A review appeared in the London Evening Standard today. John Preston says of the Fanny & Stella
You would need to be a very dull — or prim — dog indeed not to find this a terrifically entertaining story. Neil McKenna has thrown himself into it with unfettered glee. If the opportunity arises to describe an anal fistula — and it does, frequently — he does not shirk it. Every so often the campness threatens to tilt out of control, but he’s a sufficiently crisp, colourful and funny writer for it not to matter.
Perhaps the abiding impression the book leaves is just how thin the curtain was separating the demi-monde from solidly bourgeois society of Victorian England. In later life, one of Stella’s ex-lovers renounced the “sodomitical underworld”. Instead he decided to explore some other fleshy nooks and crannies — and became a chiropodist.
You can read the whole review below.
Dressing up in drag in the 19th century could be hazardous. Male transvestite prostitutes often wore false breasts made from boiled sheep’s lungs. One, who took out his breasts when he went to bed, was surprised to find the next morning that they’d been eaten by his cat.
However, far greater perils lay in store for “Stella Boulton” and “Fanny Park” when they were arrested outside the Strand Theatre in 1870. Stella had already gained some renown as a great beauty — indeed one man at the Strand mistook her for the Duchess of Manchester, recently described by the prime minister, William Gladstone, as “the very fairest of our land”.
But at Bow Street police station, Stella admitted that her real name was in fact Ernest Boulton. As for Fanny, she was really Frederick Park. Stripped naked, they were examined by an exceedingly curious doctor who noted that both had unusually slack bottoms and inordinately long corkscrew-shaped penises — both these things, he concluded, being the result of “sodomitical activity”.
They were then charged with “the abominable crime of buggery” — which until nine years earlier had carried the death penalty: the sentence had now been commuted to penal servitude for life. The case, predictably enough, caused a sensation — all the more so when details emerged of the two men’s backgrounds. Fanny’s father turned out to be a High Court judge, while Stella’s was a stockbroker.
Both Fanny and Stella had dreamed — rather fancifully under the circumstances — of becoming actresses, but had ended up as male prostitutes. To make matters even more exciting, there was an exotic cast of supporting characters. One of Stella’s more regular consorts was Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, son of the Duke of Newcastle and an MP.
The case also lifted the lid on something that had hitherto been kept tightly screwed down in Victorian London — the drag scene. Drag, it seems, was a lot more popular at the time than might be supposed. There were regular drag balls which the police, on the whole, turned a blind eye to — although in 1854 they did arrest a 60-year-old man “dressed in the pastoral garb of a shepherdess of the golden age”.
Meanwhile, Stella and Fanny were languishing in Newgate Prison and being subjected to yet more medical examinations. One of these involved the two leading French specialists in sodomy, along with 17 English medical men “of the highest eminence”. They peered through magnifying glasses at both men’s bottoms and concluded — I suspect to the astonishment of Fanny and Stella themselves — that they could find no evidence of sodomitical activity.
By the time the case came to trial the public mood had changed — from shuddering fascination to something like sympathy. And when Stella and Fanny were found not guilty the public gallery erupted into cheers. Never one to be upstaged, Stella promptly fainted.
You would need to be a very dull — or prim — dog indeed not to find this a terrifically entertaining story. Neil McKenna has thrown himself into it with unfettered glee. If the opportunity arises to describe an anal fistula — and it does, frequently — he does not shirk it. Every so often the campness threatens to tilt out of control, but he’s a sufficiently crisp, colourful and funny writer for it not to matter.
Perhaps the abiding impression the book leaves is just how thin the curtain was separating the demi-monde from solidly bourgeois society of Victorian England. In later life, one of Stella’s ex-lovers renounced the “sodomitical underworld”. Instead he decided to explore some other fleshy nooks and crannies — and became a chiropodist.
Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p