Fight for sexual freedom in the naughty 1890s

Against the backdrop of the Oscar Wilde trial, two men defend ‘Greek love’ in a debut novel of rare skill and promise

THE NEW LIFE by Tom Crewe 384pp, Chatto & Windus, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

“The sex instinct might be a great engine for happiness. If only it could be liberated from shame,” laments a central character in Tom Crewe’s meticulously crafted first novel, set in the 1890s: a “naughty” decade that saw not only Yellow Book decadence and the unnerving exposure of Oscar Wilde but also the loosening of Victorian corsetry restricting the conduct of monogamous marriage. Another 10 years or so and a reformist culture embracing Bloomsbury enlightenment, suffragettes, vegetarians, socialists, and the polemics of DH Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw would be openly blossoming.

But Crewe’s story focuses on the cautious pioneers of this “new life”, at a moment when the concept of sexuality was developing through the writings of left-field German psychologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebbing and Magnus Hirschfeld. From their perspective, deviations from the hetero-norm could be seen for the first time not as a sin or a crime so much as a pathology occurring on a spectrum of “natural” human behaviours. This idea was slow to catch on in Britain, but it affected both the writer John Addington Symonds and the psychologist Havelock Ellis, whose biographies Crewe fictionalises in the novel with great skill and sensitivity.

Crewe’s John Addington is a middle-aged married father of three and devotee of Walt Whitman’s rhapsodically homoerotic poetry who has slid into occasional illicit homosexual encounters. As the story opens, he falls in love with an unabashed working-class fellow he spots swimming naked in the Serpentine. With the partial complicity of his grumpy wife, he takes the lad into the family home as his secretary and the couple discreetly form a loving and stable relationship. Addington, meanwhile, is in correspondence with the doctor Ellis, who has an unconsummated but companionable marriage with the freethinking Edith – who is herself pursuing a rocky lesbian affair with the alarmingly caustic Angelica Britell. Ellis’s secret “peculiarity” is not attraction to his own sex, but arousal at the sight or sound of a woman urinating. No snickering at the back, please.

Through an encoded correspondence replete with euphemistic references to Greek love, Addington and Ellis agree to collaborate on a book through which they hope public opinion will become more sympathetic to what would now be called queerness and even lead to a repeal of the draconian law against homosexual activity. In the aftermath of the hysteria surrounding Oscar Wilde’s prosecution, this becomes an extremely dangerous endeavour, but Addington in particular is passionately convinced that the risk must be taken, noting that nothing can advance unless people are prepared to defend their desires in open debate.

“Progress will not encompass this,” he insists. “Not unless we try to force it on.” What happens after the book is published, as Addington becomes more militant and Ellis more circumspect, provides the novel’s climax with a modest degree of dramatic tension.

Crewe trained academically as a historian: this becomes evident in his flawless rendering of period dialogue and detail, as well as his command of the relevant intellectual hinterland. Late Victorian London is painted in atmospheric pea-soup hues and scrupulous pains have clearly been taken to avoid the sort of incidental anachronism that wouldn’t have bothered Hilary Mantel had she been exploring the same territory.

Historical figures such as the “advanced” bookseller George Bedborough and “Uranian” proselytiser Edward Carpenter and his partner George Merrill make appropriate appearances. I tried catching Crewe out on his use of the word “bloke”, to no avail – the Oxford English Dictionary records it as current from the 1860s.

Perhaps he lacks the born novelist’s imaginative daring: there is no ambiguity or moral chiaroscuro here – the central figures are all upfront in deadly earnest and the plotting has a schematic clunk-click quality. There’s also a total absence of humour, let alone the sharp, camp wit and fantasy that was such a vital defensive weapon for marginalised homosexuals fighting the long war towards social acceptance. But with its powerful themes and lovingly polished prose, informed by rich authorial intelligence, this is a fictional debut of rare quality and promise.

j Decadence in bloom: Oscar Wilde as a student at Oxford in the 1870s