a story about a real nineteenth-century reader and his fraught engagement with the novel you are holding, Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme. On January 10, 1875, a young man named Henry Blake Fuller was enduring a dismal stint as a clerk in Ovington’s crockery store in Chicago. He had turned eighteen years old the day before, and he confided moodily to his diary (to which he gave the grandiloquent title “A Legacy to Posterity”) that he felt he would always look back upon himself at eighteen “as a boy in bad health, & who wished to be somewhere else. In short as a discontented young person. Unfortunate!” Fuller felt acutely conscious, he told his diary, of his many personal inadequacies, which he tallied in self-deriding terms reflecting the standard novelistic clichés of the time: “Harry Fuller at eighteen would never serve as a romantic hero. No olive complexion, no hair in graceful curves and black as the raven’s wing; no commanding figure, no fascinating presence, no woman’s tenderness with a man’s courage.—but why torment myself by prolonging the list of my own deficiencies. Yes, I may set myself down as quite an ordinary person.” Then suddenly the diarist’s attention turned from morose self-examination, rendered in familiar novelistic terms, to a novel he had just read—this very novel. “Read Cecil Dreeme yesterday. A peculiar book. Not a profound observation. A book that interests me greatly.”1 (There is a truly uncanny echo here of the novel’s narrator, Robert Byng, who explains to Cecil Dreeme his attraction to the alluring villain Densdeth: “He interests me greatly” [124].) Versions of many of the romantic clichés with which he had just berated himself would, in fact, have been ready to hand in the florid “Biographical Sketch of the Author” by George W. Curtis that prefaces Cecil Dreeme (included here as an integral part of this “peculiar” book). Fuller would have read there of Winthrop’s “keen gray eye” and “clustering fair hair” (1), would have learned that Winthrop’s “sensitive seriousness grew sometimes morbid” (4) and that he was afflicted with “an ill-health that colored all his life” (4); that he had “a flower-like delicacy of temperament” characterized by “the curious, critical introspection which marks every sensitive and refined nature” (6), but that his “womanly grace of temperament merely enhanced the unusual manliness of his character and impression” (6). Fuller would have found, in other words, someone whose “ill-health” matched his own “bad health,” but who was somehow a paragon of the “romantic hero” he felt he was not. He would have found a model for his own morbid self-castigation, but perhaps also an image of something less “ordinary” that he might aspire toward.
Many questions arise here. The teenaged Fuller was certainly a great reader: the diary in question is full of references to novelists and novels, poets and poetry, as well as histories and other literary genres. Wilkie Collins (July 12, 1874), Charles Dickens—he reported reading David Copperfield and Dombey and Son (July 14), Nicholas Nickleby (Aug. 23), and Bleak House (Nov. 22)—Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris and Schiller’s Maid of Orleans (July 17), Longfellow’s “Wayside Inn” (July 20), Johnson’s Rasselas (Aug. 30), Bulwer’s The Last Days of Pompeii (Sept. 27), Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Jan. 28, 1875), Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake (Nov. 25), and Macaulay’s Essays (Dec. 25)—Fuller mentioned all of these and more. About many of them he had substantive critical observations to make, as a future novelist very well might. Some of them he read patiently over an extended period of time, and returned to for rereading and reconsideration. But about Cecil Dreeme, which he evidently read in one day—on his eighteenth birthday, no less, and in a state of deep discontent—he could not muster anything that would satisfy him as “a profound observation.” Something about Cecil Dreeme left him nonplussed, but at the same time intrigued. “A peculiar book,” he wrote. “A book that interests me greatly.”
How did Cecil Dreeme come to Fuller’s attention? What did he find “peculiar” about it, and why did it interest him so “greatly”? Did someone who had responded to its peculiarity—and who thought its peculiarity would interest Fuller—recommend it to him? We probably cannot know. Fuller went on to become a noted writer himself, and many decades later he would write one of the earliest unmistakably queer American novels, Bertram Cope’s Year (1919).2 The fact of this later literary performance, and the knowledge that Fuller was also an avid lover of men, perhaps licenses us to infer that the great and baffled interest that his teenaged self took in the “peculiar book” Cecil Dreeme must have had something to do with its (and his) incipient queerness.
The single word Fuller used to describe the novel, the mere epithet peculiar, is a curious one, having served over the years prior to the invention of homosexual identity as one of the many vague euphemisms that could evoke what was not yet, in 1875, as firmly conceived, securely denoted, or publicly recognized as it would soon come to be: a style of sexual personhood that had not yet coalesced into a defined social identity, did not yet have a label, had not yet become a description under which people could act and could understand themselves and others to exist. Cecil Dreeme’s narrator, Robert Byng, tellingly refers at one point to the “peculiar power” that the dangerously magnetic Densdeth exerted over him, and at another place to the “too peculiar a tenderness” he himself felt for his beloved Cecil Dreeme (194, 281, emphasis added). A decade earlier Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrator, Miles Coverdale, teased his friend Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance (1852) by reading to him some suggestive passages from the writings of Charles Fourier, and explaining to him (“as modestly as I could”) the radical sexual arrangements that Fourier advocated. Coverdale then provocatively asked Hollingsworth whether he thought they could introduce these “beautiful pecularities” into their own communal practice.3 At roughly the same time as Winthrop published Cecil Dreeme another adventurous novelist, Margaret J. M. Sweat, had the eponymous protagonist of Ethel’s Love-Life (1859) describe to her fiancé Ernest the “peculiar relationship” she had with a woman named Leonora: “Women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men,” Ethel patiently explained, and although Leonora has been banished from Ethel’s life their “subtle essences mingled and assimilated too thoroughly ever to be entirely disunited.”4
Fuller in 1875 may not yet have had any sense of a firm sexually categorical possibility for himself or for a character in a novel. But he was certainly aware of the bent of his own desires, and of his unsuitedness for the role of romantic hero if it would entail an erotic interest in women. Naturally, then, he would have taken a great interest in a novel that, among many other things that might have appealed to him, featured a passionate friendship apparently between two men, described unabashedly (and repeatedly) as “more precious than the love of women” (139), “a love passing the love of women” (163). But that passionate friendship, forthrightly depicted in 1861 by Theodore Winthrop as something that did not entail categorization as “homosexual,” would have been at least somewhat more likely by 1875, when Fuller read the novel, to have had such an implication. But then again, it would not yet certainly have had this implication: many readers and reviewers at the time did not detect any such suggestion. Same-sex romantic friendship was then in the midst of a long late nineteenth-century transition from a perfectly normal and even celebrated form of personal attachment to a suspect and eventually deviant form of desire.5 What we have, in the encounter between Henry Blake Fuller and Cecil Dreeme, then, is a neat vignette exhibiting a book written and published before what is often called the “invention” of the homosexual (indeed, the invention of the heterosexual too) and an act of reading coming in an uncertain, slightly later moment when that incomplete invention may or may not have been clearly known to this particular young reader.6 The book’s transitional status, and the liminal quality of this scene of reading, both contribute to what Fuller called “peculiar” about Cecil Dreeme. What he called “peculiar” corresponds to what we might today call queer.
Queer is a term in use today to suggest a broad range of erotic tastes, inclinations, attachments, and desires that do not fall neatly into the binary categories the dominant culture still frequently deploys for the sake of distinguishing between the normal (heterosexual) and the abnormal (homosexual). It seems fair, then, to describe Cecil Dreeme as a queer novel, since it doesn’t entirely observe or respect that binary distinction (and