A Brief Acquaintance
Early in 1897, a twenty-two-year-old British student named Harold W. Curtis (1875–1952) was on holiday in Sorrento, Italy. There he made the acquaintance of Henry Blake Fuller (1857–1929), the noted Chicago novelist, playwright, essayist, satirist, and travel writer, who was also on vacation. The acquaintance was a brief one, but memorable enough for Curtis to initiate a correspondence with Fuller in a series of at least five letters, beginning October 17, 1897, and continuing to March 1, 1898.[1]
When they first met, Curtis was travelling abroad before heading to Toronto to take up the study of the pipe organ at the Toronto Conservatory of Music (now the Royal Conservatory of Music), with the aim of becoming a professional organist. His route to Toronto was peripatetic, to say the least. He left Sorrento by way of Gibraltar and New York, travelled to Canada, where he spent one month in Manitoba visiting his brother, and then went to Calgary, District of Alberta, Northwest Territories.[2] Curtis had intended to study law there, but found it “so uncongenial to me & so irksome that after 4 months there I came here, & this time I hope I have struck the right line.”[3] Curtis planned to stay in Toronto for two or three years and, if he was a success at the organ, go to Germany or Italy to continue his studies.[4]
Toronto in 1897 was the leading Canadian business hub, after Montreal, a city of churches overwhelmingly Protestant and known as “Toronto the Good” for its religiosity. Its population was almost 200,000, decidedly white, and Anglophilic.[5] Although there was no organized queer community, there was a noticeable clandestine presence of homosexuality, as mentioned in C.S. Clark’s Of Toronto the Good. A Social Study. The Queen City of Canada as It Is (1898).[6] Clark declared, “If saintly Canadians run away with the idea that there are no sinners of Oscar Wilde’s type in Canada, my regard for truth impels me to undeceive them.”[7] He then detailed examples of bell boys at large hotels who were available for homosexual assignations for pay, and some of whom engaged in blackmail.[8]
For his part, Fuller had been in Sorrento on one of the many European trips that he took over his lifetime. He had just published a short play, At Saint Judas’s (1896), which is credited as the first American play to deal explicitly with homosexuality.[9] Of course, discussion of homosexuality was in the air at the time, only one year after the disgrace and fall of Oscar Wilde, the Irish writer convicted of “gross indecency.” Fuller likely needed a break and was abroad from December 1896 to June 1897, when he visited Algeria, Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy. Bernard R. Bowron, Jr., has described this trip as “a rather melancholy pilgrimage.”[10] Fuller had turned forty and was despondent as he feared the advance of middle age. In Bowron’s words, “he felt that the door had closed, inevitably and forever, on the freshness of perception that he identified with youth.”[11]
Not much is known of Fuller’s private life. His journals reveal that as a teenager he was infatuated with some dormitory roommates at Allison Classical Academy (1873–74), and that when Fuller was thirty-four, he fell in love with a fifteen-year-old boy. In 1923, at the age of sixty-six, Fuller had an affair with a college student, William Shepherd, and they travelled to Europe together.[12]
It is not clear from Curtis’s letters how long he and Fuller had visited together in Sorrento or what the exact nature of their relationship was. In any case, they were both homosexual men. Perhaps there was some attraction between them or they were just new friends. The first letter from Curtis, dated October 17, 1897, was mailed to Fuller by way of his publisher in New York. In it Curtis was polite and a bit formal: “My dear Mr Fuller, I don’t know whether you have forgotten me but anyhow I have not forgotten you so I hope you will not mind my writing & as I cannot renew the acquaintance personally, please allow me to do it by letter.”[13] Curtis wrote that he hoped that Fuller would reply as “I should much like to renew an acquaintanceship which though short was very pleasant indeed.”[14] He signed off in a P.S. that he intended to read all of Fuller’s books.
Curtis received a reply from Fuller on October 23, 1897, and wrote back the same day.[15] Now that he was writing to Fuller directly, he was less guarded. A bit of a complainer, Curtis groused about “that wretched spot called Calgary” and confirmed that he was “not cut out for frontier life” but hoped, in time, to become “a thorough cosmopolite.”[16] Curtis was more cheerful and hopeful since coming to Toronto but was troubled by the drudgery of studying the organ, “which of course is very tedious.”[17]
It is in the second letter that Curtis opened up about his sexual frustrations, yet in a subtle way:
“I expect in some respects you would find me changed already, but not in one particular. I have tried my hardest to get the upper hand but I think now that it is impossible. The worst of it is that, though delightful in other ways, this town seems quite hopeless in that respect. It is bad that it is so, as I feel the necessity very often, & have no means of gratifying it, & see no chance of any. That must be bad for me, as try as I will the thought is with me nearly always. Canadians are quite hopeless.”[18]
Curtis then apologized for making such personal comments about himself, and yet stated, “but I think you take an interest in me & it is so nice to have a confidant.”[19] Note that Curtis’s discussion of sexual matters is rather more elliptical than blatant throughout the letters.
The rest of letter two was a disjointed combination of news, gossip, and reminiscences. Referencing Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Curtis remarked that he had seen in the paper the other day that “O.W. & Lord A.D. are at Naples again. Shocking!!!”[20] He talked of the tedium of his Harmony lectures at school, and that he was “the only male in the room besides the lecturer & about 20 girls of all sorts & sizes.” He then clarified, “Though I have no use for the opposite sex I’m not afraid of it.”[21] He also made cryptic comments about a young man he had met in Calgary:
“I met one nice young Englishman at Calgary who had been buried there for 7 years. He had just been home for the first time & only returned 2 or 3 weeks before I left so we did not see much of each other. He takes his fate very philosophically. I wish I could.”[22]
The “fate” the two men shared presumably related to their homosexuality and society’s response to it. Curtis asked that Fuller write again soon and suggested that they might exchange photographs.
Fuller did reply promptly, with a letter and photograph, which Curtis received November 2, 1897, and to which he replied the same day. Curtis said that some of his best friends had been older men and that this was perhaps because he himself felt “very much older than I am, which feeling has only developed since I left England.”[23] He then alluded to Fuller’s letter: “I agree with you that it was a pity we were not better acquainted when we met in Italy, but I think that was my fault as I was very much in love with a certain person there & rather exhausted my faculties. Perhaps we may meet again sooner than we expect & then we shall know each other better.”[24] This suggested that Curtis and Fuller did not have a sexual relationship in Sorrento but that there might be hope, at least on Curtis’s part, for one in the future.
Curtis wrote of his progress as an organist, and also about having made the acquaintance of an Englishman; they met two or three times but Curtis concluded that he was “not at all my style.”[25] He thanked Fuller for his “hint re commercial travellers” and speculated that there would be no difficulty with them “if they are as knowing as the average Guardsman in England.”[26] Curtis closed with “Best love from yours ever. Harold W. Curtis.”[27]
Curtis’s fourth letter to Fuller was dated November 24, 1897, and was brief, only three pages. He had received a letter from Fuller that day and responded, but was ill and could not write much. He gave thanks for a photograph that Fuller had sent and joked, “The photo was very nice & of course I only looked at it from an artistic point of view. I don’t know what others might do though.”[28]
The fifth and final letter from Curtis, dated March 1, 1898, was mysterious. He had received a reply to his last letter to Fuller but it took a long time to arrive, as Fuller had gone south during the winter. He had planned on visiting Jamaica but went to South Carolina and Washington, D.C., instead. Curtis was envious of the trip and hoped to visit the United States himself. But in the parts of the letter in which Curtis made “personal” and suggestive remarks, Fuller attempted to obscure them by writing over them in pen and modifying the original wording. For example, in one passage Curtis remarked on Fuller’s trip to Washington and wrote that he hoped “someday I shall be able to sample the delights there.”[29] The words “sample the delights” were obscured.
The rest of the letter was typical of Curtis, filled with reports of his pastimes, school, and travel, but there are at least seventeen other instances in the five-page letter of textual overwriting and obscuring of words, only a few of which I have been able to decipher. Curtis complained, for example, “I find Toronto the most hopeless place as far as my tastes in that direction are concerned & have almost given up in despair.” The words “tastes in” were obscured. In another passage Curtis wrote of a “rather nice fellow” with these words obscured, and the end of the sentence was overwritten and cannot be deciphered. Similarly, he wrote about an upcoming visit to Montreal with his brother, but several words were also overwritten and cannot be read.[30]
Why were such passages obscured in this letter and not the earlier ones? Fuller was on holiday when he received it and perhaps he was not alone. Fuller may have obscured passages that he did not want anyone else to see. If he was so concerned about the content, why did he keep the altered letter rather than destroy it?[31] In any case, this was the final letter from Curtis to Fuller that has survived, and we do not know if they were in contact again.
Thank you to the staff of the Newberry Library, Chicago, the University of Toronto Archives and Records Management (UTARMS), and the Robarts Library, University of Toronto, for their assistance. Thanks also to Marian Press and Hans Soetaert for research help.
[1] Much of this story was outlined by Kenneth Scambray in A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987). New information is presented here and helps to enhance our knowledge of Curtis.
[2] Harold W. Curtis to Henry Blake Fuller, 17 October 1897, 2, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Letters Incoming, Box 4, Folder 111, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[3] Curtis to Fuller, 17 October 1897, 2, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[4] Curtis to Fuller, 17 October 1897, 3, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago. Student records from the Toronto Conservatory of Music confirm that Curtis was a student there for twelve terms, beginning October 4, 1897, and ending November 9, 1899. See Sarah Paiva, University of Toronto Archives and Records Management (UTARMS), e-mail to Donald McLeod, June 20, 2025.
[5] An excellent contemporary overview of the achievements and preoccupations of 1890s Toronto is seen in Conyngham Crawford Taylor, Toronto “Called Back", from 1897 to 1847: Its Wonderful Growth and Progress (Toronto: William Briggs, 1897).
[6] C.S. Clark, Of Toronto the Good. A Social Study. The Queen City of Canada as It Is (Montreal: Toronto Publishing Company, 1898; reprinted by COLES—The Book People, Toronto, 1970).
[7] C.S. Clark, Of Toronto the Good, 90. The Irish author and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was ruined in 1895 when he was convicted in London of gross indecency for homosexual acts and sentenced to two years’ hard labor. See Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde: The First Uncensored Transcript of the Trial of Oscar Wilde vs. John Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry, 1895 (New York: Fourth Estate, 2003).
[8] C.S. Clark, Of Toronto the Good, 90. Steven Maynard explores male-male sexual relations in Toronto during this period and slightly later in ‘“Horrible Temptations’: Sex, Men, and Working-class Male Youth in Urban Ontario, 1890–1935,” Canadian Historical Review, 78, no. 2 (June 1997): 191–235, and “Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890–1930,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5, no. 2 (October 1994): 207-42.
[9] Years later, his self-published novel Bertram Cope’s Year (1919) was one of the first American fictional depictions of a homosexual theme.
[10] Bernard R. Bowron, Jr., Henry B. Fuller of Chicago: The Ordeal of a Genteel Realist in Ungenteel America. Contributions in American Studies Number 11 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974), 175.
[11] Bowron, Jr., Henry B. Fuller of Chicago, 175.
[12] Kenneth Scambray, A Varied Harvest, 156–57; Nathan Titman, “Working the Dunes: Queer Tourism and Henry Blake Fuller’s Gentlemanly Mobility,” Gender & History, 31, no. 1 (March 2019): 132.
[13] Curtis to Fuller, 17 October 1897, 1, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[14] Curtis to Fuller, 17 October 1897, 3, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[15] Unfortunately, copies of Fuller’s letters to Curtis are not in the Fuller papers, and the originals have likely been lost.
[16] Curtis to Fuller, 23 October 1897, 2-3, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[17] Curtis to Fuller, 23 October 1897, 2-3, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[18] Curtis to Fuller, 23 October 1897, 3, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[19] Curtis to Fuller, 23 October 1897, 4, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[20] Curtis to Fuller, 23 October 1897, 6, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago. The details of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas’s time together in Naples were well examined by Richard Ellmann in Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), especially 517–23.
[21] Curtis to Fuller, 23 October 1897, 6, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[22] Curtis to Fuller, 23 October 1897, 7, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[23] Curtis to Fuller, 2 November 1897, 2, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[24] Curtis to Fuller, 2 November 1897, 2-3, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[25] Curtis to Fuller, 2 November 1897, 4, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[26] Curtis to Fuller, 2 November 1897, 5-6, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[27] Curtis to Fuller, 2 November 1897, 7, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[28] Curtis to Fuller, 24 November 1897, 1-2, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[29] Curtis to Fuller, 1 March 1898, 1, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago. The words “sample the delights” have been overwritten with additional letters. I was able to decipher the original text by looking at the manuscript letter on a light table and also by taking a digital photograph of the passage and blowing it up.
[30] Curtis to Fuller, 1 March 1898, 2-4, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
[31] The altered letters were discussed in Kenneth Scambray, A Varied Harvest, 107.