ABSTRACT
T he ‘unspeakable’ quality o f hom osexual desire in late V ictorian Britain has, o f late, becom e a familiar presence in historical w riting and literary criticism.1 I t encompasses L ord Alfred D ouglas’s by now cliched ‘love th a t dare n o t speak its nam e’, E. M. Forster’s Maurice , as well as John A ddington Sym onds’s A Problem in Modern Ethies. Just as M aurice described him self as ‘an unspeakable o f the Oscar Wilde so rt’, Symonds, considering how to approach the subject, could ‘hardly find a nam e which will n o t seem to soil this paper’.2 H istorians and theorists have taken up this them e, w ith the result th a t the euphemism s and evasions o f V ictorian Britain are now frequently seen as pregnant w ith sexual m eaning o f all kinds. M ost recently, William C ohen has argued th a t ‘silence abou t sexuality composes a strategic form , n o t an absence o f representation’. Instead o f m ere repression or censorship, the forms o f discourse which dealt indirectly and euphemistically w ith sexual m atters enabled, he suggests, the creation o f a ‘prolix and polyvalent’ set o f term s which came to designate various forms o f illicit sexuality.3
