Archaeologists use the term “preservation bias” to describe the incompleteness of the archaeological record. Many elements, including burial practices, environmental factors, and human influence, can confound representative samples. For example, fragile materials such as textiles will be preserved far less frequently than pottery. This does not mean that people in the past were often nude, but rather that clothing is simply less often preserved in the ground. The concept of preservation bias can—and should—be applied to historical and archival research.
Our understanding of the past is limited by the historical records that have been preserved. It is easy to assume that if a record does not exist, an experience did not happen. However, it is important to consider the provenance of archival materials: whose words are kept, and whose are discarded? Sometimes, even more importantly, how did the records we do have access to become part of the collections they belong to? In a webinar hosted by Rare Book School, Jonathan Kearns explained that often, the material he works with as an antiquarian and rare book dealer “could conceivably be, and most likely in many cases is, the only evidence beyond a very dry parish record . . . that these people, this person, ever existed”.[1] Historians often only have access to these “dry parish records”, because they exist in institutional collections. Book dealers, like archaeologists, are frequently the reason that these artefacts of human life are preserved and find homes in accessible repositories.
This preservation bias is particularly poignant with regard to records relating to gender and sexuality.[2] As the historian, Noan Sienna, has observed, this is, in part, because “words like “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” as well as the concepts that they describe, have a very recent vintage”.[3] While queer people have always existed, records relating to their experiences are potentially obscured by the illegality of homosexual relationships or simply a lack of gay marriage within a church register. Yet documents relating to private life are sometimes able to illuminate personal attitudes toward queerness. The perfect example lies in the 1810 diary of Matthew Tomlinson, a farmer from near Wakefield, West Yorkshire. His entry for 14 January that year states,
“It appears a paradox to me, how men, who are men, shou'd possess such a passion; and more particularly so, if it is their nature from childhood (as I am informed it is)—If they feel such an inclination, and propensity, at that certain time of life when youth genders [i.e. develops] into manhood; it must then be considered as natural, otherwise, as a defect in nature . . . it seems cruel to punish that defect with death.” [4]
Prior to this entry’s discovery in 2020, it would have been much easier to view Georgian working-class attitudes toward homosexuality as monolithically intolerant. Tomlinson stands as a testament to the diversity of human thought and experience.
Yet preservation is not the only factor that influences our understanding of the past. No human being is impartial. We are all influenced by our modern understanding of the world and view everything we come across through the lens of our own experiences.[5] As Noam Sienna explains,
“To label anyone in the past who had sex with (or expressed erotic desires for) someone of the same sex as homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, queer, or any other modern label, or similarly to use transgender or genderqueer to speak of people who lived (or wished to live) in a gender different than their birth assignment, is not only anachronistic; it actually prevents us from seeing precisely how people in this different place and time thought about sexuality and gender.”[6]
While it might be tempting to use modern terminology to place the past into categories we understand, we must resist that impulse. If we do not, we risk missing the nuances of past lived experiences.
Queer history is often considered a “hidden” history. This is, in part, due to the biases inherent in library and archival catalogues.[7] While the information and records exist, they are often incredibly difficult to access. A person named Sarah Dulley provides the perfect example.
Sarah was born in 1760 and died in 1836 at Bethlem Royal Hospital. Sarah was sent by friends and admitted to Bethlem on 15 November 1800, as a “case of a woman who imagines herself to be a man”.[8] He was given a leave of absence for six months, and when he did not return, he was discharged from the hospital. On 29 October 1808, his friends sent him to be readmitted to the hospital as an “incurable”.
Sarah’s admission record.[9] Sarah’s lived experience at Bethlem is known only through the records kept by hospital staff. From Sarah’s case notes, we know what medication he was given, that he suffered from rheumatism, and that his disposition was “irritable”.[10] The records also indicate that he tended to bow rather than curtsy, and in 1817, it was noted how he seemed "to be uncertain whether she was a man or a woman".[11] Sarah’s Bethlem records do not state his date of birth, but his entry into the death register in 1836 lists his age as 76. We can therefore reverse engineer his birthdate to be in 1760. We know woefully little about Sarah, but we do know that he was never “cured”. Sarah seems to have never considered himself a woman in the 28 years that he spent at Bethlem after being admitted as incurable.
Sarah’s case file.[12]Are Sarah’s case notes a piece of trans history? Very possibly. It is, however, the bias of a modern lens that impacts our point of view. While Sarah’s case can certainly inspire a feeling of kinship from a queer reader, we should nonetheless avoid defining Sarah by modern standards—Sarah’s experiences are not necessarily analogous to the contemporary queer individual, and to assume that they are would be reductive of the vast differences between our times. According to Sienna, the
“historical phenomenon of people who were raised as women but who live partly or completely as men presents numerous interpretive complexities. In some cases, it seems clear that these individuals understood themselves to be men in every way; in other cases, it seems that their intention was to pursue marriage or partnership with women; and in yet other cases, their life as a man opened new professional, economic, and social opportunities.”[13]
We cannot confine Sarah to any one category based on his Bethlem records, but we can remember him and welcome his memory into our shared queer history.
Source 51 in Sienna’s A Rainbow Thread provides us with another important case study: the story of Esther Brandeau, a Jewish person who attempted to emigrate to Quebec under the name Jacques La Fargue.[14] In 1738, Jacques/Esther was outed as both a woman and a Jewish person living in the French colony. During this period, the government permitted only Catholics to settle in Quebec, and the discovery of Jacques’/Esther’s birth sex and Jewishness resulted in an investigation by a superintendent in the colony. Their story is known only through a report of the minutes of this interrogation. Based on the minutes, Jacques/Esther seems to have lived as a man for five years. They were asked why they had “concealed [their] sex during five years” but avoided answering the question, stating only that they sought “the same liberty as the Christians”. In the end, they refused to convert to Christianity, which seems to have been the more significant issue than “concealed sex”. They were sent back to France from Quebec and disappeared from the historical record.
We do not know if Jacques/Esther continued to live as a man when they arrived in France. We can extrapolate, however, that their sex and/or gender may have been a topic they did not want to talk about with the authorities. While they perhaps had practical reasons for living as a man and did not see themself as being one, their story nonetheless illustrates that people far less famous than the Chevalier d'Éon expressed sex/gender expansiveness to some degree.
Sarah’s record in the “Incurable Patient Admission Registers”, which shows his date of death on 17 July, 1836.[15]While we should not place historical people like Sarah and Jacques/Esther within our modern definitions, we can certainly take comfort in the knowledge of their existence and others like them—and like us. These glimpses into the past reveal that while the language and frameworks to describe queerness may have changed, the presence of people who lived outside of societal norms has remained constant. No matter how either person would have described themselves then or now in the modern day, these narratives affirm that sex/gender expansiveness is not new, fleeting, or isolated. By welcoming these narratives into our queer lens of history, we enrich our understanding of the queer past, the queer present, and the queer future.
If you enjoyed this article and want to explore the primary sources that it spotlights, please check out British Online Archives’ collection, Records from Bethlem Royal Hospital, 1559–1932.
[1] J. Kearns, “Archival Conversations: Ethics of Selling & Acquisitions”, webinar presented by The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage at Rare Book School, Nov 4, 2024.
[2] For further reading on why this is the case see The National Archives (UK), "Fifty Years of UK Pride Marches: Pride and Defiance before 1972", The National Archives Blog (2022), available at https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/fifty-years-of-uk-pride-marches-pride-and-defiance-before-1972/.
[3] Noam Sienna, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (Philadelphia: Print-O-Craft Press, 2019), 12.
[4] “Yorkshire Farmer Argues Homosexuality Is Natural in 1810 Diary Discovery”, University of Oxford, Feb 10, 2020, available at https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-02-10-yorkshire-farmer-argues-homosexuality-natural-1810-diary-discovery.
[5] For further reading on this phenomenon in anthropology, see Paola Tiné, "Art as a Research Method: on the Expression of Anthropological Insights”, O Ideário Patrimonial 9 (2017): 150–160.
[6] Sienna, A Rainbow Thread, 13.
[7] K. R. Roberto, ed., Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2008).
[8] British Online Archives, Records from Bethlem Royal Hospital 1559–1932, “CB-005: Patient Casebooks, 1778–1819”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/20511/cb-005-patient-casebooks-1778-1819?h=CB-005-469#?xywh=-716%2C0%2C4054%2C3850&cv=466, image 467. At the risk of seemingly undermining the point of falsely applying modern terminology to the past, this article henceforth will refer to Dulley via the pronouns he/him, except within quotes from others. This is an attempt to honour his identity, posthumously, in a way that Dulley was not fully granted during life. That said, I do not presume to know how Dulley actually identified. Additionally, at the time of writing, the author has not found documentation providing an alternate or preferred name.
[9] Ibid.
[10] British Online Archives, Records from Bethlem Royal Hospital 1559–1932, “CB-004: Female Patient Casebooks, 1793–1816", available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/20333/cb-004-female-patient-casebooks-1793-1816#?xywh=153%2C96%2C4670%2C2307&cv=71, images 72 and 73.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Sienna, A Rainbow Thread, 123.
[14] Throughout A Rainbow Thread, Sienna opts to use the pronouns they/them throughout the story, presumably for neutrality. She also chooses to use both "Esther" and "Jacques" since it is not known what preferences the individual may have had. Sienna's choice is mirrored here.
[15] British Online Archives, Records from Bethlem Royal Hospital 1559–1932, “ARB-01: Incurable Patient Admission Registers, 1723–1853”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/20317/arb-01-incurable-patient-admission-registers-1723-1853?h=sarah&cv=4#?#%23h=sarah&xywh=-563%2C0%2C3500%2C3324&cv=170&h=dullys, image 171.