Historicizing Age, Sex, and Agency

As a historian of childhood who enjoys grappling with questions about evidence, epistemology, and ethics, I devoured Unspeakable when it first came out. Writing about the history of sex between children and adults in our current moment — a time when, as Joseph J. Fischel notes, the preferred mode of sexuality is “adult consensuality” — is a difficult task, and Rachel Hope Cleves takes it on unflinchingly. She has produced a challenging and rewarding book that offers much to scholars working on sexuality, literary celebrity, and British expat life between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Her work should also be required reading for historians interested in age, agency, and the lived experience of young people. While on one level, Unspeakable is an account of the adult life and preoccupations of the once-well-known British novelist and pederast Norman Douglas, it is also — perhaps unsurprisingly for a study of a man who claimed to have had sex with well over 1,000 young male and female virgins — a book about children. The first child the reader encounters is Douglas himself, born into British expatriate privilege in Austria in 1868. Insisting that his boyhood experiences “determined the life of the man,” Cleves writes that in mid-life, Douglas told friends that “his interest in sex [had begun] when he was six years old,” while hinting “that his earliest sexual encounters [had been] with his sister.” While hating “the conformity and bullying” he experienced as a schoolboy, the young Douglas also enjoyed learning about natural history and was an active participant in the peer sexual cultures that were common across late nineteenth-century English public schools. As the book moves forward through time (after Douglas the child has grown up), the reader encounters dozens of other young people whose lives intersected with his. Some of these interactions were clearly unwelcome and/or traumatic, as evidenced, for example, by the words of sixteen-year-old Edward Riggall, twelve-year-old Duncan Knight, and ten-year old Esmond Knight, who testified against Douglas following his arrests for indecent assault in London in 1916 and 1917. The unhappy children discussed in Unspeakable also include Douglas’s sons Archie and Robin, born in the early twentieth century during his brief marriage to Elsa Fitzgibbon. While Douglas was granted custody of the boys after his divorce, he was by all accounts a neglectful father who possibly molested one of them. While clearly preferring to spend time (and have sex) with other young people, Douglas occasionally turned to his sons when he needed them: after his second London arrest, for example, the teenage Archie helped his father pack so that he could jump bail and flee to France and Italy. The hints of incest and allegations of sexual assault contained in the pages of this book are difficult to read. Differently challenging are Cleves’s accounts of the numerous other young people who chose to accept Douglas’s advances. Their stories jar with the understanding — near-universal since the 1980s — that children are defined by their inability to consent and that sexuality marks a clear and ideally inviolable boundary between childhood and adulthood. The fact that a number of youngsters (and in some cases their parents) did not object to the prospect and reality of sex with Douglas highlights the still-understudied ways in which the history of modern childhood, poverty, family, and work is also often the history of sex. In some cases, and in accordance with local custom, Douglas established contracts with young people’s adult relatives, which formalized the exchange of money and gifts for youthful sex and companionship. Cleves’s uncovering of this history echoes a point …