5 minute read
Rooms with a View
Seeing Victorian-era Boston through Queer Eyes
By Meghan Gelardi Holmes
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As you wind your way up the staircase of the Gibson House Museum, you leave behind the public spaces of this elegant Back Bay townhouse and enter the family’s private quarters. The third floor was formerly the master bedroom suite – two separate bedrooms linked by a shared bathroom, as was common in wealthy 19th-century homes – of Charles Hammond Gibson, Sr. and Rosamond Warren Gibson, from their marriage in 1871 until Charles’ death in 1916.
What used to be Charles Gibson, Sr.’s bedroom is now the Red Study. It’s an apt name. The carpet is crimson; the walls and drapes a rust-red. The room is packed tightly with furniture: armchairs – also red – by the small fireplace, a desk, and several tables. Even a sofa is tucked in. In the years following Charles, Sr.’s death, this room became the domain of Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. Known by his family as “Charlie,” he was the second of Charles’ and Rosamond’s three children, born in 1874. We can learn much about Charlie simply by looking at the objects that fill this brooding, close space: his books on the desk, with several ashtrays nearby; his portable projector on the center table; framed letters from American and British notables, thanking him for his thoughtful words; a memento from the Revolutionary War.
Charlie’s story is both at the heart of the Museum – he was, after all, its first curator – and shrouded in some mystery, as his status as a lifelong bachelor provoked some rumor and conjecture over the years.
If there was one thing Charlie would have wanted us to know about him, it was that he was a writer and poet. In 1906, he published The Spirit of Love and Other Poems, followed closely by The Wounded Eros, a collection of sonnets. Although these are his only published volumes of poetry, he was a prolific writer throughout his life. The Museum’s archives are filled with drafts of poetry, travel lectures, odes to various dignitaries, and even song lyrics.
Charlie’s writing career started in the 1890s when he was a young man. After a year as an architecture student at MIT, he departed for Europe, as was typical of many men of his social class. During his travels – funded through an allowance sent by his parents – he amassed material for a travelogue, Two Gentlemen of Touraine, which he published in 1899. The book and its companion, Among French Inns, were modestly successful.
The specific nature of Charlie’s travels seem to have garnered plenty of attention back home, as they were conducted in the company of a self-styled noble with several decades on Charlie. Letters from contemporaries tell us that the arrangement, which included the two men sharing a bed, scandalized Boston society. Although we don’t have any of Charlie’s own correspondence from that time period, his poetry suggests that he had fallen in love with the Count de Mauny.
When Charlie returned to Boston in 1902, he moved into rented rooms rather than returning home. He did not follow his father into business (Charles, Sr. was a cotton broker), but instead focused his efforts on writing. He also held a handful of volunteer positions, including with the Boston Parks and Recreation Commission. When Charles, Sr. died in 1916, he left more money to his daughters, Mary Ethel and Rosamond, than to Charlie. This was a sore spot for Charlie for the rest of his life. Whether the apparent estrangement between father and son was ultimately due to Charlie’s sexuality or just different personalities and priorities, we cannot know for sure. In fact, it is unlikely that Charlie would have thought about his sexuality as such; the term homosexual was only coined in 1868 and the concept of a fixed definition of gay sexual identity did not gain popularity until well into the 20th century. The life of gay men in Victorian Boston was often lived in the margins.
Despite his fraught family relationships, Charlie was passionate about his family’s history. He wanted everyone to know that he descended from an illustrious family with important ties to Boston history. He was particularly proud of their Revolutionary-era connections. One great-uncle, William Dawes, rode with Paul Revere, and another, Dr. Joseph Warren, was considered the hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Charlie kept mementos of this history with him throughout his life. The Museum’s archives contain a detailed genealogy, prepared by Charlie himself, which traces the Gibson and Hammond families from England through to Charlie’s own generation.
Red Study, Gibson House Museum. Credit: John Woolf. Courtesy of the Gibson House Museum. Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. as a young man. Credit: Unidentified photographer. Courtesy of the Gibson House Museum.
In 1934, at the age of 60, Charlie returned home to 137 Beacon Street to care for his aging mother. She passed away later that year, and Charlie found himself living alone, aside from part-time staff, in his childhood home for the first time in over 20 years.
Boston, including Charlie’s beloved Back Bay, was changing rapidly. More and more of his peers were moving out of the city for the suburbs. Charlie remained the model of stiff Victorian manners and gentility. He still spent summers at the family home in Nahant, tending to his rose gardens. He regularly ate dinner at the Ritz-Carlton, walking over in an old raccoon coat and top hat (as the story goes). If the world around him was changing, Charlie seemed to embody the image of an eccentric, a relic of Boston’s traditional elite.
In 1936, he took a road trip to Florida, and stopped to visit a cousin in Delaware. This cousin, Henry Francis du Pont, was beginning a project to turn his family’s prominent estate into what would later become the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, now the nation’s premier museum of American decorative arts.
When Charlie returned home, he began the work of preserving 137 Beacon Street. He roped off rooms and composed tours of the entertaining spaces, emphasizing the Chinese export porcelains in the Music Room and the family portraits in the Library. We find his looped handwriting on tags around the house, identifying the original owner of a particular dress or the provenance of a noteworthy piece of furniture. He was deeply aware of the legacy he was creating, and in 1957, only three years after his death, his family home opened to the public as the Gibson House Museum.
It was not uncommon in this period to think of preservation as a tool to record one’s family history upon the built environment. Straight women have been leaders in the historic preservation movement since its earliest days, in part because the focus on historic homes seemed a natural extension of the roles and spaces women were traditionally allowed to occupy. Similarly, gay men have played an important role in the movement; historians have posited that this reflects a desire to anchor themselves to their environment and leave a tangible piece of themselves for future generations. Charlie was part of this rich tradition of women and gay men who preserved many of the historic homes in the United States today. As Charlie himself remarked to his lawyer, “I would like to make a prophecy that by the year 2000 a Victorian museum would be a very unique, a very important, institution.”
Meghan Gelardi Holmes is a public historian, writer, and museum specialist. She is Curator at the Gibson House in Boston’s Back Bay, where she cares for and interprets the Museum’s rich collection of Victorian-era artifacts, documents, and photographs. Previously, she was Assistant Curator at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, where she fell in love with cabinets of curiosity and the life of objects. Holmes received a master’s degree in Public History from UMASS-Amherst in 2006.
