Jerome K. Jerome, The Chameleon, and the Victorian fear of male desire

In late 1894, the short-lived undergraduate magazine The Chameleon published a series of pieces exploring same-sex love. Most famously, it included Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem containing the line “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Writing as an editor of To-Day in December 1894, Jerome K. Jerome publicly condemned the magazine and its sentiments as “nothing more nor less than an advocacy for indulgence in the cravings of the unnatural disease.”

Jerome was, of course, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). But beneath the humour was a very Victorian fear of what might corrupt the young.

“That young men are here and there cursed with these unnatural cravings,” he wrote, “no one acquainted with our public school life can deny.” Such young men, he argued, must “wrestle with the devil within them”, often through a “long and agonised struggle” fought “unseen and unknown” in their hearts. A publication such as The Chameleon, falling into their hands before “the victory is complete”, might, unless the reader were “of an exceptionally strong nature”, “utterly ruin him for all eternity.”

It is a remarkable glimpse into the moral climate of Victorian Britain — written only months before Oscar Wilde’s arrest and the sensational trials of 1895.

Indeed, Jerome’s condemnation of The Chameleon was later invoked by the defence during Wilde’s trials.

And yet there is an interesting twist.

When the Wilde trials became the great scandal of London, To-Day did not join in the sensationalist frenzy. Later, the magazine turned its criticism on the blatant hypocrisy of London’s theatre managers, who hurriedly erased Wilde’s name from their marquees while continuing to profit from plays that were still running.

Victorian morality, it seems, had its limits. And so did its hypocrisy.