Conclusion

When scrutinized from our contemporary perspective, and without the sin of anachronism, it must be interpreted as a different enterprise from the milieu of, for example, Horace Walpole and his all-male correspondents. They too were homoerotic, but their networks anticipate Victorian arrangements of all-male attachment rather than the unique blend of friendship and literary collaboration fostered by the Scriblerians. Collaboration is the key ingredient.

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The Scriblerians were the first organized group in English literature to initiate a form of literary collaboration with clearly homosocial resonances. Later in the eighteenth century, the "Dilettanti" (young connoisseurs taking the Grand Tour who collected "marbles" abroad and retrieved them to England) followed in their footsteps.

The Scriblerian enterprise represents an activity lying somewhere between the purely hedonistic pleasures of the Augustan clubs (the dissipated Beefstakes, Macaronis, and Medmenham Monks) and the formal "colleges of authors" populated by "scheming projectors" of the type Swift ridiculed in Gulliver's Travels.

Throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century, sodomitical characters were both presented and pilloried in literature.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

The last of the Stuart monarchs, Anne, Queen of England, conducted romantic friendships with several women, including Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.

Throughout his life, Horace Walpole was devoted to other men, and his exploration of dysfunctional families in The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother probably stems from his own experience with a destructive father.

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.