ERO Presents Special: Fanny, Stella and Fred Spalding

London, April 1870: Fanny and Stella were no ordinary Victorian women. They were young men who liked to dress as women.

Stella was the most beautiful female impersonator of her day. Men fell at her feet. Fanny was her ‘sterner-featured’ inseparable companion.

Fanny and Stella (Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton) were sisters in spirit. By night and by day they did everything together and went everywhere together. To the theatre, to the music halls; to the Boat Race, to Bond Street and to the Burlington Arcade; to parks and pleasure gardens; to balls and cheap dances.

Up and down, and down and up, they promenaded and paraded themselves on the streets of London, sometimes in drag, and sometimes out of drag (and sometimes half-in and half-out, which confused and confounded everybody and meant that no-one could be quite sure whether they were men dressed as women or women dressed as men). They scoured the streets looking for men, for love or for money, sometimes finding neither, and sometimes finding both.

But the Metropolitan Police were secretly plotting their downfall. Fanny and Stella were arrested in drag and subjected to a sensational state trial in which every lascivious detail of their lives was lapped up by the public.

With a cast of peers and politicians, detectives and drag queens, the story of Fanny and Stella is as extraordinary as it is enthralling.