Wilde and the law

From Reading to Rio: Oscar Wilde in Brazil

“…21 What distinguishes Wilde, then, is the public consciousness surrounding the trials and, as Cocks highlights, Wilde's testimony in his own defense. 22 Similarly, Joseph Bristow insists:…”

“…See Hirsch's discussion of Brazilian prisons in The Rise of the Penitentiary. Green notes that the Imperial Penal Code passed in 1830, eight years after Brazilian independence, eliminated references to sodomy and was influenced by Jeremy Bentham, the French penal code of 1791, the Neapolitan Code of 1819, and the Napoleonic Code of 1810 decriminalizing sexual relations between consenting adults (Green,Beyond Carnival,22). 41.…”

“…44. Green,Beyond Carnival,22. 45. I have retained the spellings from nineteenth-century Portuguese for the journal titles and quotations as well as for names (Elysio instead of Elísio) and works like A Ballada do Enforcado (normally Balada).…”

The blackmailer and the sodomite: Oscar Wilde on trial

“…Yet he also observes that there was a ‘[n]ew penalizing of homosexual men’ within the ‘wider pattern’ of legislation, such as the full scope of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which sought to prevent men’s sexual exploitation of women and young girls (Sinfield, 1994: 14). As Harry Cocks has commented, there are attendant problems in defining Wilde as an epitome of a distinctive type of modern homosexual that came to attention through the Labouchère Amendment to the 1885 law: ‘The advent of gross indecency was not a legal or conceptual revolution; neither did it supplant the older offences of sodomy and indecent assault’ (Cocks, 2013: 300; cf. Cocks, 2003: 1–154).…”

“…Lockwood sought to obviate the point that Clarke had repeatedly made about the double standard involved in using testimony from confessed extortionists as corroborative evidence in a case where even the identities of several persons engaging in indecent acts remained wholly unknown. Cocks has shrewdly observed that Lockwood went out of his way to argue that the evidence that the prosecution presented before the jury ‘was not a rule of law, but merely one of practice, and could therefore be safely overlooked by the judge’ (Cocks, 2013: 303). The only moment Mr Justice Wills expressed some doubts occurred when he acknowledged, as Hyde observes, there was ‘the rule of evidence which prevents a witness from telling what he or she has heard from someone else’ ([1962] 1973: 266).…”