Seventy-three prisoners were condemned to death at the Old Bailey in 1835 at a time when there were more than 200 capital offences on the statute book. Nevertheless, all had their sentences commuted apart from two: James Pratt and John Smith, who were convicted of ‘the detestable and abominable crime’ of sodomy.

The indictment stated that the accused had been ‘seduced by the instigation of the devil’

‘The love that dare not speak its name’ may forever be associated with Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde, but the same reticence was clearly evident in the first half of the century. When in 1828 Sir Robert Peel introduced the Offences Against the Person Bill, which included a clause to facilitate convictions for sodomy, he refused to speak the phrase ‘the crime against Christians not to be named’ in English, choosing to couch it in Latin.

Between 1806 and 1835, 404 men were sentenced to death for sodomy in England, of whom 56 were hanged and many more transported. In his meticulously researched James and John, the politician and historian Chris Bryant explores the proceedings against Pratt and Smith, as well as the social attitudes and legal code in what he dubs ‘an era of spectacularly cruel and bloodthirsty prejudice’.

Pratt and Smith came from working-class backgrounds in Staffordshire and Worcestershire respectively. Like many such people at the time they moved to London in the mid-1830s in search of employment, while presumably enjoying the freedom of the metropolis, for which Bryant provides a detailed sexual topography. Class had a substantial bearing on their fate. Only recently had the MPs Charles Baring Wall and William Bankes been arraigned on similar charges – the former for attempting to seduce a police constable, the latter for being caught with a soldier whose braces ‘were undone in the front’ in a lavatory near Westminster Abbey. Both had been acquitted after calling on influential character witnesses (Wall’s included the Dean of Salisbury and the Earl of Darnley, and Bankes’s the Duke of Wellington). Pratt and Smith had no such supporters, nor the sympathetic jury of their peers.

Their humble roots also pose problems for their biographer. Apart from the court record (deemed so offensive it was published as an appendix to the official Proceedings of the Old Bailey), neither man left any direct testimony. Although Pratt confessed shortly before his execution that ‘his crime is abhorrent and his punishment just’, it may well have been a journalistic fabrication. Bryant has therefore relied on bald entries in parish, census and employment records. Such archival detection work is particularly exacting when one of the subjects happens to be called John Smith, of whom at least 67 were baptised in Worcestershire between 1793and 1801.

Within these constraints, Bryant does an excellent job of tracking down the two men and their confederate, William Bonell, in whose lodgings Pratt and Smith met and who was subsequently transported to serve 14 years in Van Diemen’s Land. Pratt has left the deeper historical footprint, having worked as a groom and footman, notably for the chaplain of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich. He also married Elizabeth Moreland, with whom he had two children, and who supported her disgraced husband to the foot of the gallows. Smith, who seems to have been a common labourer, has left scarcely a trace apart from his trial.

That trial is the centrepiece of the book and Bryant describes it in painful detail. The indictment stated that the accused had forgotten ‘the order of nature and had been seduced by the instigation of the devil’. The men, cowed by the panoply of the law, offered no defence except to enter a plea of innocence. The prosecution made much of the salacious testimony of Bonell’s landlord and the arresting policeman. The jury took a few seconds to convict the men. After two months in Newgate, where they were held in isolation lest ‘their presence would disgrace and contaminate the others’, they were hanged.

At times, Bryant compensates for the dearth of evidence about his subjects by resorting to lengthy descriptions of the employers, clergymen, statesmen and jurists who crossed their path – all part of the ‘bloodthirsty English justice system’ of the time. He also reminds us that although social attitudes have changed beyond recognition in Britain since the 1830s, homosexuality still carries the death penalty in nine countries in the world.