Class has been crucial both to how individuals have experienced their desires and to how those desires have been interpreted, categorized, and articulated. This chapter offers an overview of the intersectional relationship between class and sexuality and demonstrates that the nuances of class difference and division, across continents and within regions of the same country, could drastically alter the lived experience of sexual desire. Class influenced notions of private and public spaces and the impact these had on sexual activity. Class differences mixed with racial differences also determined ideas of sexual respectability or sexual danger, both on an individual level with the erotic appeal of class differences and on a group level in eugenics. Class divisions have also been significant in shaping how the history of sexuality has been written, since it has shaped the nature of archival sources. The example of English author Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) demonstrates these themes.

There’s an incoherence in our thinking about the intersections of gender and sexuality in the 1890s that is conditioned by an overemphasis on the Oscar Wilde trials. 1895 saw the coalescing of diffuse components (aestheticism, dandyism, effeminacy) that would establish a modern definition of male homosexuality. Yet we recognize that Wilde had little interest in the sexological notion of inversion, advocating instead for the pederastic model that depended on the repudiation of cross-gender expression. This chapter reconsiders the legacies of the 1890s by shifting focus from Wilde to two figures who differently adjudicated the merits of pederasty and inversion: John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter. Analyzing the revisions Carpenter made to his pamphlets in preparation for the publication of Love’s Coming-of-Age – delayed by Wilde’s trials – the chapter shows the influence of Continental thinkers such as Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, as well as New Woman writers of the 1890s, in defusing the antagonism between pederasty and inversion.

Before the specter of the Nazi Final Solution, many British intellectuals at the fin de siècle perceived eugenics as forward-thinking and liberating. In their respective novels, A Superfluous Woman (1894) and The Girl from the Farm (1895), the socialist-feminists Emma Frances Brooke and Gertrude Dix paired ideologies of degeneration and eugenics with an endorsement of Edward Carpenter’s ethos of simple living, celebrating good health and wholesomeness. They adopted Francis Galton’s policy of selective breeding yet rejected his promotion of the peerage as “eminent” specimens for propagating future generations. In their fictions, the conservative aristocrat and entitled upper-middle-class man are instead enervated, parasitical decadents and obstacles to social, evolutionary advancement. Ultimately, Brooke’s and Dix’s visions are not altogether unified: whereas Dix simply dismisses her flimsy, immature dandy, Brooke advocates a more radical “negative eugenics” with an eye to her decadent’s diseased offspring. Rejecting privileged, dissipated men in favor of health and liberation, both authors anticipate twenty-first century social critiques of decadence.