19th Century: Gender
Victorian gender roles were fairly strictly marked. Women had few political rights and there were rigid expectations of how they were to behave. But there is a surprising amount of evidence from Cumbria that gender roles could be subverted and that there was a level of toleration when they were.
Sal Madge
Perhaps the best known example of gender non-conformity in Cumbria is the Whitehaven mine-worker and local celebrity Sal Madge. Born into poverty as Sarah Madgin in the Penrith workhouse around 1831, Sal spent most of her life in Whitehaven. She began working at the local coal mines when she was 9, going on to drive wagons on the surface in adulthood. Female mine workers were common in Cumbria and often worked down the pits before the law changed in 1842. Sal would remain at the mines, despite a serious accident in 1890 and the ravages of age, until her death in 1899 at the age of 68.
Sal was locally famous for her long service in the mines and for her dress and habits. A local newspaper described her unconventional appearance and manners:
Sal early developed a most masculine deportment, and by her eccentricity of dress soon became quite a local celebrity. She wore her hair cut short and parted down the side, a cloth peaked cap, waistcoat, jacket, “rationals,” scarf and shirt, and was possessed of a manly voice and gait. — Carlisle Journal, 14 April 18991
She also smoked a short ‘cutty’ pipe, played cards and “preferred the society of pitmen to that of her own sex.”
In her younger days, Sal was respected for her sporting achievements, taking part in wrestling and football games with the miners. At the Whitehaven Colliery Sports in 1883, the audience raised 16 shillings to reward her for her wrestling prowess, as her sex prevented her from winning the official prizes.
Although often blunt in her speech, she was said to be kind to friends and especially to animals. She would nurse her work horses if they ailed and she had a beloved dog called Flirt (left, with Sal), which won her wagers with its diving abilities. She was popular and well respected — a favourite among her employees and colleagues — hard working and tenacious in her final battle with bronchitis. Her death was reported, more or less kindly, in newspapers across the country. Many local people attended her simple funeral in April 1899, where a single cross of daffodils was laid on her coffin.
Sal’s story seems to show a Victorian Cumbria where gender non-conformity could be tolerated, perhaps even celebrated. It is difficult to know whether the newspaper reports’ curiosity and occasional trace of derision at her dress and habits was also felt amongst those who knew her or belonged solely to the journalists who reported on her life and death. Local articles during her lifetime make no real reference to her appearance and those reporting her death are largely respectful or affectionate, although words like “strange” and “peculiar” are used occasionally. When her story appeared in the national Woman’s Life magazine in 1897 her ‘peculiar garb’ and ‘strange career’ were mentioned but the article is primarily focussed on her character and achievements. The wide reporting of her death across the country has more of a judgmental air, focussing on her ‘masculinity’, often heading the snippet with the title ‘Masculine Woman’, although some describe her more favourably as a pioneer of Rational Dress.
After her death, Sal remained in local memory. In the years after her death, postcards of her were sold with other ‘local views’ and a racing whippet was named for her honour in the 1920s. In 1993 the Friends of Whitehaven Museum resurrected her memory and placed a headstone on her previously unmarked grave, which was replaced after being vandalised in 2012. A local pub (now Joe Bananas) on Duke St was also named after her for a time, showing the ongoing affection for Sal in the town.
Press Opinions
Tolerance was not universal in Whitehaven: in 1863 a young woman was arrested in Chapel St for venturing out in men’s clothes as part of a drunken caper, having been reported to police by a friend. In Carlisle, John Bell was arrested in Rickergate in 1888 for accosting men for money while wearing women’s clothes. These cases were reported without much moral judgment. Even the famous 1870 Boulton and Park case in London doesn’t seem to have aroused much beyond curiosity in local papers.
Alonzo Johnson, who was convicted of sodomy in Newcastle in 1844 (see 19th Century: Persecution) was arrested in Kendal the previous year for stealing clothes from the house of Thomas and Elizabeth Simpson: a black silk cloak and linen apron (right). We might assume that the motivation for this crime was money, but Alonzo was apparently seen around Newcastle dressed in female attire in the weeks before his arrest there. Was his Kendal burglary an attempt to get hold of women’s clothes to wear? If so, it was not commented on in the press.
A similar incident later in the century seems to have aroused much more suspicion.2 According to the Carlisle Patriot, on 31 May 1890, “what appeared to be a tall and somewhat fashionably attired lady,” arrived from the south at Carlisle station and immediately aroused the interest of a station worker because their “demeanour was of so masculine a character.” The worker informed Chief Constable Mackay, who ordered the “mysterious visitor” to be followed. Walking along English Street, they first visited a jewellers, where they had their ears pierced and bought gold earrings to wear, then went to a drapers to buy a jacket and hat. Then they stopped at the County Hotel before getting back onto a train to Edinburgh. There, it seems, the woman bought a tweed suit and hat from an outfitters in Leith, which they left the shop wearing, having changed in front of the startled shopkeeper, leaving behind the clothes bought in Carlisle and their wig and bonnet from London. The Leith newspapers noted that the visitor was “believed to be an eccentric individual, if not of unsound mind.”3
Eliza Lynn Linton & Christopher Kirkland
The Keswick-born writer Eliza Lynn Linton was a contradictory woman. A trailblazing journalist, said to be the first woman to be paid a salary in that profession, but in later life also a notable critic of the growing feminist movement and a firm believer in the traditional roles and virtues of men and women. She complained that “the lines of demarcation between the sexes” were “becoming blurred and obliterated in the present moral attitude of women,” although she herself lived largely independently.4 Her marriage to W.J. Linton (at that time owner of Brantwood overlooking Coniston Water) ended in separation within a decade and she retained her maiden name, Lynn, throughout her life.
Eliza was a prolific writer, publishing many novels, short stories and articles throughout her 50 year career, but it is her 1885 novel, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, that is the most intriguing. It is essentially her own life story, with Eliza’s place taken by the male character of the title. With this device, she found it necessary to transform her real-life husband, William, into Esther Lambert, although other elements of their life together remain unchanged. The question is, did she also transform the sex of the other love interests in the book? Or was Christopher created to allow Eliza to explore genuine experiences of same-sex attraction in her work?
While Christopher’s marriage to Esther is largely one of duty towards her fatherless children, his affections for the other women are more passionate, although their love is always thwarted for one reason or another. His “head swam” and he was “faint and giddy” when near to Adeline Dalrymple. He poured out “a whole torrent of love and thanks and violent delight” to Althea Cartwright. And with Cordelia Gilchrist he “fell in love with her in that intense way which is almost like possession.”5
We cannot know the truth of Eliza’s real-life relationships and even at the time her friends were “burning with curiosity to know where fiction ended and reality began.” Eliza herself described Adeline and Althea as “partly true, partly evolved,” while most of the other characters were “real persons.”6
Another of Eliza’s novels, Rebel of the Family (1880), includes suggestive scenes between the rebellious protagonist Perdita and the leader of a women’s rights group, Mrs Blount. “I can give you all you want — work, love, freedom and an object. I want nothing in return but your love,” Blount tells Perdita, and later “put her arms round the girl’s slender, loose and stayless waist,” before kissing her and claiming her “as one of us!”.
The Autobiography reveals another insight into gender in this period. When Christopher first visits the home of Esther and her first husband, Joshua, he is confronted by the sight of their six children playing in the unkempt gardens, “all dressed exactly alike,” except in the smallest of details, and all with long hair. “It was difficult to distinguish the sex in this queer epicene costume,” Christopher recalls, but “one forgave the unfitness of things for the sake of their beauty.”7 It was said that, in reality, “the little Lintons used to suffer much from the ridicule of the children of the neighbourhood, who used to hoot after them and ask whether they were boys or girls.”8
Herbert Charles Pollitt & Diane de Rougy
Herbert Charles ‘Jerome’ Pollitt was from a respectable Kendal family, the son of the Westmorland Gazette‘s then owner, who grew up in one of the stately townhouses of Thorny Hills, overlooking the River Kent. During his time at Cambridge University in the 1890s, he became renowned as a drag artist, performing seductive but campy scarf dances in the alter ego of Diane de Rougy (right), modelled on the famous French courtesan Liane de Pougy and American dancer Loie Fuller.
Both in and out of drag, Herbert made an impression at Cambridge and beyond. He became the inspiration for the title character in E.F. Benson’s novel The Babe, B.A. (1897), whose
particular forte was for dinner parties for six, skirt dancing and acting, and the performances of the duties of half-back at Rugby football … With a wig of fair hair, hardly any rouge, and an ingenue dress, he was the image of Vesta Collins, and that graceful young lady might have practised before him, as before a mirror.9
He was friends with the artists Aubrey Beardsley and James McNeil Whistler, whose works he collected, and he wrote to Oscar Wilde in exile in France, sending him (sometimes risqué) photographs.
In 1897 Herbert, now living back in Kendal in a house called The Green Window, briefly returned to Cambridge to reprise his role as Diane, where he met and befriended budding spiritualist Aleister Crowley, who was captivated by his beauty. Crowley admitted that “I lived with Pollitt as his wife for some six months and he made a poet out of me.”10 But on a trip to Wasdale Head the following spring the two men realised they had little in common and were growing further apart. Crowley called it off soon after. He later wrote “It has been my lifelong regret, for a nobler and purer comradeship never existed on this earth.”11
Music Hall Impersonators
The British have long accepted cross-dressers as a form of entertainment, and Cumbrians were no exception. Our modern tradition of pantomimes, with principal boys and pantomime dames, developed as a popular form of entertainment during the 19th century, but it was in the music halls that male and female impersonators thrived.
Music halls developed in London in the 1850s and gradually spread to the provinces, showing variety shows in a more relaxed atmosphere than ordinary theatres. Dedicated music halls like the Alexandra (later Star and Tivoli) and Alhambra (later the Royalty Theatre) were built in Barrow in the 1860s and 1870s. But in many of the larger towns existing theatres took on variety acts, which included music, dancing, acrobatics, comedy, male and female impersonators and various curiosities.
The opening night of the Star Music Hall in 1872 included, beside the male impersonator Kate Clifton, “the only and real Man Fish, Champion Tank Performer”, “Wonderous Willie, the Boy Frog,” a world-renowned imitator of bird and beasts, serio and character comics, an operatic vocalist, a pair of dramatic actors and an act uncomfortably titled “Screaming Negro Entertainment.” Tickets for this evening of entertainment cost between 3d and 1s 6d, meaning almost anyone could afford to visit.
Kate Clifton was just one of many male impersonators who visited the music halls and theatres of Cumbria from the 1870s to the 1910s. Other early examples include Madame Barton, Bertie Stokes and Nellie Rosamund, who toured the towns of West Cumbria in 1882. Most were relatively unknown but major stars of the genre like Hetty King, Ella Shields and the premier impersonator Vesta Tilley came to Carlisle, Barrow, Millom and Ambleside in the 20th century. Vesta even kicked off a Barrow football game in 1913. She was so popular by that point that she inspired a flurry of mini-mes who could be seen in Cumbria: Tiny Wilmot described as ‘Vesta Tilley in a Nutshell’, Wee Kitty Masters and Little Maudie Vera, both called ‘The Pocket Vesta Tilley’, Exie Wright ‘A Perfect Miniature Vesta Tilley’ and Phyllis May ‘the juvenile Vesta Tilley’. Pauline Travis (right) was particularly popular in the county during WWI.
Female impersonators also formed part of the variety shows, but they were never as common or as popular in Cumbria as their male counterparts. Acts like Saphrini, La Petit Bene, Leoni, Percy Maye and The Great Nevo graced the stages of Barrow in the Victorian era, while Clarence Hallett made appearances in Workington, Keswick and Bowness.
The First World War was the swan song of the music halls and of the impersonators. While men on the front were dressing in drag to entertain the troops, male impersonators at home moved from drumming up support at the start of the war towards a sort of wistful escapism by the end. Vesta Tilley’s 1915 tour, which included theatres in Carlisle, Ambleside and Barrow, also included a visit to the wounded soldiers in the Cambridge Street military hospital (Barrow).
In the aftermath of war the music halls limped on, but there were notably fewer bookings for impersonators. The main exception was a tour by the ‘Splinters’ company, who had started out entertaining troops behind the lines in Flanders, which took in Kendal, Ulverston, Dalton, Ambleside and Millom in 1925. Some of the audience must have seen the group perform in Poperinge, Bethune and Arras where local battalions has been stationed during the war. A film by the same group, featuring a chorus of leggy dancers and Reg Stone as a glamorous chanteuse, was the first ‘talkie’ to play at Penrith’s Alhambra Cinema in 1930. But by the end of the 1930s the variety scene and impersonators had lost out to cinema, radio and dance halls.
Notes
- Rationals (from the Rational Dress movement) were a sort of trouser or split skirt that allowed women greater movement and comfort. They were associated in the 1880s-90s with the New Woman and were met with a degree of gender hysteria by the Victorians. Photographs of Sal Madge tend to show her wearing a long woollen skirt, possibly over her rationals. ↩︎
- This incident was brought to light at LGBT+ Language and Archives ↩︎
- Leith Burghs Pilot, 7 June 1890, 5. ↩︎
- Lynn Linton, E. (1886). ‘The Future Supremacy of Women’ in The National Review, Vol VIII, London, 3. ↩︎
- Lynn Linton, E. (1885). The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, London (i) Vol 1, 181; (ii) Vol 2, 130; (iii) Vol 2, 217. ↩︎
- Layard, G.S. (1901) Mrs Lynn Linton: Her Life, Letters and Opinions, London, 246-7. ↩︎
- Lynn Linton (1885) Vol 3, 37. ↩︎
- Layard (1901), 94. ↩︎
- Benson, E.F. (1897), The Babe, B.A.: Being the uneventful history of a young gentleman at Cambridge University, London & New York, 30. ↩︎
- From the unpublished personal edition of Crowley’s Confessions (see below) ↩︎
- Crowley, A., J. Symonds and K. Grant (eds) (1989), The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: an autohagiography, London, 149. ↩︎