The Petticoat Men
Freddie Park and Ernest Boulton are theatre folk, so Mattie Stacey thinks nothing of it when the two gentlemen sometimes leave her family’s lodging house in elegant women’s dresses and wigs. That is, until Freddie and Ernest are arrested for “conspiring to incite others to carry out an abominable offence.” The newspapers seize on it as the Scandal of the Century, and the moral middle class of Victorian London, who refuse to acknowledge that homosexuality exists, are confronted with shocking headlines about these Gentlemen in Female Attire. Mattie doesn’t care what they get up to in their frocks; she knows them as good lodgers and kind friends. But, despite her best efforts, she and her family are pulled into the lurid trial.
This is the story of the sensational and real trial that gripped 1870s London and drew in bishops, lords, and a prince before its end. But Barbara Ewing’s novel goes beyond the court proceedings. Like a stone in a lake, the arrest of the “Petticoat Men” sent out ripples, into both the upper echelons of Victorian society and the lower strata. The Petticoat Men is told from three points of view: Mattie, her mother Isabella, and a dispassionate, very Victorian omniscient narrator. Between the three of them, they tell the story effortlessly, with the right amount of tabloid breathlessness, while still staying near enough to the characters most affected by the scandal. An excellently written and interesting novel.
