ABSTRACT
In the twenty-first century, readers turn to Trollope to critique so many aspects of Victorian cultural history. Where once Trollope was the redoubt of an oldguard, masculinist rationale, close new readings show his highly individual take on subjects as diverse as politics, commerce, empire and colonialism, class, law and, of course, gender, where his presentation of women who buck the sexual stereotypes of the age has been recognized for many years, and his equally innovative constructions of masculinity are increasingly attracting attention.1 However, Trollope has been less frequently considered when we seek to examine men outside the parameters of heterosexual behaviour. This is a sad oversight, since when we come to examine his treatment of sexually equivocal men, we find a Trollope who challenges our perceptions of what it was to be a man attracted to other men in the times when he was writing. Michael Mason, in The Making of Victorian Sexuality,2 observes that evidence about homosexuality in the period up to 1880 is extremely meager, an assertion supported by Brian Reade’s earlier and originative anthology, Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900, which has 21 entries from the first 30 years, and 68 from the last 20.3 And though Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between Men examines canonical Victorian texts to challenge the assumption that homosexual existence is necessarily different from and in adversarial relation to other sorts of masculine experience, no one has yet turned to Trollope to discover a liberal and tolerant voice describing passionate love between men.
