The Chronicles Of Peculiar Desires In The Briti... May 2026

His contemporary, the poet Wilfred Owen, underwent a similar transformation in the trenches of France. Owen’s desire was not for death but for fellowship in suffering . His poetry transforms mud, gas, and the blood of horses into a strange, grieving eros. What remains of these peculiar desires? We like to think we are more enlightened, more honest. Perhaps. But walk through any British antique fair, and you will see them: the collectors of Victorian taxidermy (mice playing cricket, squirrels drinking tea). Scroll through any niche online forum, and you will find the heirs of Flinders-Haig—people obsessed with the reproductive habits of deep-sea anglerfish, or the manufacturing defects of 1970s British Leyland cars.

The peculiar British desire has not vanished. It has merely mutated. It is the desire for the perfectly curated misery of The Great British Bake Off ’s soggy bottoms. It is the desire for queuing in the rain. It is the desire to say “I’m fine” when drowning. The chronicles of peculiar desires in the British Empire are not merely a register of deviance. They are the secret history of constraint. When a society tells its citizens that they must be upright, rational, and Protestant, those citizens will pour their irrational, weeping, ecstatic hearts into orchids and whips and coded diaries and crocodile wrestling. The Chronicles of Peculiar Desires in the Briti...

It took the form of the intense friendship . The diaries of Anne Lister (1791–1840) of Shibden Hall, written in coded Greek, detail explicit same-sex relationships. But less famous is the case of the Ladies of Llangollen—two upper-class Irish women who eloped in 1778 and lived together for 50 years, dressing in riding habits and being celebrated by Wordsworth and Byron. Their peculiar desire was for a domesticity that looked like marriage but was officially “romantic friendship.” His contemporary, the poet Wilfred Owen, underwent a

E. M. Forster’s Maurice , written in 1913 but published posthumously, hints at this geography of desire. The protagonist finds freedom not in Cambridge but in the greenwood—a pre-industrial, almost pagan Britain. Similarly, many colonial administrators found that distance from the Drawing Room allowed for peculiar arrangements. The diaries of Colonel Arthur Conyngham (1847–1923), discovered in a trunk in Gloucestershire in 2012, detail a thirty-year “domestic partnership” with a Punjabi horse trainer named Zulfiqar. The colonel’s peculiar desire was not for the exoticized “native,” but for a mundane, boring, monogamous love that the Empire’s laws rendered illegal at home but invisible abroad. What remains of these peculiar desires