Remembering Walter Sholto Douglas (1790-1830)
- Room to Be
- Feb 20
- 2 min read
LGBT+ HISTORY MONTH: Walter Sholto Douglas was born Mary Diana Dods. Known as 'Doddy' to his friends, one of whom was Mary Shelley, the forever-famous author of the gothic novel, Frankenstein. Shelley herself lived a life fraught with scandal and rebellion for the early 1800s, it seems fitting that she would not shy away from a friendship with Doddy, a Scottish gender non-conforming writer and literary critic who first published under the name David Lyndsay and then later Walter Sholto Douglas.
Mary Shelley was a key player in the plot to obtain Doddy and their mutual friend Isabella Robinson fake passports and documents in a bid to live as man and wife raising Robinson's illegitimate child. The plot somehow succeeded. They travelled to France as Mr and Mrs Douglas, and their forged marriage disguised the child's illegitimacy.
No images of Walter Sholto Douglas are known, but a scathing description exists from another of Shelley's friends, Eliza Rennie, who wrote about Douglas in her Traits and Private Recollections.
. . . certainly Nature, in any of its wildest vagaries, never fashioned anything more grotesque-looking than this Miss Dods. She was a woman apparently between thirty and forty years of age, with a cropped curly head of short, thick hair, more resembling that of a man than of a woman. She wore no cap, and you almost fancied, on first looking at her, that some one of the masculine gender had indulged in the freak of feminine habiliments, and that "Miss Dods" was an alias for Mr. —.
Constant financial struggle eventually saw Douglas separating from Robinson and incarcerated in a debtor's prison. It was while he was in prison, Douglas contacted a friend requesting a fake moustache and whiskers, it is assumed to keep the guards unsuspecting of his hairless chin.
Douglas had always struggled with health complications. He died of his ailments somewhere between November 1829 and November 1830 after months in prison.
There is anguish in my Breast
A sorrow all undreamed, unguessed –
A war that I must ever feel –
A secret I must still conceal –
I stand upon the Earth alone
To none my secret spirit known.
Walter Sholto Douglas
