Throughout the century, the growth of industrial towns and cities, and the working class which formed their beating heart, only fed fears of increased immorality. The coming together of so many strangers in cramped and often squalid conditions was surely a recipe for vice. By the end of the century, Carlisle (left) was a city of almost 10,000 people and Whitehaven, a significant port, had almost as many, as well as a constant rotation of visiting sailors.

The moralists may have been catastrophising but growing urban spaces did give queer people more opportunity to meet others like them. There may have been nothing as established as the London molly houses in Cumbria, but loose groups of queer people could have existed in the larger centres, even if no evidence of them has survived. The discovery of a sort of gay men’s society in and around Warrington in 1806, which resulted in the arrest of 24 men (of which 5 were executed) shows that such things could exist, even in a town barely bigger than Carlisle.

In 1747, 25-year-old Hannah Snell (below) arrived in Carlisle to carry out military exercised as a soldier in the 6th Regiment of Foot. Some months earlier, having been abandoned by her husband and lost her infant daughter, she had donned the clothes and identity of her brother-in-law, James Gray, and left her home in London for Coventry, where she enlisted.

While in Carlisle, Snell developed an “Intimacy and Friendship” with an unnamed local woman, the nature of which is unclear. It was enough to rouse the jealousy of her sergeant, called Davis, who accused Snell/Gray of neglecting their duties and had them stripped to the waist and flogged outside the gates of the Carlisle Castle. Hannah bore this and Davis’s continued abuse for a time, but eventually deserted the regiment when an old acquaintance arrived and risked revealing her identity. Her female friend was said to have been “loth to lose the Company of such a Friend and Companion.”⁴

Snell went on to join the marines in Portsmouth and was wounded in the siege of Pondicherry in 1748. Her natural sex was only revealed when she returned to England in 1750 and let slip to her shipmates. She was dismissed but later managed to secure a military pension. The response from the public at the time seems to have been one of curiosity and admiration, not disapproval. She enjoyed a brief period of fame and ran a pub called The Female Warrior or The Widow in Masquerade before disappearing into relative obscurity. Nearly 20 years later a priest met her in Norfolk working as a peddlar and wearing men’s clothes. She died in 1792 and was buried at the Royal Chelsea Hospital.

Just weeks before coming to Cumbria, Beckford had met and fallen in love with William ‘Kitty’ Courtenay, only son of the earl of Devon, believed by contemporaries to be the most beautiful boy in England. Kitty was only 11 years old at the time — 8 years younger than Beckford. Three years later, Beckford commissioned the renowned Cumbrian portraitist George Romney to paint the boy. The actual nature of their relationship is unknown during this period, although it may have later become sexual. William and Kitty were both forced into temporary exile after a scandal broke about their relationship broke in 1784.

At around this time, Enlightenment thinkers were beginning to rethink attitudes towards sodomy. Thomas Cannon’s largely lost pamphlet Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d, written in 1749, harks back to the days of ancient Greece to justify the modern practice but also reasons that “Unnatural Desire is a Contradiction in Terms; downright Nonsense. Desire is an amatory Impulse of the inmost human Parts.”⁵

Later in the century, Jeremy Bentham wrote an essay called Offences Against One’s Self: Paederasty which argued that laws against sodomy were based on prejudice and that it should be tolerated since it caused no harm. As the first of these works was destroyed and the second was never published, they had little impact on wider society.

It is hardly surprising that the Romantic art movement — which focussed on individual, emotional and intuitive responses to nature and beauty — became connected with the Lake District and with unconventional sexualities. Two of the most famous of the Lakes Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, are thought by some modern commentators to have had a repressed but complex homoerotic bond, although both men married and are known to have been attracted to other women.

William’s sister Dorothy was known to form unusually intense bonds with others (most notably her brother), but never married, leading some to suspect that she may have been asexual or aromantic.