It's Always More Complicated

The Forgotten Square of Bloomsbury: Tragedy and oddity in Regent Square:

The western end of St George’s Gardens leads out to Wakefield Street, which runs back up to Regent Square. Here, you’ll find one of London’s more unusual plaque dedications: “Stella and Fanny”, as the plaque attests, were noted cross-dressers at a time when such pursuits were considered suspicious or even "an offence against public morals and common decency". In 1870 the pair were arrested and charged with the “abominable crime of buggery”, on only the most circumstantial of evidence. They were subjected to humiliating physical examination without consent, and traduced throughout the press. They were later acquitted. The case was a landmark in British LGBT history and deserves an article in its own right. If you want to find out more, the National Archives has published an excellent account of the case and other documentation relating to their lives.

The Reverend James Mahomed, Chaplain to the London Hospital:

Reverend James Dean Kerriman Mahomed was Chaplain of the London Hospital from 1890 to 1898. James was the grandson of Sake Dean Mahomed (1759-1851), also known as Shekh Din Muhammôd, who was the first Indian to write a book in English and who had opened England’s first Indian takeaway restaurant and first ‘shampooing vapour masseur bath’, where clientele included George IV and William IV. Dean Mahomed converted from converted from Islam to Protestant Christianity in 1786, around the time of his marriage to Jane Daly, an Irish Protestant, and his seven children with Jane were brought up as Christians. His grandson James DK Mahomed was born in 1853 in Brighton, near to the fencing, gymnastics, boxing and callisthenics academy in Hove, run by his father Frederick, son of Dean Mahomed. Several of Frederick's children went on to notable careers: James’ brother, Frederick Henry Horatio Akbar Mahomed , became a doctor, studying at Guy’s Hospital, London, where he did pioneering work on hypertension. After studying at Keble College, James was ordained a minister of the Church of England. His first clerical posts were in the East End, as curate at St Anne's, Limehouse and at St Philip’s, Stepney Way, Whitechapel (now the Whitechapel Library of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, QMUL), before he moved to a post at St Anne’s, Highgate.On 7 January 1890, James' return to the East End was agreed when he was unanimously confirmed as Chaplain to the London Hospital, succeeding against a very strong field of candidates[.]

Eliza Sharples Carlile:

There, Eliza Sharples lectured in the Blackfriars Rotunda (a place ‘long devoted’, wrote the Christian Advocate, ‘to the purposes of radicalism and infidelity’) where she castigated Church and state with equal ferocity. With Carlile still imprisoned, she threw herself into his defence, fired by the twin principles which would animate her life and work: the strident pursuit of knowledge and the unhindered right to free discussion. Organised Christianity, Sharples argued, was a barrier to both, and Carlile a martyr in their name.
From the Rotunda stage Sharples declared herself ‘a free and independent woman.’ In the press, she was branded the ‘Pythoness of the temple.’ That year, Sharples also became editor of The Isis – a weekly paper dedicated ‘to the young women of England for generations to come, or until superstition is extinct’ – through which her ideals were further expounded.
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Though venerating the memory of Carlile (who had been dead for six years), Eliza sought help. ‘Mr C. died’, she wrote, ‘leaving the three children entirely unprovided for’ and so ‘subjected to every degree of wretchedness, often without food.’ Her firm feminism was still in evidence, but she was acutely aware of her own precarious position: ‘Alas! For woman,’ she wrote, ‘hard indeed is her lot to want in her last hour what she has expended her health and her strength in bestowing.’

A women’s history guided tour along London’s Suffragette line - not 100 miles from where I sit....