The Chronicles Of Peculiar Desires In The Briti... [FREE]

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.

Consider the case of Sir Reginald Flinders-Haig (1834–1901), a lesser-known botanist in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Flinders-Haig did not simply collect orchids; he obsessed over pseudocopulatory orchids—flowers that evolved to resemble female insects to lure male pollinators. He wrote sixteen volumes (unpublished, mercifully) on the “vaginal mimicry of the Ophrys speculum .” His peculiar desire was not for women or men, but for the botanical replication of intimacy. When the Royal Horticultural Society banned his paper “On the Labial Turgidity of Endemic Epiphytes,” he reportedly wept into a specimen jar for three hours. The Chronicles of Peculiar Desires in the Briti...

Lawrence’s well-documented masochism (he paid men to beat him) was not a sideshow but the central engine of his heroism. For British public school men of his generation, raised on floggings and hymns, pain was the only legitimate conduit for intense feeling. Lawrence’s peculiar desire was to be broken by the desert, by the Turks, by his own body—because only in fragments could he feel whole. The protagonist finds freedom not in Cambridge but

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 colonel’s peculiar desire was not for the

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.