SOURCE: Corber, Robert J. “Representing the ‘Unspeakable’: William Godwin and the Politics of Homophobia.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (July 1990): 85-101.

In the following essay, Corber examines Godwin's participation in the homophobic atmosphere of the late eighteenth century with his novel's association of effeminacy and homosexuality with aristocratic privilege.

Despite the impact of the new historicism on Romantic studies, the virulently homophobic climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been all but ignored by scholars interested in situating Romantic writers in relation to the political debates of the period. As a number of scholars working in the field of gay history have recently shown, sodomites were subjected to a virtually unprecedented persecution in Georgian England.¹ The number of sodomy convictions rose dramatically, antisodomitical pamphlets warning against an “epidemic” of sodomy proliferated, and the popular press gloated over the appallingly brutal treatment of sodomites...