Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900

This book explained what Lord Queensbury meant when he accused Oscar Wilde of having posed as a sodomite in 1895. Rather than understanding same-sex desire as having only been brought to light in the ensuing trials of Wilde this study explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century. Caricatures of allegedly effeminate types of men such as macaronis, dandies and aesthetes can be understood to have referred to issues of sexuality. Moreover, depictions that might appear at first glance only to be precursors of twentieth-century homophobic representations can also be understood as having participated in the development of visual discourses of excess that enabled the coded expression of sexual non-conformity. Caricature, therefore, needs to be appreciated for having played a key role in the development of queer fashioning in Britain before the widespread identification of the figure of the homosexual in the first half of the twentieth century