Main content

Comrades and Lovers

The Victorian borderland between Platonic and homosexual friendship. Dr Thomas Dixon's history continues. From April 2014.

Dr Thomas Dixon presents a timely history of the changing meaning and experience of friendship over the centuries

Drawing on the intriguingly ambiguous relationship of Frances Power Cobbe with Mary Lloyd and the more open relationship of Edward Carpenter with George Merrill, he explores the Victorian borderland between Platonic friendship and homosexual love.

Professor Barbara Caine discusses Frances Power Cobbe, the largely forgotten Anglo-Irish feminist and journalist, who wrote articles with titles such as, "The Woman Question", "What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids" and "Wife Torture in England". She explains how Cobbe reclaimed friendship for women after centuries of classical and renaissance assumptions that only men had a true capacity for it.

Dr Matt Cook tells the story of Edward Carpenter, whose own unconventional lifestyle and 1908 book, The Intermediate Sex, brought homosexual love out into the open and even introduced the contemporary notion, celebrated in tv series such as Will and Grace, of women enjoying having a "gay best friend".

Producer: Beaty Rubens

First broadcast on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 in April 2014.

Available now

15 minutes

Last on

Fri 4 Oct 2019 02:15

Related Reading

Barbara Caine (ed.), Friendship: A History (Equinox, 2009), Chapter 7, ‘Class, Sex and Friendship: The Long Nineteenth Century’, by Marc Brodie and Barbara Caine


Ìý

Matt Cook, ÌýLondon and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885 - 1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)


Ìý

Matt Cook (ed.), A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men since the Middle Ages (Greenwood, 2007)


Ìý

Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton University Press, 2007)

The History of Emotions blog

Read specially commissioned blog posts supporting this series.


Broadcasts

  • Thu 3 Apr 2014 13:45
  • Thu 7 Apr 2016 14:15
  • Fri 8 Apr 2016 02:15
  • Thu 4 Jan 2018 14:15
  • Fri 5 Jan 2018 02:15
  • Thu 3 Oct 2019 14:15
  • Fri 4 Oct 2019 02:15