Edward Ward's The Mollies Club

In his 1709 publication The History of the London Clubs, investigative journalist Edward Ward exposes to his readers a scandalous new cultural group that he labels “mollies.” These men, as he describes in the piece “The Mollies’ Club,” comport themselves as women, and commit numerous sodomitical acts with each other. In this revelatory article, Ward frames the mollies as a cultural group that is othered from his audience, one so degenerate that it raises questions of sliding social virtues, contributing to the moral panic that would help to sell his writing. In order to emphasize the otherness and unnaturalness of the mollies and their behavior, Ward utilizes multiple references and comparisons to nature, animals, and the natural order in a rhyming poem that concludes the article. …show more content…
He relates the men to toads, writing “a toad and they/Were born the very self same way” (134). Readers of his time would most likely be aware of the use of the toad and frog in Christian symbolism as an “unclean spirit” and a sign of plague, making the association between the mollies and the symbolic impurity and maliciousness of toads. Ward also creates a metaphor comparing the sodomites to swine. He relates how pigs are “nurs’d up in filth” and “wallow belly deep in muck”, then claims that the mollies are “fifty times worse swine than they” (134). With these comparisons, Ward cements the mollies position as one of the most unclean and unnatural animals in nature, not close to the same category as the people who were reading his