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at the Hay Festival, she has admitted the necessity for corrections, pointed out that this is exactly the stuff that scholarship is made of, and even joked that the current run will be collectors’ items as soon as the corrected edition arrives. A single error on page 71 did not, after all, invalidate the entire book.

I tried to bear this in mind as I slogged through Outrages, a book that is nothing if not ambitious, and – at a moment when freedom of speech and gay rights are at issue across the world – timely. Having made her name in 1990 with the feminist classic The Beauty Myth, Wolf has had a long career as a smart and righteous campaigner, tackling big topics head-on across her eight, often controversial, books. Outrages comes with the special imprimatur of being based on Wolf ’s midlife doctorate in English literature, taken at Oxford in 2016 – something that you might expect to bring a new edge of academic respectability to her social critiques.

Outrages’s focus is literary. At the centre of Wolf ’s thesis about the deadening affect of legal strictures on gay men in 19thcentury England is the slightly obscure figure of John

Addington Symonds: poet and biographer, as well as a privately pioneering historian – and defender – of homosexuality. Joining him is a cast that includes Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, through whom Wolf charts the ways in which she believes Victorian society grew increasingly intolerant of male-on-male affection.

Queer history is valuable, valiant stuff, and the kind of turf on which Wolf should be most at home, and where she has the visibility to reach a wide audience. Which is why I wanted, despite the notorious error, to find things to like here. But there is very little to like, and so much wrong, sloppy, or simply inelegant, that by the end of it I felt like Sweet’s correction was almost the least of its problems.

Part of the blame lies with Virago, which has managed to print a text apparently neither fact-checked nor proofread. In addition to the “Death Recorded” howler, minor slips abound: none of cholera, tuberculosis or typhus are spread by “mosquito bites”; chloral is not an “opiate”; and I am unable to find the savage review that The Times “originally published on April 8, 1865” of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, which only appeared in 1866.

My personal favourite is the malapropism that: “It was socially normative in the 1850s for a man to sleep every night in the same bed with another man”. Normal, perhaps, but normative implies a society in which no man could sleep alone for fear of what the neighbours might think. For typos, meanwhile, Milton’s Areopagitica literally flies to the defence of free speech as “the Aeropagitica”.

Copy-editors and proofreaders sleeping on the job is one thing; major errors, conflations and confusions are another. It is hard to imagine many queer historians relishing the moments in which Wolf fails to distinguish between homosexuality and paedophilia, or abuse of power between teachers and students – something worth doing with a figure like Symonds, who was both gay and much taken by the ancient Greek idea of paiderastia. It is a shame because Symonds is an interesting, important figure, and one whose historical recovery is, doubtless, a good cause. Unfortunately, a bad book in a good cause is still a bad book.

These aren’t just typos – they are major errors, conflations and confusions

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