Reputation and the Sexual Abuse of Boys

The situation has become all too familiar: accusations of sexual molestation against a man of good reputation with a responsible position in an organization dedicated to helping boys in difficult circumstances. The accusations threaten not only the man but the institution itself and the good work it is doing. A trial follows, or perhaps a government investigation, and the press swells with stories of the salacious spectacle. The formal inquiry and the public at large will come to conclusions about the case based on the credibility of the purported victims and their alleged abuser, but the truth may remain elusive in the absence of a confession. Reputation appears as both an influence on the process and its product. Reputation makes evidence more or less credible, and the resulting publicity will affirm or destroy that same reputation. Through it all, the trial will showcase society’s understanding of what is acceptable and unacceptable in sexual behavior.

Recent examples of this interplay of personal reputation, institutional self-preservation, and alleged sexual abuse of boys include the 2012 Jerry Sandusky trial in the United States (The Penn State Scandal, Piece by Piece 2012) and the revelations of sexual and physical abuse of children by clergy and members of religious orders in the three government reports (Ferns Inquiry 2005; Murphy Commission 2009; Ryan Commission 2009). These scandals were recent manifestations of this phenomenon, which has a history that took shape in late-Victorian times. Before 1895, there were occasional court cases, newspaper accounts, and private correspondence about men who pursued sexual relations with boys, but these incidents did not have the specific characteristics of the later sexual abuse scandals: widely publicized allegations that a middle-class man with institutional responsibility for young working-class boys took advantage of his authority and their dependent status for sexual gratification (Upchurch 2009; Cocks 2003; Jackson 1999). But attitudes changed as the century drew to a close, as evidenced in the Kirlew scandal that began in 1895 when the satirical weekly Spy claimed that the devoutly religious philanthropist Gilbert Kirlew had taken sexual advantage of boys resident at the Manchester Central Refuge at Strangeways. As one of the refuge’s top two officials, Kirlew was an active finder and rehabilitator of homeless and troubled boys. Cocks and Upchurch have shown that public opinion and the legal system had long dealt harshly with men for consensual or unwanted sex with other males, but the Kirlew trials illustrate a cultural shift. In the late nineteenth century, many Britons came to see the sexual abuse of boys and girls as a particularly reprehensible crime of its own, distinct from other sexual offences.

In her study of childhood sexual abuse, Louise Jackson (1999) has described a late-Victorian social ideal of duty to children, which reflected other societal preoccupations, including state-building, imperial rule, and attention to the psychological process of becoming an individual. This led voluntary societies, the state, and public opinion to attend more energetically to child abuse, including sexual abuse, with the press facilitating this new attitude. The New Journalism sought commercial success through sensational reporting of social problems and official misdeeds. The Kirlew scandal also resonated with questions increasingly asked by the press, the public, the government, and the Charity Organization Society about rapidly expanding philanthropic institutions. The combination of these factors in a cultural context of deeply held beliefs about delineations of class, gender, and sexuality made the Kirlew case a local sensation with broader ramifications.

Class issues permeated the accusations against Kirlew. This begins with the location; Manchester was the archetypical industrial city dominated by the expanding middle class and a vast working class. Unlike the artistic Wilde and the aristocratic frequenters of London’s Cleveland Street brothel, Gilbert Kirlew was a middle-class man by virtue of his employment, his activities, and his character. There was some ambiguity about his position within the middle class. His immediate roots were from the lower middle class, with his father, John, earning his living as a draper’s agent and as a manufacturer’s agent. One of his brothers became an engineer and another a salesman, while his sister Eliza Marianne was a governess, living with her father until his death and subsequently as a boarder. Tellingly, the six-member family had no live-in servants in 1871, an indication that they were on the lower edge of the middle class (UK Census 1871 and 1881). Notwithstanding the family’s frequent financial problems, they also recalled with pride that the Kirlew forefathers had been landowning Yorkshire gentlemen (Kirlew 1908, 9–10). If Gilbert’s career in banking and insurance helped lift his status above his roots, his philanthropic activities did even more by bringing him into regular contact with members of the upper middle class and the gentry, which created a certain ambiguity that did not help him when trouble came.

In many ways, he embodied middle-class rectitude. As a married evangelical Nonconformist Protestant active in a respectable job and active in good works of all types, he demonstrated the middle-class masculine virtues of hard work and restraint. In character and activities, he shone: he was a tireless philanthropist, he was sincerely religious, and he had a companionate if childless marriage with his wife Elizabeth. To all appearances, he fulfilled his obligations as a middle-class man in the service of higher ideals based on an idealized domestic life (Davidoff and Hall 1987). John Tosh (2005, 72–77) describes masculinity in the middle class as dependent on these characteristics, emphasizing the control of base instincts and skepticism about the pursuit of pleasure. Class, religion, and character would all play a part in the trials to come, which would hinge on whether or not Gilbert Kirlew failed to live up to his masculine identity.

These markers set the middle-class men apart from what they saw as a hedonistic upper class, where reputation and sociability were the chief marks of masculine worth among landowners who could live well without the necessity of hard work, and from a lower class that they imagined had neither the virtues nor the means necessary to achieve the ideal life. Greater penetration of religious observance among the middle classes only reinforced their sense of difference and superiority. Similarly, the middle classes dominated philanthropic organizations, even when one or more aristocratic patrons lent their names and even their funds to assist.

In the view of the middle class, character was the chief barometer of masculine worth. Sean Brady (2005, 48) observes that middle-class men carried out onerous and often conflicting responsibilities to attain full masculine status. This sacrifice made the prize seem all the more valuable, but it also meant that deviations from the norm could easily raise questions about the whole structure.

Homosexuality—a crime as well as a vice—was one such deviation (Kaplan 2005, 177; Brady 2005, 27). Accounts of same-sex court cases in the decades before 1895 illustrate the cultural hostility to sex between men (Upchurch 2009; Cocks 2003). Newspapers and judges alike used strong language to denounce those cases of sex between men that came to their attention, characterizing this activity as “unspeakable crime,” “ the worst of crimes,” and “worse, even, than a charge of murder” (Cocks 2007, 107, 113; Upchurch 2009, 47–48, 53). As Upchurch (2009, 47–48) points out, this extreme characterization of impaired reputation and honor as the worst possible crime could be made only by those men “whose political and economic power depended on their honor.” Upchurch (2009, 188) argues that this made it almost impossible for them to understand—or to say they understood—sex between men as anything but examples of unimaginable depravity. The nineteenth-century pattern had been set, as society came to control the potential for sex between men, in Randolph Trumbach’s (1988, 409) analysis, “by denying its existence and by severely limiting all public description or discussion of the behavior.” Same-sex contact jeopardized individual and collective claims to character and damaged reputations. The consequences could be severe, leading to humiliation and exile for men such as Oscar Wilde, or even fatal, as when same-sex contact became the excuse for denying Roger Casement clemency in his 1916 trial for treason. This severity created a space for working-class males to attempt to profit through extortion by demanding payments from middle- or upper-class men for real or fabricated sexual advances, and for its mirror image, the argument that a working-class male had claimed sexual assault simply for the purpose of extortion.

Sex between working-class men did not pose the same kind of threat to the entire edifice and therefore did not inspire such vitriol. In the view of other classes, the working class had looser sexual morals and less concern with concepts of honor. The exploitation of the working class for the pleasure of their betters was another matter entirely. Upchurch (2009, 53) and Kaplan (2005, 191–2) have shown that cases in which aristocrats or middle-class men were accused of abusing their class position to exploit their inferiors were considered more scandalous and appeared more prominently in the press.

Studies of the legal and press treatment of male homosexual activity for most of the nineteenth century show little difference in the treatment of sex between men and adult male sexual relations with teenage and preteen boys. At public schools, the discovery of sexual relations between adults and students was generally dealt with discreetly (Upchurch 2009, 56–57). The most important criterion had been the existence of same-sex activity, with disparity in age, like disparity in class, triggering somewhat wider publicity and opprobrium.

Gorham (1978, 369) observed that youth was thought of as a social status in relation to other groups in society. In the mid-to-late Victorian era, this changed, as the middle class began to consider its notions of childhood to be universal norms. Children of the working class in particular were increasingly seen as innocent and thus entitled to protection, education, and play appropriate to their class, in a life outside the adult world of social and economic autonomy. Children thus became the object of social concern, extending the values of the middle-class family to society as a whole. Cruel treatment, deprivation, and exploitation of children became marks of society’s failure. As one sign of this shift, the concept of “abuse” of children came into particular vogue in the 1880s as described by Flegel (2009, 13). At the same time, the boundary of childhood shifted upward. Prepubescent children were identified as being in particular need of care, and with the average age at the onset of puberty at about fourteen to fifteen years, this meant that special protections would apply to those up that age (Arnett 2006; Keniston 1971, 4; Trumbach 1988, 409, 421). This was visible in the changing nature of the Factory Acts; the Act of 1878 reduced the maximum work day for a ten- to fourteen-year-old child from ten to five hours. During these years, Behlmer (1982, 4, 19) has demonstrated that the number of children sent to prison fell rapidly, while charitable institutions to assist neglected and abused children and teenagers proliferated, giving rise to numerous ragged schools, homes such as the Manchester Refuge, and Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCCs).

The neglect and abuse of children was a particular locus of anxiety for the middle class and, increasingly, British society as a whole (Behlmer 1982, 11, 44). As an example, the interpretation of poor children begging shifted from an unremarkable part of public life to a deplorable situation by mid-century. By the 1890s, an adult who would send children to beg or tolerate that situation had become a perpetrator of a crime of cruelty (Flegel 2009, 15–16). The desire to give organizational structure to these beliefs crystallized quickly after the founding of the first British SPCC in Liverpool in 1883, followed by London in 1884, and Manchester in 1885. By 1889, Societies had prompted Parliamentary legislation, the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act, which addressed ill-treatment, neglect, abandonment, and exposure, but did not explicitly discuss sexual abuse (Flegel 2009, 22). The SPCCs primarily concerned themselves with prosecution and punishment of adults, usually parents, for abuse or criminal neglect, relying on other organizations to look after the children (Flegel 2009, 18–21, 36).

In a parallel development, sexual abuse of minors was becoming an area of concern and protection of boys from sexual corruption was, sotto voce, joining the more familiar discourse relating to girls (Flegel 2009, 95, 165). In the process, popular attitudes began to include the idea that prepubescent boys were susceptible of corruption, an idea that does not appear to have governed in the previous century. The outcry that occurred when the King pardoned Captain Robert Jones in 1772 after he had been convicted of an unnatural offence against twelve-year-old Francis Henry Hay was seen at the time and in recent scholarship as concerning sex between males rather than as concern for a prepubescent boy (Norton 2006, 170–171; Norton 2008). Other examples exist for the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. Opinion and the courts treated sexual relations between men and prepubescent boys as the same kind of offense as sex between men, if somewhat worse in degree—and not as serious as men having sex with boys in early puberty, because of the belief that such contact could influence the sexual direction of the boy entering on his sexual life (Trumbach 1988, 415). Louise Jackson has shown that the nineteenth century was more likely to see the reverse correlation between the age of the victim and the likelihood of conviction: all sexual assault cases involving boys under twelve ended in conviction of the older male, but this proportion fell to 75 percent for cases involving twelve- to thirteen-year-olds, 60 percent for 14-year-old victims and only 33 percent for victims aged fifteen (Jackson 1999, 103). Support for the claims of younger boys related to their presumed innocence of sexual matters, their status as presexual beings, and the concern that older boys might be claiming assault to extort money for a nonexistent sexual encounter or a consensual one that would otherwise leave both parties legally culpable. To reduce the incentive, falsely claiming unnatural assault was a crime punished even more severely than unnatural assault itself (Upchurch 2009, 94).

Most popular, journalistic, and parliamentary discourse dwelled on male sexual contact with girls. In part, this was driven by the numbers. Jackson’s study of 1,146 court cases of sexual abuse between 1830 and 1914 calculated that 93 percent of the identified victims were girls and 99 percent of the perpetrators were male, though she also suspected that reporting rates were lower for boys because many boys did not know that sexual contact with older men was a crime (Jackson 2000, 4, 100, 102). The risk of a countersuit for a false claim of unnatural assault could only further discourage boys or their parents from filing charges. Also, in the traditional view, the loss of virginity for a girl was an assault on the property rights of the father, without any parallel for a boy (Backhouse 1981, 209–10). In addition, male abuse of girls was seen as related to normal impulses that needed to be contained in a civilized country, whereas a male desiring another male of any age was publicly condemned as a deviant aberration (Brady 2005, 88). According to Jackson (1999, 103–4), this attitude was linked to an interest in protecting homosocial work, political, and social environments and the need to enforce notions of normal masculinity. When the General Post Office investigated allegations in 1877 that its telegraph boys were selling sex to men, the government solicitor suggested some exemplary prosecutions, risking scandal “for the protection of the children” (Hindmarch-Watson 2012, 612), redefining boys of sixteen and seventeen as children. Because of these factors, anxieties about boys occupied a related, but different, discursive space than similar anxieties about girls. This can be seen in Parliamentary laws to protect girls, which sometimes included and sometimes neglected boys.

Until the late nineteenth century, an agglomeration of laws about sodomy, attempted sodomy, and unnatural assault governed legal cases about sexual contact. As anxieties about the protection of young people increased, new laws appeared and old ones were made more stringent. This can be seen in the changes to the definition of the “age of consent,” the age at which a young person could be assumed to be legally competent to agree to sexual acts. Britain’s age of consent standards had long been treated as a sliding scale. The closer the young person was to the age of consent, the more likely the accused adult would be able to use consent as a defense or mitigating factor. Parliament ended this practice in the Indecent Assaults on Young Persons amendment to the Criminal Law Act of 1880, which stated in no uncertain terms that consent was no defense if the boy or girl was under thirteen years of age. Boys deemed incapable of giving consent would have been below the age of puberty. This signaled that Parliament was ready to see sexual contact with prepubescent boys and girls as a particularly heinous offence that required a bright line to separate it from similar conduct among older persons. This represented a significant change from views predominant to a century before, when sexual contact with a prepubescent boy less of a problem than the same contact with an older boy. Opponents of the 1880 law argued that an arbitrary limit would oversimplify consideration of complicated situations, apply to sexually active prostitutes and working-class girls who had no need of protection, and leave men open to extortion by wily girls, boys, or parents ( Parliamentary Debates 1880, cols. 1082ff; Jackson 1999, 82). Their attempt to have the limit set at ten years of age failed. They were out of step with public opinion, which Brady (2005, 94) has shown was more precisely reflected in the reporting of The Times. This newspaper had stopped reporting trials of men for homosexual sex, but from 1886 to 1896 reported trials of men accused of having sex with boys.

The next major legal change came in the wake of W. T. Stead’s (1885) campaign against the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, which portrayed young working-class girls as the victims of men whose deployment of wealth overcame modesty and parental scruples (Gorham 1978, 354). With the support of church leaders and socialists, the 1885 Amendment to the Criminal Law Act redefined the age of consent for girls to sixteen. Rather than applying the same standard to boys, this law instead made all sexual contact between males—or any attempt to procure such contact—subject to a prison term of up to two years.

Two major cases involving boys came to the attention of the public between 1885 and the Kirlew allegations: the Cleveland Street Scandals of 1889, involving a homosexual brothel, and the Oscar Wilde trials of April and May 1895. In both cases, upper-class exploitation of working-class youths received wide opprobrium (Upchurch 2009, 53; Kaplan 2005, 191–2; Brady 2005, 41). Demonstrating this new mood, Matt Cook (2003, 51–52) has noted Reynolds’s Newspaper’s (1898) extensive coverage during the Wilde trials of a case in which a chemist’s assistant named Goodchild was tried for inducing a fourteen-year-old boy to commit indecent acts. These cases alone show that attitudes had begun to change, a shift highlighted by the packed courtrooms and dramatic press coverage of the 1895 Kirlew trial, which added a new element not present in the Cleveland Street, Wilde, and Goodchild cases: the violation of the responsibility Kirlew had taken on for the young people in his care.

Gilbert Richardson Kirlew was not a likely candidate for accusations of abuse. Born in 1858, he began his working career in his early teens as a bank clerk in the Union Bank of Manchester, rising within a decade to become branch manager (Kirlew 1908, 10). A devoutly evangelical Wesleyan Methodist, he took part in the new solicitude for the troubles of children in 1876, when he began teaching street boys to read and write. After finding one of his pupils dying in the street from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself more thoroughly to helping these homeless and neglected boys.

There were plenty of children to help in Manchester. As publicized by Friedrich Engels and others, its slums were notorious for their dire conditions. Hundreds of children roamed the streets of Manchester each night (Mohr 1992, 42). Reflecting the new concern for children as victims in the second half of the century, philanthropists began to attend to the homeless, abused, and unfortunate children of the city. The ragged school movement tried to help them by day, and soon charitable institutions formed to provide overnight shelters and more permanent homes (Behlmer 1982, 11). In Manchester, two of the earliest were Alfred Alsop’s Wood Street Mission, started in 1869, and the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuges and Homes (hereafter referred to as the refuges), founded by Leonard K. Shaw and Richard B. Taylor in 1870 (Mohr 1992, 43; Sykes 2011).

The headquarters and heart of the latter enterprise was the Central Refuge, known more commonly as the Strangeways Refuge, located on Francis Street just three blocks from Manchester’s Strangeways prison. Here boys could find a long-term home, basic education, religious instruction, and industrial training. Here also were the headquarters of a network of institutions at more than a dozen locations to assist young people—girls were added to the group’s mission within a few years of its founding. The organization ran an all-night shelter for children needing a break from the streets or from abusive parents and guardians. There were also orphan homes, homes for older boys who were self-supporting, a girls’ industrial training school, a home to train boys for farming in preparation for emigration to Canada, a prison mission for newly released inmates of Strangeways Prison, a day nursery, and offices of the Industrial Brigades to provide employment for boys not yet skilled enough or old enough to work for private employers. About forty-five miles away, on the shores of the Irish Sea, the refuges ran a seaside rest home for weary city children, and a summer camp for poor boys. At the port of Birkenhead, Manchester boys could learn to become sailors on the training ship Indefatigable. Unlike the more famous Barnardo Homes in London, which rejected more than two-thirds of its applicants, the Manchester Refuges accepted any boy or girl up to sixteen years of age, contingent only on their adherence to the rules and deference to authority (Koven 2004, 100; Behlmer 1982, 58; 1890 Charities Register , 317–18). All this ran on total income that averaged around £14,000 a year.

Starting in 1879, Kirlew helped at the Wood Street Mission by writing for its newspaper and leading outings for the children, such as trips to the seaside (Mohr 1992, 43). In 1881, he left the mission to start the Children’s Aid Society to provide work for boys delivering messages and shining shoes. At the urging of the Bishop of Manchester, who was concerned about the confusion caused by competing institutions, Kirlew merged the Children’s Aid Society into the equivalent group within Leonard Shaw’s Refuges in 1882. Shaw generously invited the twenty-four-year-old Kirlew to become joint Honorary Secretary (meaning they both worked without pay), thus sharing leadership of the organization, an arrangement that lasted for the next thirteen years. In addition to the work brigades, Kirlew’s responsibilities included editing the refuge periodical, the Christian Worker (Brake and Demoor 2009, 333). In 1883, he became editor of the Children’s Own Paper, the weekly organ of the Band of Kindness, a group of middle-class children interested in animal welfare. With the help of his sister, Marianne Kirlew, he expanded the group’s scope to include the welfare of children. By 1886, the Band of Kindness had become primarily a fund-raising arm of the refuge. Encouraged by the writings of “Uncle Gilbert,” its membership increased steadily, reaching 50,000 children by 1891. Through these activities and others, Kirlew had become a major force in the region’s philanthropy for young people. When Manchester worthies decided to start up a local SPCC in 1885, they naturally turned to Shaw and Kirlew to organize and oversee it (Manchester and Salford SPCC 1885, 7, 8).

Much of Kirlew’s philanthropic work focused on boys. They made up the work brigades that Kirlew managed. He also took on special projects involving boys, once traveling to Dublin to “rescue” Irish boys from Catholic homes, and, with his wife, escorting groups of emigrating boys to Canada in 1888, 1894, and 1898. He and his wife took a total of twenty-four boys into their home over the years, usually two or three at a time (Kirlew 1908, 31, 40, 52).

Gilbert Kirlew’s professional life became more entwined with his philanthropic life in 1884 when he joined Shaw in opening and running the Manchester office of the four-year-old Scottish Life Assurance Company, at £150 plus commission (Mohr 1992, 44; Denholm 1981, 23–24). Although Kirlew was unlikely to grow rich from this work, it gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Whitworth, a vicar’s daughter, two years later. Although they were technically equals at the refuges and at work, Shaw was the senior partner in these endeavors.

After a bout of pneumonia in 1890, Kirlew left the refuges and the firm for a two-year recuperation voyage to Algiers, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. All the same, by 1895, his position as a leading philanthropist seemed secure. In the first few months of that year, as reported by the Manchester Guardian (January 5, 1895, January 23, 1895, April 2, 1895, May 22, 1895), he helped to form and lead the Manchester Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), organized a denunciation of Armenian massacres, and celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the refuges.

This changed very quickly thanks to Henry Yeo. A few years younger than Kirlew, Yeo was a less respectable self-made man. His father and grandfather had been agricultural laborers, but Henry’s ambitions had taken him far from the rural life (UK Census 1841, 1861, and 1881). Originally a teacher, he became a journalist and a newspaper auditor, before moving to Manchester, where in 1891, with the backing of one Percival Percival (1896), he launched an illustrated penny paper called Spy: The Serio-Comic and Free Lance for Manchester, Salford, and District (Brake and Demoor 2009, 596). It was a hodgepodge of news, humor, satire, and muckraking, with a self-proclaimed emphasis on exposing “shams, hypocrisy, and humbug” of all kinds (Williams 1985, 83). The paper seems to have been successful enough to earn a living for him and his family from its founding in 1891, earning bigger profits when it reported scandals. His attacks on his fellow citizens led to a number of libel cases that did not dissuade him from continuing to publicize real and imagined wrongdoing. His models were Henry Labouchère’s Truth and W. T. Stead’s reporting, but he operated considerably down market from these two men in audience and tone. Without their standing, dignity, and connections, Yeo was far more vulnerable to libel suits; the first suit against the paper, which was dismissed, came in 1893 (Yeo 2010). As the Kirlew case was to show, libel cases could boost the paper’s circulation tremendously, suggesting that Yeo believed the libel cases were worth the financial and personal tolls they exacted.

The Oscar Wilde trials of April and early May 1895 indirectly gave him a new opportunity to use a scandal to boost circulation and cleanse the community. In April 1895, after reading about the trials, a young man visited Henry Yeo to report that Kirlew had sexually assaulted him while he lived in the Strangeways Refuge ( Manchester Guardian, June 28, 1895, 7) in the late 1880s. When Yeo asked for corroboration, the young man agreed to find others with similar experiences. The “sets of silences” that Jackson describes surrounding sexual abuse of boys were about to shatter as muckraking journalism and courtroom drama gave a public voice to young men who had not previously known they had any right to complain (Jackson 1999, 100–6).

These inquiries reached the ears of Leonard Shaw on May 5. Shaw could not believe the accusations against the man he had worked so closely with for so long. After informing Kirlew of the rumors, he questioned the Master and Matron of the Strangeways Refuge (Shaw and Crossley 1895) house and found they shared his views on the matter. There was talk, however, that young men with grudges against Kirlew had gone to the Spy. When Shaw confronted Yeo the next day, the editor said he did not have enough evidence to print, and, according to Shaw, promised to inform Shaw if that changed (Shaw and Crossley 1895). Later, in the August 16, 1895, issue of Spy, Yeo rebuffed Shaw’s assertion by claiming that he had merely said he would not publish unless he had incontrovertible proof (Yeo 1895).

On June 1, 1895, Spy published a story called “A Filthy Scoundrel,” (1895) announcing that the paper would soon unmask “one of the lowest blackguards that ever disgraced the human form.” Yeo observed that Kirlew’s crime was worse than Wilde’s because Wilde did not prey on young people who could not resist. Yeo described Kirlew as “cloaked in garments of extreme respectability, and wears over all the cloak of religion.” This description brings to mind Laud Humphreys’s observation that many men who lead double sexual lives reduce their risk of discovery by “donning the breastplate of righteousness” and leading lives of such propriety that people consider them to be models of good behavior and right thinking (Humphreys [1970] 2005, 137). While Kirlew’s rectitude did not, in itself, indicate guilt, it could have served him as it did the men Humphreys studied, as a cloak to deflect the gaze of others and the promptings of his own conscience.

In the issue of June 15, Yeo named Gilbert Kirlew as the perpetrator in a lengthy article whose tone is clear from this excerpt:

He is a loathsome being, who has misused the name of God and the vicariate of Christian work to gratify his unnatural passion. Refuge boys are his victims. He is accustomed to committing indecencies with them, and, appalling as the blasphemy is, he approaches them with words of religion on his lips. He has committed indecent acts in the boys’ beds, in his room at the Refuge, in a railway carriage, and in a place of worship during service. He has habitually defiled the youth he has been commissioned to protect. We cannot, and would not, describe his particular vice; let it suffice for us to say that it is an offence which all men–men, mark you—hold in horror. (Yeo, “Gilbert R. Kirlew” 1895, 8)

Yeo had fused the old anxieties about homosexual conduct with the new discourse of children as victims in need of protection. The boys who accused Kirlew had been between eleven and fourteen years of age at the time of the alleged incidents, invoking society’s heightened concern for prepubescent boys. The Spy seems to have been the only newspaper to editorialize on Kirlew’s behavior. Other papers simply reported the trial, including the testimony against Kirlew. But the Spy’s fulsome censure and the eager response of the courtroom gallery to Kirlew’s discomfiture gave voice to the new ethos. In condemning the abuse, Yeo also condemned the hypocrisy that enabled it and masked it. He believed he had pierced what we will call the “breastplate of righteousness.” Yeo also questioned Kirlew’s masculinity, denying him the status of a “man” because of his homosexual actions. Yeo’s words reflected the general attitude of Victorian society and the more specific ire of the son of an agricultural laborer against the holier-than-though, and thus somewhat effete, do-gooder.

Although Kirlew resigned as Honorary Secretary of the Refuge after the first article, he remained on the committee and continued to hold positions with other organizations through June. Yeo said he would not have published Kirlew’s name if he had “cleared out quietly,” an attitude which had carried over from older days, when schoolmasters who had sexual contact with their charges had been allowed to resign without prosecution (Kaplan 2005, 105).

In addition to selling papers, Yeo intended to cleanse the Strangeways Refuge (Yeo, “Gilbert R. Kirlew” 1895) and thus assist it in its goal of helping young people. In this, his attack both paralleled and differed from several similar scandals that touched children’s charities. Some years before, the Charity Organization Society subjected the famous Dr. Barnardo to a widely publicized inquiry into his homes for abandoned and neglected children in London. These accusations did not include sexual abuse of children and the trial absolved him of every serious charge (Koven 2004, 91). However, the incident exposed the concerns that many had about philanthropists helping poor children. Some of his accusers wanted to destroy him out of personal enmity, while others because they felt that his form of charity was insufficiently “scientific” and allowed neglectful parents to escape censure and punishment. The notion that effusively religious philanthropists might be using their self-proclaimed godliness as a cover for immoral activities resonated here and in the later Kirlew case. These were not isolated incidents. Another important children’s charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), was to be investigated for mismanagement in 1896.

What made the Kirlew case different was the explicit allegation that the philanthropist was sexually abusing boys in his care. Juries and judges tended to be skeptical of older boys’ claims of sexual assault. Authorities believed older boys were much more likely to have made accusations of indecent assault to blackmail men who either were innocent or had been entrapped (Jackson 1999, 103). In the Kirlew trial, at the time of the alleged abuse most of the witnesses had been between eleven and fourteen years old. However, when they testified, almost all were older than eighteen. The sympathy that younger victims found did not apply when grown men were testifying about events that had occurred five to thirteen years before.

Kirlew moved quickly to defend himself. Shortly after the second Spy article named him, Kirlew and his barrister were in the City Police Court swearing out warrants for the arrest of Yeo and Percival for printing libels. In this, the Manchester Guardian reported (June 19, 1895), they had learned from the experience of one John Southam, an attorney whose own libel suit against the two men the week before had been impeded because Yeo and Percival had eluded process servers. When the magistrates asked Chief Detective Inspector Jerome Caminada about Yeo and Percival, he informed them that they were men of “no status” whose paper sold nothing but scandal. Already the stage was being set. A philanthropist of standing had likely been libeled by two men of no status. This prejudice (prejudging in its purest sense) echoed through subsequent days in court.

Arrested the evening before the trial, Percival and Yeo spent the night in police office because they could not raise £500 bail at such a late hour. When they came before the City Police Court, they faced a crowded courtroom and a large panel of judges despite the short notice. All local Justices of the Peace had the right to participate, and no fewer than thirty-three magistrates, including the Lord Mayor himself, made up the bench, illustrating how Kirlew v. Spy had already become a Manchester sensation. This was a far cry from the way that boarding-school cases of the previous decades had been discreetly disposed of. Yeo’s article and Kirlew’s lawsuit had made that course of action impossible. However, the thirty-three magistrates were there by choice and the public filled the gallery. Given Kirlew’s reputation and record of good works, it might be reasonable to assume that the magistrates were there to support one of Manchester’s leading philanthropists. The results of this trial suggest otherwise. Not knowing what to expect in terms of guilt or innocence, the magistrates and the public came because of the notoriety of Yeo’s allegations and Kirlew’s standing. From the first day, the case resembled a performance pitting the strength of Kirlew’s reputation against the heinousness of what he had been accused of. Although Yeo and Percival were the official defendants, Kirlew was also on trial.

Class assumptions permeated the case from the beginning. Kirlew’s reputation was tied up with his social status as a leading middle-class philanthropist. This gave him a certain level of protection. The Chief Detective Inspector, Jerome Caminada, told the court that he had tried to deter the first witnesses from testifying, because, in his words, “Mr. Kirlew held a responsible position and before the public was a very respectable man.” Caminada, who himself had come up from poverty, in this way reinforced the class bias that privileged Kirlew over the working-class men and boys prepared to give evidence against him. This had not dissuaded most of the young men, who were waiting to be heard. However, Kirlew’s class status also put him at greater risk; he was held to a high standard and he could quickly become a pariah if Yeo’s accusations were accepted.

The Manchester City Police Court trial took place on six days between June 19 and June 28. At the very start, the presiding magistrate ordered all females to leave the courtroom (“Melodrama in a Court” 1895). In doing so, he was ensuring that the young men who were called to testify would be able to talk more freely about sexual matters. Like the ladies, we do not have access to the graphic testimony because most of the court records for the trials were destroyed. David Govier (2012), the Archivist in the Greater Manchester Record Office, reports that the city court records for the 1890s were destroyed in error some years ago. The National Archives, separately, records that the clerk relocating the Assizes Criminal Depositions and Case Papers during World War II discarded them. Only the Indictment from the 1898 Assizes trial still remains in the National Archives. Similarly, a pamphlet drawn up by Yeo reporting the testimony does not appear to have survived. We must, therefore, rely on the somewhat guarded words of the court reporters for the Manchester Guardian, Manchester Evening News, Manchester City News, Manchester Courier, and Manchester Weekly Times. These papers may not have reported the graphic details of the testimony, but they gave their readers lengthy accounts of each day’s activities in the 1895 trial.

The testimony of the first day’s witnesses was sufficiently convincing that bail for Yeo and Percival was reduced to a more manageable £50, according to the June 19 Manchester Evening News (1895). The court heard statements and testimony against Kirlew from at least nineteen young men: seventeen former residents of the refuge, one current resident, and one young man working for Kirlew and Shaw in the Scottish Life Assurance office. All but three told of incidents that took place before Kirlew’s medical leave in 1890, which gave Kirlew’s lawyers the opportunity to claim that the witnesses were inventing or exaggerating events that they had not seen fit to report at the time or in the interim. Leonard Shaw and Elizabeth Kirlew attributed the allegations to a few young men with grievances from many years past. It is true that Kirlew had expelled one witness for drunkenness, one for “disobedience,” and another for running away, but other witnesses testified that they had left the refuge on good terms and with good characters, even from Kirlew himself. In addition to description of assaults they had experienced or witnessed, they said that Kirlew’s behavior was known among the boys at the refuge, who teased each other about it and, when possible, avoided being alone with him, as Spy noted on August 16.

The Kirlews by this time had received many telegrams of support from friends, and it seems likely that the packed courtroom contained people who were there to support Kirlew, such as Leonard Shaw, even if many others were there to watch an unfolding scandal. Kirlew’s barrister, Sutton, took the situation seriously, telling the court that Kirlew was “stood in imminent peril. His reputation, which was his life, and more, was at stake,” an assessment echoed by Yeo’s barrister, who suggested that Kirlew was lying because he knew that “his honour and very life were at stake” ( Manchester Guardian, June 25, 1895, June 29, 1895). To clear Kirlew’s name completely, Sutton wanted a jury trial at the Manchester Assizes (Manchester Guardian, 27 June, 1895), which would convene in less than two weeks. With an eye on the calendar, Sutton fatefully opined that there was no need for rebutting evidence. He asked the court to commit the case to trial at the Assizes where a jury would definitively restore Kirlew’s good name at the expense of Yeo’s. The magistrates did not agree. They ruled that Kirlew had not proved his charges against Spy and dismissed the lawsuit, to the applause of many spectators. In response, an abashed Sutton took advantage of a rule that allowed Kirlew to bring the matter up on his own initiative at the Assizes by paying a £100 deposit.

This was not, in itself, a disaster. In his opening remarks at the Assizes on July 10, Judge Wills at the Manchester Assizes observed, “One could scarcely conceive a less creditable title than that of this paper, for it implied that it existed for the purposes of spying.” He advised the grand jury that there was a prima facie case that Spy had published a libel “of the most aggravated character” against Kirlew and they were obliged to indict Yeo and Percival (Manchester City News, July 13, 1895). Clearly, the prejudice in Kirlew’s favor continued to operate. When Yeo and Percival pleaded guilty in the Southam libel a few days later, the judge sentenced them to a year in prison, observing he had seen nothing like the Spy’s libels in forty years’ experience ( Law Times June 15, 1895, July 20, 1895). But Yeo and Percival did not intend to plead guilty in the Kirlew case, where they had a small battalion of witnesses to back up their attack.

Yet, to everyone’s surprise, no case was filed. Kirlew’s solicitors had resigned, and Kirlew had left the country to recuperate on his doctor’s advice after suffering a physical and emotional breakdown. He later said that those days were a blur beyond recall and that he and his wife “were driven nearly crazy.” After his return, Kirlew sought the advice of Sir Edward Clarke, Oscar Wilde’s barrister. With Wilde’s ill-fated prosecution of Queensberry for libel fresh in his mind, Clarke advised Kirlew not to return to court but instead to “live it down” (Manchester Guardian, July 18, 1898).

Clarke’s message to Kirlew was more than a reaction to Oscar Wilde’s disastrous lawsuit. In other cases involving sexual conduct, the Victorian court system had ruined the reputations of plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses alike. The public activist for women’s emancipation, Emily Faithfull, was a reluctant witness in the scandalous Codrington divorce case of 1864. After she contradicted her own sworn affidavit that Admiral Codrington had attempted to rape her while she shared a bed with Helen Codrington, Faithfull found herself shunned by many of her allies and “voluntarily” withdrew from society (Vicinus 2004, 78–79; Hirsch 1999, 259–62). Clarke may also have been thinking of the 1886 divorce case that stunted Sir Charles Dilke’s promising career. Named and then dismissed as a corespondent in the Crawford divorce suit, Dilke’s subsequent efforts to return to court to vindicate his innocence ended up making his name a byword for immorality for years to come, particularly among religious leaders and other moralists (Corbett 2013, 6; Nicholls 1995, 180–90). Sixteen years later, as a result of the scandal, missionary director Harry Grattan Guinness and crusading journalist W. T. Stead refused to cooperate with him in the humanitarian campaign to reform King Leopold’s Congo Free State (Pavlakis 2011, 74–76, 79).

For Kirlew, “living it down” would be a challenge in Manchester. His good reputation did provide some protection. Chief Detective Inspector Caminada sought Kirlew’s arrest after the June 1895 trial, but both the relevant magistrate and the public prosecutor had refused to indict him, saying “they considered that the ends of justice would be better met by not bringing this matter before the public,” a murky phrase that suggests they prioritized mercy for Kirlew and trust in his reputation before justice for Yeo or the young men of the refuge ( Manchester Guardian, July 16, 1898, 13). The current refuge boys had nothing to worry about, however, because Kirlew resigned from all his philanthropic posts except the Council of the Band of Kindness and terminated the Christian Worker and the Children’s Own Paper (Brake and Demoor 2009, 112, 333). His wife later remembered this bitterly, because these organizations—even the refuges—accepted his resignations without making an attempt to keep him. However, even his close friend Leonard Shaw could not jeopardize the standing of the refuges in the community to help him.

Yeo predicted that the platforms of public meetings and purses of charities were the poorer for the loss of Kirlew but was satisfied to report later that children were safer (“A Filthy Scoundrel,” June 1, 1895; “Strangeways Refuge,” April 1, 1898). Elizabeth Kirlew saw the matter in a very different light: “We found out what a poor defence against slander is a good reputation” (p. 49). She complained that he was deserted by his former philanthropic compatriots. He was no longer welcome on committees and platforms and not permitted to speak in churches. At Sunday services, he was refused communion. Some people who shunned them claimed to believe he was innocent but worried about their own social position when so many believed he was guilty. The public reputation that had been so helpful to him over the years now worked against him, though he had not been found guilty of anything. Social concern for children, skepticism about the integrity of philanthropic institutions caring for vulnerable children, and anxiety about sexual exploitation had come together to wreck the life that Gilbert Kirlew had constructed.

The Kirlews’ unhappy memories notwithstanding, they continued to have the support of a number of people critical to their future, such as the magistrate and public prosecutor who refused to prosecute Gilbert Kirlew for indecent assault. No one was more important to their ongoing fate than Leonard Shaw. He published two letters of support for Kirlew in June and August 1895 and defended him to their employer, the Scottish Life Assurance Company (Shaw 1895; Shaw and Crossley 1895). Based on this, the Company’s directors in Scotland maintained their high regard for Kirlew’s “outstanding character” and sent him to open a new office for the company in Preston, North Lancashire, in 1896 (Denholm 1981, 48). There is no evidence in the company’s official history that they were aware of any scandal or drama. It may be that they knew no more than Shaw told them; the story had been picked up by a few papers in the vicinity of Manchester during the summer of 1895, but the only mention of the case outside this area was a short notice in the London Morning Post that the libel case had been dismissed.

The Kirlews settled in Lancaster, fifty-five miles from Manchester, where Gilbert began to reconstruct his reputation through his work at the office and his pursuit of religious and philanthropic activities. Temporarily leaving Methodism, he was soon a leader of the Children’s Sunday Evening Mission at the Centenary Congregational Church and once again founded a Boys’ Brigade. He helped organize Pleasant Sunday Afternoon (PSA) meetings to bring ethical and religious concerns to the workingmen of Lancaster, such as having the famous missionary leaders Dr. Harry Guinness and Dr. John Paton speak. He started a YMCA, worked with the Town Mission and, with his sister, founded the Children’s Help Society to aid homebound disabled children. When he joined the local Free Church Council, he showed that he had in large measure regained his lost social standing. He had “lived down” the suspicions that had dogged him in Manchester (Kirlew 1908, 57; Mohr 1992, 42, 45).

Although the Kirlew suit had ended in his favor, Yeo also had a difficult year. After his year in prison for the Southam libel, he revived Spy in 1896 and wrote of his victory over Kirlew. When this came to Gilbert Kirlew’s attention, he decided to ignore it because it was not impeding his work in Lancaster ( Manchester Guardian July 18, 1898).

By 1898, Yeo had recovered his confidence. After denouncing more charities, he learned that Kirlew was organizing a Vigilance Committee in Lancaster to protect the sexual morals of young women and girls. In February, Yeo wrote to G. H. Weekes, the secretary of the Lancaster Town Mission, advising him that Kirlew should be in penal servitude, not in contact with young people (Yeo to Weekes 1898). Alarmed by the risk to his rebuilt reputation, Kirlew sued Yeo for libel in the Lancaster Police Court and at the Manchester Assizes (1895; Queen v. Henry Yeo 1898). When the Assizes trial opened in July, Kirlew and his new barrister, Mr. M’Keand, were ready. Evans, again representing Yeo, asked for the records of the old trial to be read in as evidence, but the judge required Yeo’s witnesses to testify anew (Manchester Guardian, July 16, 1898). Eleven of the original witnesses testified.

In contrast to the first trial, Kirlew’s testimony in the new trial presented a more human and appealing face to the jurors and judge. This time, Kirlew’s own witnesses took the stand, including refuge boys and middle-class character witnesses, such as Leonard Shaw and the famous Dr. Barnardo (The Times, July 22, 1898, 15). Some witnesses, like Shaw, could talk about what they had seen—or not seen—at the refuges, but others, like Barnardo, could speak in general terms only about Kirlew’s character and not on the specific allegations. One former refuge boy, William Frederick Evans, said he had been one of a small group who resented Kirlew in the late 1880s when he had tried to get them to stop unspecified “wrong practices” (likely masturbation or sexual contact). Although he had gotten over his anger, some of the boys still hated Kirlew for it. Smith’s testimony implied a conspiracy to hurt Kirlew. This fit the narrative of Kirlew’s supporters like Shaw but did not explain testimony from boys who had left the Refuge with gifts and good references from Kirlew.

On the fourth day of the trial, July 18, 1898, the jury found Yeo guilty of libel, but qualified its verdict, observing “that Mr. Kirlew had been very injudicious in his actions with the boys.” This equivocal verdict, suggesting that Kirlew was guilty but that he should not be punished, reverberated for some months to come, leading Kirlew to sue one poor newsagent who had sold 1,000 copies of Yeo’s attack on Kirlew even after the trial because he knew that the jury had not fully exonerated Kirlew ( Manchester Guardian, April 8, 1899).

Kirlew’s vindication in the 1898 trials received attention far beyond the Manchester metropolitan area. Newspapers across England reported on the Kirlew libel trials, though without editorializing. In 1895, Manchester had been fascinated with the allegations against Kirlew but most other papers had only briefly mentioned the case; by 1898, the audience had grown much wider.

Kirlew’s victories over the newsagent, Yeo, and, by implication, the former refuge boys who testified against him show strong class inflection. Yeo and the boys had won the day in 1895 only because the prosecution had not called any witnesses. In 1898, the prosecution’s witnesses could testify only that Kirlew had been a man of good character, but that was sufficient to convince the jury to discount the statements of the laborers, joiners, tailors, and shoemakers who said Kirlew had sexually molested them. A good character in a middle-class man was worth far more than the accusations of the working class.

Class and character had helped in other ways too. Yeo had benefited from Spy Defence Funds in 1895 (at least £55) and 1898 (at least £15), but this did not compare to the substantial sums donated to Kirlew. In 1898–1899 alone, the Kirlew Vindication Committee raised £390.13s. toward his £750. 1s. 18d. legal expenses (Manchester Evening News, June 7, 1899).

In sentencing Yeo to six months in prison, the judge commented that Yeo’s sincerity was beyond doubt, but that Yeo should have been more hesitant in taking away Mr. Kirlew’s “whole character” on what the jury found to be unconvincing evidence ( Manchester Guardian, July 19, 1898, 4). In 1895, Yeo had damaged Kirlew’s reputation by asserting cross-class sexual assault, but in 1898 Kirlew used the tools at his disposal to assert his exemplary middle-class condition against Yeo’s questionable claims to class and respectability.

The trial redeemed Kirlew’s reputation and character. Within months, Manchester’s Shaftesbury Brotherhood voted him its president—an honor all the more striking because the group was mostly former refuge boys (Manchester Guardian 1899). He continued his philanthropic work in Lancaster and Preston, reactivated his old networks in Manchester, and revived the Children’s Own Paper yet again ( World Paper Trade Review 1900, 38). In 1907, he moved to Leeds at his employer’s behest (Denholm 1981, 48), where he died of an apparent heart attack in 1908, at the age of 49 (Kirlew 1908, 61).

The case showed the vulnerability of the masculine character that had helped him become a leading citizen of Manchester. Kirlew’s standing in the community protected him from further prosecution but did not prevent him from being ostracized from Manchester society. It is Kirlew’s character that Leonard Shaw invoked to protect his friend and coworker from complete destruction. The crowds that flocked to the trials, the voluminous newspaper coverage, and the particular interest of magistrates and judges in the case reflected the new definition of sexual abuse of dependent boys as a separate category of crime generating public excitement and approbation. Although the final verdict suggested that character and class could still prevail, echoing older patterns, the excitement and publicity were part of a new pattern.

Gilbert Kirlew’s ordeal shows how ideas of childhood, sexual expression, masculinity, and the responsibility of society to all children were changing in late-Victorian culture through lenses of character and class. At the same time, attitudes towards same-sex relations were hardening in the wake of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, the Cleveland Street scandal, and the Wilde trials themselves. These changes began to crystallize in the mid-1890s from elements that had accumulated in the preceding decade.

The affair shows culture in flux, with inconsistent responses that both supported and punished Kirlew. Shaw, Bernardo, and a Kirlew Vindication Committee defended Kirlew with pen, time, and money, but his social peers generally shunned him after the first trial, causing him to move from Manchester. Within the legal system itself, presumptions of innocence based on his class and character coexisted incongruously with an unstated presumption of guilt that began with the presence of thirty magistrates on the bench at the first trial and ended with the curiously ambiguous verdict of the 1898 jury, which convicted Yeo but found Kirlew “injudicious.” After the final trial, there was nothing to prevent Kirlew from resuming his activities involving boys. The dichotomous reaction suggests tensions between two ways of thinking, each with emotive bases: the power of socially constructed character in a class context versus a new view of society’s responsibility for all children that extended the emotional power of the family to society at large.

Children were coming to be seen as a special category of victims in cases of neglect and abuse, especially by parents, guardians, and caregivers. The state and private welfare organizations increasingly acted as advisors, supervisors, and replacements for parents who they believed could not care for their children. In a reversal of the judgments philanthropists made about who was deserving of care, society began to judge whether philanthropists were worthy of their self-appointed responsibilities, opening the door to a wider role for the state. The legal system reflected this perceptual change through legislation and trials, while the press reinforced it with publicity, as exemplified by W. T. Stead’s “maiden tribute” campaign and by the spectacles of the Wilde and Cleveland Street trials. The sensationalism of the New Journalism brought the allegations to the court of public opinion in sensational form. The crowds who bought the papers and filled the courtroom reflected their own anxieties about status, evangelical philanthropy, protection of children, and sexuality. Kirlew’s innocence or guilt could not resolve these anxieties, only aggravate them. The ordeal of Gilbert Kirlew brings these elements together in a single incident that illuminates the roots of our current concerns in the Victorian past.