Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld - Hardcover

Aronson, Theo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 156619993X ISBN 13: 9781566199933

Publisher: Barnes & Noble, 1995

Synopsis

Book by Aronson, Theo

About this title

About the Author:

Working from original sources (including the files of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Esher Papers), Theo Aronson has written the first full account of the strange life of Prince Eddy, setting it in perspective against a vivid backcloth of the astonishingly active homosexual underworld during the last decades of Queen Victoria's reign. He explores Prince Eddy's upbringing, his university and military careers, his curious personality, his alleged "secret marriage", his links with the Jack the Ripper murders, his early death and, above all, the central mystery of his life - his sexual orientation. For it was this that linked the young Prince's name to the Cleveland Street Scandal.

From Booklist:

Prince Albert Victor--known within the British royal family as "Eddy"--was Queen Victoria's grandson and second heir after her son. Eddy's death at age 28 in 1892 eliminated him--perhaps fortunately, given his character--from the line of succession. The legend sprang up, and has been debated and reasserted and challenged ever since, that Prince Eddy was the famous serial killer who was never apprehended and whose name lives on in infamy, Jack the Ripper. Veteran biographer of royal lives, Aronson dismisses the notion as "absurd." However, he sets his balanced look at the reckless, self-indulgent, even dissipated life of Eddy within the context of the homosexual world of Victorian England, with which, avers Aronson, the prince was probably familiar. The author creates a decidedly unsensational picture of life for male homosexuals at the time; simultaneously, he draws a cradle-to-grave portrait of Prince Eddy as a lazy, unclever, and unfocused fellow who, though not a murderer of prostitutes in London's East End, "almost certainly" was a denizen of the surprisingly energetic homosexual underworld. As fascinating as Aronson finds Prince Eddy, this book is equally so. Brad Hooper

About this edition

• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 156619993X
• ISBN 13: 9781566199933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 246