CECIL DREEME
Q19: THE QUEER AMERICAN NINETEENTH CENTURY
Christopher Looby, Series Editor
Queer is a good nineteenth-century American word, appearing almost everywhere in the literature of the time. And, as often as not, the nineteenth-century use of the word seems to anticipate the sexually specific meanings it would later accrue. Sometimes queer could mean simply odd or strange or droll. But at other times it carried within itself a hint of its semantic future, as when Artemus Ward, ostensibly visiting a settlement of “Free Lovers” in Ohio, calls them “some queer people,” or when the narrator of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Felipa” refers to the eponymous child, who wears masculine clothing, as “a queer little thing,” or when Herman Melville, writing of the master-at-arms Claggart in Billy Budd, tells us that young Billy, sensitive to Claggart’s attentively yearning yet malicious behavior toward him, “thought the master-at-arms acted in a manner rather queer at times.” Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century makes available again a set of literary texts from the long American nineteenth century in which the queer appears in all its complex range of meanings. From George Lippard’s The Midnight Queen: “‘Strange!’ cried one. ‘Odd!’ another. ‘Queer!’ a third.”
CECIL DREEME
Theodore Winthrop
Edited and with an introduction by Christopher Looby
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Publication of this volume was aided by gifts from the UCLA Friends of English and the UCLA Dean of Humanities.
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8122-2365-1
CONTENTS
Introduction: Cecil Dreeme and the Misfortune of Sexuality Christopher Looby
Biographical Sketch of the Author George William Curtis
IV. The Palace and Its Neighbors
XVII. A Morning with Cecil Dreeme
