Books: Are you at all fond of Wagner?

The English experience: Matthew Sweet on forbidden sex in Victorian times; and Blake Morrison, below, on Anglophilia

Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality

ed Chris White

Routledge pounds 50/pounds 15.99

It may not be the last word on the subject, but Chris White's anthology will certainly save the blushes of the next generation of undergraduates. Order up her source texts in the few libraries that hold them, and you're made to feel like some dribbling smut-bibber in a windowless Soho porn joint. In the Bodleian, you're issued with a warning ticket in Beardsleyan yellow that exhorts you not to leave the book on your desk for fear of it corrupting the morals of a passing academic (Tom Paulin, perhaps, or Terry Eagleton). And in the old reading room at the British Museum, anyone wanting to apply themselves to a book from the "private case" was made to sit at a special frontless desk, so that the librarians could watch out for any unauthorised self-abuse. Not having tried to order any such material in the new British Library at St Pancras, I'm unable to say whether the practice continues (the surveillance, that is, not the self-abuse).

Few books on this subject are in print in their entirety. Much discussed by White's contributors, Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1889) is available, but not in an edition that you could buy and still find yourself able to make eye contact with the assistant in Blackwells. Issued under a mucky cover by Velvet Publications (who also have such titles as The Whip Angels and Irene's C--- on their backlist), it is introduced by Terence Sellers, author of The Correct Sadist. Mercifully, White's book looks stylish and respectable. Brown paper bags will not be required.

Those who know their way around 19th-century shirtlifting will find that the usual suspects are present. White produces edited highlights of Edmund Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Wilde, and a short account of the transvestite good-time boys Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park - whose "campish undertakings" in the Burlington Arcade landed them in court in 1870. More satisfyingly, White has also produced a few surprise witnesses. She introduces us to Adah Isaacs Menken, an actress, model, circus performer and poet who went out on the town dressed in men's clothing with her companion George Sand. White has cherry-picked obscure, privately printed volumes to produce a comprehensive selection of purple pederastic poetry ("Ah let me in thy bosom still enjoy / Oblivion of the past, divinest boy"). She has also reproduced extracts from Xavier Mayne's psychometric questionnaire, Are You at All a Uranian? - a wonderful document that goes sniffing for sodomites with questions such as "Do you whistle well, and naturally like to do so? Do you feel at ease in the dress of the opposite sex?" (Disappointingly, White omits my personal favourite, "Are you at all fond of Wagner?")

Unfortunately, White's editorial eclecticism is marred by an important methodological error. It's a matter of terminology. She supports her use of the word "homosexual" to describe these writings with the assertion that it is "historically valid and comprehensible to the modern reader". The latter is certainly true. It's convenient because we're comfortable with it, and probably know whether or not our own sexual predilections place us within its taxonomic boundaries. But the Victorians would not have done. The term was coined in 1869 by a Swedish campaigner named Hans Benkert, but it didn't get into print in English until the 1890s. White's book reproduces sources from as far back as 1810, but the first one to use the H-word is an unpublished letter from 1892. To speak of "homosexuals" in contexts before this date is like using the word Nintendo to describe everything from 1930s fruit machines to 1980s video tennis.

This isn't just a semantic quibble. The absence of medico-legal definitions for what the Victorians did in bed was reflected in the relationships and peccadilloes that they pursued. There are many texts - few of which get an airing in White's book - that reveal 19th- century sexuality as much less systematised and tribalist than our own. Attempting to apply modern jargon to what went on between 19th-century lovers can only yield a limited understanding of how their relationships were constituted.

How, for instance, might we categorise those intense friendships between men found in Victorian fiction? What's going on between Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), or Allan Armadale and Ozias Midwinter in Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1864-6)? They don't sit too well under the label "homosexual", but their passionate attachments to each other also refuse to square with modern ideas of heterosexuality. "I do love him!" wails the hero of the Collins novel. "It will come out of me - I can't keep it back. I love the very ground he treads on! I would give my life - yes, the life that is precious to me now, because his kindness has made it a happy one - I tell you I would give my life." The narrator continues: "The next words died away on his lips; the hysterical passion rose, and conquered him. He stretched out one of his hands with a wild gesture of entreaty ... his head sank on the window-sill, and he burst into tears." He probably whistled like a tart, too.

These ambiguities become more explicit when you go digging in 19th-century pornographic journals such as The Pearl, whose narratives cheerfully despatch their protagonists to bed with partners of either sex, willy-nilly. For instance, in a Pearl serial entitled "Sub-Umbra; or, Sport among the She- Noodles", the hero, Walter, offers to loan his friend Frank a deluxe copy of Fanny Hill. Walter's graphically illustrated edition is concealed in a secret compartment of his dressing case. "Here it is, my boy, only I hope it won't excite you too much; you can look it over by yourself, as I read the Times." Of course, it does excite him too much, and soon the pair are, as Walter puts it, "having a mutual fuck between the thighs on the bed". There's no room for this activity in White's anthology. It's a pity, because as she exposes obscure areas of 19th-century sexuality to the widest audience they've probably ever had, she also closes up areas of ambiguity that will be immediately apparent to anyone who can brave the disapproval of the librarians and search out these texts for themselves.