‘The chain of sympathies’: Comradeship and queer marriage in the life of Charles Robert Ashbee

Abstract This article analyses the theories and life of Arts and Crafts designer Charles Robert Ashbee (1863–1942) as a case study of a queer conceptualization and lived experience of marriage in the late nineteenth century. I focus on Ashbee’s concept of ‘comradeship’, which has been read by critics and biographers as an expression of homosexual desire. Using recent scholarship on queer kinship, I propose a queerer reading of ‘comradeship’ as a diffuse force that is not tied to any one locatable sexual identity, gender, or erotic expression, and argue that Ashbee saw ‘comradeship’ as a queer way of building both relationships and communities. I then analyse Ashbee’s relationship with his wife Janet as a form of ‘comradeship’, and show how both Janet and Ashbee repudiated developing paradigms of homosexuality and instead forged an alternative, queer life together, one that accommodated both same-sex desire and the structures of heterosexual marriage. Critical work on the queer potential of marriage in the Victorian period has focused on the mid-century, arguing that this potential was radically curtailed after the 1880s. However, the Ashbees’ union demands that we consider the way earlier concepts of marriage did not simply vanish, but persisted long past the ‘boundary’ of the 1880s, interacting and overlapping with, and reacting against, newer paradigms. Ashbee’s theories and relationships offer an important case study of the new queer possibilities for those with same-sex desires at the turn of the century, and the ways in which queerness could still be at the heart of marriage, even in the climate of increasingly restrictive conceptions of homosexuality.