women’s clothing. All of the men were charged that evening at Tottenham Court Road Police Station. The following morning they appeared at the Great Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court. This widely reported event drew readers’ attention to the fact that Marling attended court in fantastic female attire of black and gold. Journalists noted that many items of women’s clothing had been found in Watson’s home. After being remanded in custody for a week, Marling and Severs were bound in sureties of £5 to keep the peace for three months; five were ordered to find sureties of 40s. each for a month’s good behaviour; and the rest were discharged.The party would not have had much significance were it not for the fact that Marling—together with two other men, Charles Parker and Alfred Taylor, who came to the party—played a central role in two later episodes that drew public attention to the extent of homosexual blackmail in the metropolis.At the Old Bailey in April 1895, the thirty-three-year-old Taylor—the former heir to a large cocoa manufacturing fortune—was charged alongside Wilde for conspiring to commit, as well as committing, acts of gross indecency. The revelations about Taylor’s cross-dressing practices, which involved a mock-marriage ceremony with Charles Spurrier Mason, caused a sensation. Meanwhile, the twenty-year-old Parker served as a witness for the Crown prosecution’s case against Oscar Wilde. Although Parker claimed to have received sums of money for sexual favours, there was no evidence that he extorted funds from Wilde. At the same time, Wilde’s defence discovered that Parker was nonetheless deeply immersed in London’s homosexual blackmailing subculture, in ways that had paid the young man considerable rewards.As it turned out, no legal action was taken against either Parker or any of the other male sex workers who confessed to committing the sexual crimes of which Wilde was accused. Nor did the Crown charge them for operating in teams with older men who physically threatened and extorted money from unsuspecting clients who were willing to pay for sex. In December 1896, however, a violent assault, which was followed by attempted blackmail, misfired. A married bricklayer, who belonged to this network of extortionists, robbed the gay writer Cotsford Dick of his belongings, including an Astrakhan-lined coat, a scarf-pin, and a pocketbook. Although a team of seasoned blackmailers attempted to intimidate Dick, he turned to the police for protection. Eventually, in 1898 Marling was charged as the individual who had pawned Dicks’s stolen goods. He went to jail for five years. Two other accomplices—William Allen and Robert Cliburn—who evaded testifying during the Wilde trials were also sentenced.This paper, presented as a keynote speech at the AVSA “Victorian Margins” conference in Ballarat, July 2016, explores each of these related events in considerable detail, drawing attention in particular to Allen’s astounding disclosures in Reynolds’s Newspaper about the brutal methods that extortionists used on homosexual men in the 1890s

Man-made Fibres? The Split Personalities of Victorian Manliness

This essay investigates the textual traces of a split that was central to the Victorian conception of manliness: the contradiction of gentlemanliness which demanded both the capacity to commit violence and the requirement to be ‘civilized’. It suggests that there is a fault line running through the fabric of masculinity which can be seen in the texts which train boys to become men, which remember and reconstruct that training and which consider manliness in its mature forms. A man is a subject who acts; he is also subjected to forces which he does not control. In fiction, long and short, and in poetry, masculinity is repeatedly shown to be both contested and constructed – a man-made fibre, not a natural or god-given status. From Tennyson to Wilde, there is a tear in the cloth. Keywords: Victorian manliness and masculinity; gentlemanliness; Alfred Tennyson; Charles Dickens; Rudyard Kipling; Saki (H. H. Munro); Oscar Wilde; Robert Louis Stevenson

Development of a Wireless Sensor Node for Building Information Management Systems

An increasing number of internet of things (IoT) devices are being deployed long term and therefore need to be self-powered in order to reduce maintenance costs. This paper reports on the design and implementation of a low power wireless sensor node for use in a building information management system powered by an organic solar module. Detailed analysis of the power requirements of the various sensors and the methods used to reduce the power consumption are given. The suitability of organic photovoltaic modules for indoor energy harvesting is examined. Early results from the deployment of these modules are shown

Strain-tuning of nematicity and superconductivity in single crystals of FeSe

Strain is a powerful experimental tool to explore new electronic states and understand unconventional superconductivity. Here, we investigate the effect of uniaxial strain on the nematic and superconducting phase of single crystal FeSe using magnetotransport measurements. We find that the resistivity response to the strain is strongly temperature dependent and it correlates with the sign change in the Hall coefficient being driven by scattering, coupling with the lattice and multiband phenomena. Band structure calculations suggest that under strain the electron pockets develop a large in-plane anisotropy as compared with the hole pocket. Magnetotransport studies at low temperatures indicate that the mobility of the dominant carriers increases with tensile strain. Close to the critical temperature, all resistivity curves at constant strain cross in a single point, indicating a universal critical exponent linked to a strain-induced phase transition. Our results indicate that the superconducting state is enhanced under compressive strain and suppressed under tensile strain, in agreement with the trends observed in FeSe thin films and overdoped pnictides, whereas the nematic phase seems to be affected in the opposite way by the uniaxial strain. By comparing the enhanced superconductivity under strain of different systems, our results suggest that strain on its own cannot account for the enhanced high $T_c$ superconductivity of FeSe systems.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure