John Addington Symonds: Fun Facts
I work on a man named John Addington Symonds, a Victorian historian and literary critic whose reputation today is eclipsed by contemporaries like Walter Pater and Algernon Swinburne (with whom he’s often falsely grouped as an aesthete), but who was a well-respected intellectual in his own time. Today, he’s being rediscovered for his contributions to the culture, and the cultural history, of what he was the first person writing in English to call (male) “homosexuality.” My undergraduate thesis marries methodology from intellectual history, the history of print culture and the book, and the history of sexuality to do more than the (few) existing studies on Symonds to place him within his Victorian intellectual and epistemological context, as someone who was intensely preoccupied by the intersections between religion, ethics, art, and politics, and who thought within Victorian paradigms. However, it also seeks to identify how Symonds was distinct and even revolutionary in his work fitting homosexuality within those paradigms, for the first time creating the space minority sexual identities have come to occupy within wider Anglo-American culture today.
Of course, I’m not going to share my thesis with the internet until it’s finished—but below is what I hope will be a growing list of brief fun facts I’ve read by and about Symonds that make me say either “wow” or “lolz.”
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—For more reasons why the homoerotic literary world is a very small one, we need dial forward a few decades, until E.M. Forster comes into the picture. Forster was on the London Library committee in 1939, when Symonds’ daughter Katharine Furse petitioned the Library to be allowed to read her father’s Memoirs, which had been deposited there thanks to Horatio Brown and Edmund Gosse with a fifty-year embargo on publication. Forster, Harold Nicolson, Desmond MacCarthy, and the other members of the Library committee allowed Furse to read the Memoirs, the first reader since Brown and Gosse had attempted to preserve Symonds’ reputation by curtailing access to the mss. In 1961, Forster got permission to read the mss himself, round about the time that Phyllis Grosskurth was also doing the research that would become her biography of Symonds. He took some very interesting notes about the mss, which appear in the published version of his commonplace book. In short, it is not only to be imagined that Symonds did influence Forster in some way, but Forster himself can also be given major credit for introducing Symonds to twentieth-century readers and scholars.
—The moral philosopher T.H. Green was one of Symonds’ best friends at Oxford, and eventually married his sister Charlotte. After Green died suddenly in 1882, Charlotte Symonds asked all her husband’s friends to send her their memories of “Tom” for a little booklet she was putting together. I haven’t seen the others, but I’m sure Symonds’ are some of the most colorful. Symonds wrote that Green “Had a quick inimitable way of telling racy stories,” and that “He had an odd phrase to express kissing. He called it ‘emphatic choice.’” Green taught Symonds to appreciate Wordsworth and Shakespeare’s comedies; and he writes about how he remembers Green “coming back from hearing Pater read an Essay at the Old Mortality [essay society], beaming all over with the high theme expressed in thrilling language: ‘It was a Dithyramb!’” But if all this isn’t proof that this crowd’s college days weren’t thrilling beyond belief, Symonds recalls that Green’s idea of a romantic overture when courting Charlotte was to send her a book about Kant.
—Though Symonds was, I believe, the first person to use the word “homosexual” in English (his earliest usage predates the OED’s earliest citation, in any case), he was never particularly happy with the word. In his A Problem in Modern Ethics, he wrote, “The adjective homosexual, though ill-compounded of a Greek and Latin word, is useful, and has ben adopted by medical writers on this topic. Unisexual would perhaps be better.”
—One little-known but really important aspect of Symonds’ academic work is that he was a very influential early serious scholar of Michelangelo. In addition to producing a popular translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets (see the fun fact about Pater below), Symonds wrote a biography of the artist which some modern Michelangelo scholars still believe to be the best English-language secondary source on the topic out there. As in much of his scholarship, he was on the vanguard of the professionalization of Anglophone historical writing with the Michelangelo biography: he was the first foreigner granted access to the Buonarroti archives in Florence, and used the archival research to, among other things, establish for the first time that some letters Michelangelo was thought to have written to a female lover were actually written to a man.
—In the years now that I have spent with Symonds, I think the funniest thing I’ve ever seen him write is in a September 14, 1891 letter to his friend the poet Roden Noel: “I am pleased to hear that you love a fisherman in Cornwall, and repudiate Jehovah’s ways of regarding a man’s legs. I always thought him, as perhaps he is represented by the Psalmist, very middle-class upon that topic.”
—Victorian bohemia was a very small world indeed. The aesthete poet and critic Arthur Symons was sexologist Havelock Ellis’s flatmate in the early 1890s, and was the one who convinced Ellis to agree to collaborate with J.A. Symonds on Sexual Inversion. The book wasn’t finished till after Symonds’ death, though, and his wife and literary executor succeeded in pressuring Ellis to remove Symonds’ name from the title page. However, that wasn’t too hard—Ellis and Symonds disagreed extensively on method, and Ellis changed the book considerably from the cultural history of “inversion” that Symonds had envisioned.
—Symonds and Robert Louis Stevenson kept up a prickly friendship that derived from their shared love of Walt Whitman but their complete disagreement on all matters of style, taste, and literary merit. Nevertheless, Stevenson (another consumptive) spent some time at Symonds’ house in Davos, Switzerland, where he wrote his first collection of essays, Virginibus Puerisque.
—The fin-de-siècle literary world was a small one, particularly in homoerotic circles. One of the few unqualifiedly complimentary obituaries of Symonds when he died in 1893 came from Lord Alfred Douglas, who wrote that “The world has lost [in] him a sweet poet, and a biographer, translator, and essayist, as learned, as graceful, and as brilliant as any that it has ever known.” Douglas was writing, however, in his Oxford-undergraduates’ homoerotic publication, The Spirit Lamp, which explained it—he was too controversial a figure for his friends writing in the London media to be too admiring of him.
—Though very much a product of his own Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford education, Symonds was interested throughout his life in improving access to education for those who couldn’t go to Harrow and Balliol: he often lectured on ancient Greek history and literature to women’s groups in addition to the Clifton College sixth form, and he was instrumental both financially and politically in the founding of the University of Bristol, which he enthusiastically believed should educate women as well as men. It’s fitting that after Symonds’ death, Clifton Hill House, the Symonds family home, was sold to the University for use as the first university residence hall for women in southwest England, and remains a (now coed) Bristol dorm to this day.
—Let it not be said that the Symondses were not archetypical liberal Victorians: Catherine Symonds was a big William Morris fan, and had the drawing room of the family home in Clifton, Bristol, as well as the drawing room of the house they eventually built in Davos, Switzerland, decorated with Morris wallpaper.
—Nineteenth-century men who wrote to each other about their same-sex desire often used foreign languages in which to express this desire. This was partly due to the need to obscure what they were talking about, partly representative of the degree to which the leisure, education, and ability to talk about sexuality theoretically was a province of the upper classes who already knew and spoke in foreign languages, and partly reflective of a genuine absence of an anglophone discourse in which to express same-sex desire. A representative example is one 1873 letter from Symonds to his close friend Henry Graham Dakyns, which showcased an impressive array of French, Italian, Latin, and English, and ended like this: “Mais pourquoi te raconte ces bizarreries de l’esprit maladif? Je sais que tu as maintenant une anxiétée bien autrement accablante…. Judge of the state of my soul by the painful analysis expressed so clumsily in French.” (The French translates as, “But why am I telling you about these oddities of my morbid spirit? I know that you now have just as overwhelming an anxiety.”)
—The relationship between Walter Pater and Symonds is a complicated one—the two were contemporaries and academic rivals as Oxford undergrads and throughout their careers—but one fun fact about the two is that Pater, in his (in)famous Studies in the History of the Renaissance, quoted Symonds’ translations of Michelangelo’s Sonnets without credit, even introducing errors into the translations. Symonds also, in a letter to Henry Sidgwick, referred to Pater as “well dressed and ghastly.”
—Symonds was heavily engaged with the literary world of his day. In addition to reviewing books like Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance and Swinburne’s early poems (often warily—Symonds was no aesthete), he and his wife paid social calls to Tennyson on the Isle of Wight, and he eagerly read George Eliot’s novels in their original serialized form.
—Like many 19th-century men-loving men, Symonds had a wife and children whom he cared for and was emotionally involved with, even as he was unfaithful to his wife in sexual, romantic and emotional terms. Like Constance Wilde, Catherine Symonds had to put up with a lot from her (by the end of his life) openly homosexual husband. As Symonds’ biographer Phyllis Grosskurth tells it:
When Symonds arrived at Sutton Court, he and Catherine took a long walk through the spring countryside while he put a proposition to her which any woman might have found dismaying. If only she would agree to let him satisfy his desires elsewhere, he promised her that she would find him a much closer and gentler companion who would take the most careful account of all her other needs. Surprisingly, she did not react with shocked indignation…. [A]t last, reluctantly but with astonishing grace, she agreed to all his proposals.
Grosskurth probably underrates the degree to which Catherine Symonds had no choice but to acquiesce to her husband’s proposal. She was the well-to-do daughter of an MP whose family’s reputation as well as her own would have been damaged by anything as scandalous as divorce or a public suggestion of her husband’s proclivities.
—Benjamin Jowett, the great Victorian Master of Balliol College, Oxford and Symonds’ undergraduate tutor, wrote the Latin epitaph on Symonds’ tombstone when he died of tuberculosis in Italy in April 1893. It reads, Nemo te magis in corde amicos fovebat nec in simplices et indoctos benevolentior erat—in my shoddy translation, “No one cherished his friends in his heart more, nor was kinder to the simple and the unlearned.” Jowett himself died six months later.
—The only book-length secondary study of Symonds to date is Phyllis Grosskurth’s 1964 biography, titled The Woeful Victorian. Grosskurth was the first scholar to “uncover” Symonds after interest in him had died out a generation after his death; she bore up under incredible disapprobation for writing about a self-identified homosexual man and produced the best collation of information about Symonds to date—but unfortunately, it’s colored by outmoded overreliance on Freud and a heavy dose of euphemism. Of A.O. Rutson, one of Symonds’ university friends, Grosskurth writes, “‘Paranoia…,’ Freud declared, ‘invariably arises from any attempt to subdue unduly powerful homosexual tendencies’; and there can be little doubt that Rutson’s obsession with Symonds was due to a very compelling homosexual attraction.” Not dissimilarly, her version of the relationship between Symonds and one of his best friends, Henry Graham Dakyns, glides euphemistically over what she clearly sees as one of the most important things they had in common: “Their interests and temperaments were remarkably similar: both responded ardently to beauty, each possessed a gentleness and sensitivity which at times could sharpen into nervous irritability, and they shared a profound interest in philosophical speculation.”
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I’ve been trawling the internet all day looking for information on Addington Symonds, particularly with regard to his relationship to his wife.
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