“O Tom!—You won’t forget Ned, darling”: A throuple, a murder & a very gay, very Victorian scandal
Ned and Tom made a true impact
Mark
Does the name Frederick Wadsworth Loring mean anything to you? Probably not. After his death in 1871, the young man dubbed one of American’s most exciting new writers didn’t have a chance to write a follow-up for his scandalous novel that came out the same year as his murder. This was Two College Friends, the tale of two young boys in love, and the much older professor they both adore.
Because it was written in 1871, it ends in tragedy. But before the tragedy happens, Loring manages to get away with some hot and heavy letter writing between his two lovers, Ned and Tom.
“O Tom! why did I let you come at all?” Ned writes his love after the their dramatic breakup. “You will see your mother, Tom; and you will go home now, and marry, and be happy, and forget me. Oh, no, no, no, Tom! you won’t do that; you can’t do that. You won’t forget Ned, darling; he was something to you; and you were all the world to him.”
How about we take this to the next level?
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Romantic friendships were all over the place in the Victorian era. We know that Melville poured his heart out in letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and poet Walt Whitman had no trouble talking about his love of other men in his sensational poetry collection Leaves of Grass. But few writers were bold enough to make these queer-coded relationships the subject of their fiction. Loring’s tale, set at Harvard before and during the Civil War, didn’t shy away from the erotic bond between the handsome Tom and the dark, brooding Ned.
The two fall in love quickly, with Ned soon understanding how unlikely it is that he “shall ever care for any woman as much as I do for Tom.”
Throughout, only one man knows the true nature of Ned and Tom’s relationship, though plenty of others guess at it. Their professor, an older man who keeps a picture of the two boys on his desk, talks Ned through his spurts of anger and jealousy after Tom gets engaged to a woman, and seems to guide the young men through a world he knows something about. Things even get so serious at one point that Tom thinks of introducing Ned to his parents, but eventually thinks better of it. “I did not wish to have our attachment or my character analyzed or criticized,” Ned says.
When the Civil War breaks out, the two join up, following each other through harrowing, deadly trials while fighting the Confederate south. When Tom is wounded by Confederate officers, Ned rushes to his side to “kiss his hot face” and nurse him back to health with fruit and jellies. But after telling Stonewall Jackson—who just happens to be a character!—how much he loves his friend, Jackson agrees that Tom is beautiful, and allows Ned to carry him to safety…if Ned promises to return. Ned does come back to the enemy camp, and is shot at sunrise.
“It was a “gay” love story from 1871,” wrote one reader in the San Francisco Bay Times. “During the 19th century, Americans believed in intense “romantic friendships” between two people of the same gender, who often expressed their mutual affection with great candor.”
Because these romantic friendships were so common—and co-ed socializing still a relatively new concept—it’s plausible that no one would have batted an eye at the story. After all, hadn’t Loring himself just graduated from Harvard and dedicated his work to his own school friend, William Wigglesworth Chamberlain? What could be more natural!
“Indignation at my dedicating this book to you will be useless, since I am at present three thousand miles out of your reach,” Loring wrote to his friend after leaving for Arizona, on the mission that would end his life. “Moreover, this dedication is not intended as a public monument to our friendship;—I know too much for that. If that were the case we should manage to quarrel even at this distance.”
Some believe that Loring took off for Arizona to mend the heart that Chamberlain broke. Whatever the reason, he met his end while on assignment, after the stagecoach he was riding in fell prey to an attack. Two College Friends had only been published some months earlier, and Loring, at 23, never lived to write another book.
Two College Friends has been mostly lost to time, but its echo can be found in the more prominent works of gay and proto-gay fiction that came after. E.M. Forster’s Maurice, written in 1914 and published posthumously in the 70s, details a similar relationship between a reluctant bisexual Oxonian and his boyfriend, while Henry James’s most explicitly gay work, 1885’s The Bostonians, concerns a female romantic friendship along the same lines.
But was Loring was ostensibly the first. He opened up the college roommates to doomed lovers genre with his shockingly frank novel of jealousy, complex sexuality, and undying love.
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