Actually…
Naomi Wolf has a new book out. In it she says that a teenage boy was executed for sodomy in 1859, but in fact he was paroled two years after he was convicted.
Silver, who was 14 when he was convicted, is just one of several cases cited in the book but, according to the writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet, the error stems from a simple misreading of a historical record and raises wider questions about the argument Wolf puts forward.
In Outrages, which was published by Virago, Wolf examines the effect of 19th-century legal changes on the lives of Victorian poets such as John Addington Symonds and argues that the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 marked a turning point in the treatment of gay people.
“People widely believe that the last executions for sodomy were in 1830,” Wolf told the Observer. “But I read every Old Bailey record throughout the 19th century, so I know that not only did they continue; they got worse.”
According to Sweet, who first challenged Wolf on Radio 3’s Arts and Ideas, her error concerning Silver stems from a misunderstanding of “the very precise historical legal term, ‘death recorded’, as evidence of execution, when in fact it indicates the opposite”.
You can hear him telling her so. It’s a painful moment.
The historian Richard Ward agreed, adding that the term was a legal device first introduced in 1823. “It empowered the trial judge to abstain from formally pronouncing a sentence of death upon a capital convict in cases where the judge intended to recommend the offender for a pardon from the death sentence. In the vast majority (almost certainly all) of the cases marked ‘death recorded’, the offender would not have been executed.”
So it’s like saying “duly noted” when you plan to ignore the thing noted? I guess.
While Wolf only quotes the “death recorded” verdict in Silver’s case, Sweet challenges the wider argument put forward in Outrages.
“I think her assumptions about ‘death recorded’ have led her to the view … that ‘dozens and dozens’ of Victorian men were executed, and that one of the main subjects of her book, the poet John Addington Symonds, grew up with the fear of execution hanging over his head. I have yet to see evidence that one man in Victorian Britain was executed for sodomy.”
Wolf’s argument that 1857 saw a brutal turn against consensual sex between men runs counter to most scholars, Sweet continued, who suggest that it was only in 1885 that a less tolerant legal climate developed. “She argues that historians have misread this moment and we should see that 1857 was a more significant date. I think she is wrong.”
If you’re going to challenge most scholars you need to do all your homework.
I could barely finish the article about this—it hurts that much by proxy. Wanted to sink into the earth.
I know, it’s awful, isn’t it. Nightmares as far as the eye can see.
[…] Actually . . . […]
That linked article is a great article. I have raged about this forever. I am constantly reading journalists on science who believe they have it right and the scientists wrong. Physicists on biology who will not accept that the biologists understand biology better than they do. Students in my classes who solemnly inform me that ‘elitist’ credentials have no status over simple common sense, and therefore my years of study and work cannot trump what their father shouted at the television (they never put it quite that way, but that’s what it boils down to).
And another field I see this in: Shakespeare. Many people are willing to dispute all the people who have devoted their life to studying Shakespeare, because they are so convinced that Someone Else® wrote Shakespeare’s plays. They read this study, see, and it convinced them. I decided that I would trust the scholars at this point, and if it ever became a point in my life where it was a life or death situation that I needed to know just who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, I might explore it further, but for now, it isn’t worth bothering about.
The history of sodomy, however, is different. The Holocaust. Women’s history. The history of religion. The environment. All of these things actually do still have repercussions in the modern world, and must be dealt with. Shakespeare’s plays will still be what they are even if they are written by Someone Else®.