Algernon Charles Swinburne

W&M ScholarWorks Arts & Sciences Articles Arts and Sciences 2015 Algernon Charles Swinburne Terry L. Meyers College of William and Mary, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Meyers, Terry L., Algernon Charles Swinburne (2015). Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs/610 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Articles by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES 1613 War, the Boer War, and the suffrage Senf, Carol. A., ed. 1993. The Critical Response to movement, evidence that Stoker was thinking Bram Stoker. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. about contemporary events and weaving Valente, Joseph. 2002. Dracula's Crypt: Bram these thoughts into his fiction. A definitive Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. study of his romances remains to be written. Warren, Louis S. 2002. "Buffalo Bill Meets Dracula: Stoker was a complex writer who saw evil in William F. Cody, Bram Stoker, and the Frontiers his world but who also hoped to alleviate that of Decaf' The American Historical Review 107: evil either through science and technology or 1124-57. through human relationships. He often wove romance into his darkest works and gothic horror into his romances, as well as references to politics and medicine into both. Swinburne, Algernon SEE ALSO: Gothic; Medicine; New Woman Charles fiction; Novel, historical; Vampires and TERRY L. MEYERS vamp1nsm College of William and Mary, United States Algernon Charles Swinburne (183 7-1909) is REFERENCES perhaps the last major Victorian writer yet to Farson, Daniel. 1975. The Man Who Wrote take his due place in the canon, kept from the Dracula: A Biography ofBram Stoker. New York: pantheon even today by attitudes engendered St. Martin's. by his earliest appearances in print. Recent Glover, David. 1996. Vampires, Mummies, and scholarly and critical work is raising Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Swinburne's standing as poet, critic, and even Ludlam, Harry. 1962. A Biography of Dracula: The novelist, but the bleakness of his early vision, Life Story of Bram Stoker. London: Foulsham. the explicitness of his challenges to Victorian Murray, Paul. 2004. From the Shadow ofDracula: A political, literary, and sexual propriety, and Life of Bram Stoker. London: Jonathan Cape. the antipathy of such modernists as T. S. Eliot have hampered his becoming a popular writer or one taught broadly in secondary schools FURTHER READING and universities. Carter, Margaret, ed. 1988. Dracula: The Vampire Swinburne's eclipse from his standing dur and the Critics. Ann Arbor: UMI Research ing his age is such that in a 2014 New York Press. Times review of Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience Dalby, Richard, and William Hughes. 2004. Bram (which satirizes the aesthetic movement Stoker: A Bibliography. Southend-on-Sea, UK: Desert Island Books. developed in part from Swinburne's dedica Hopkins, Lisa. 2007. Bram Stoker: A Literary Life. tion to art for art's sake), a critic commented New York: Palgrave Macmillan. on "an increasing unfamiliarity with the tar Maunder, Andrew. 2006. Bram Stoker. Tavistock, gets of its satire;' including Swinburne. UK: Northcote House. Nevertheless, Oscar Wilde's evaluation in Miller, Elizabeth, and Robert Eighteen-Bisang, 1896, when a successor to Tennyson as Poet eds. 2008. Bram Stoker's Notes for Dracula: A Laureate was being sought, that Swinburne Facsimile Edition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Schaffer, Talia. 1994. "'A Wilde Desire Took Me': was already, beloved of all poets, "the Poet The Homoerotic History of Dracula:' English Laureate of England;' guides a recent collec Literary History 61 (Summer): 381-425. tion of compelling essays on such topics as 1614 SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES Swinburne's immersion in French literature, Swinburne's family lived on the Isle of aestheticism, and Hellenism; their thesis is Wight, at East Dene, Bonchurch, overlooking that Swinburne ought to be more broadly the Channel, and a short distance from the "acknowledged to be one of the most impor new church his parents helped to fund; the tant Victorian poets, a founding figure for home was also not far from Northcourt, British aestheticism and the dominant where lived a first cousin, Mary Gordon, with influence for many fin-de-siecle and mod whom, most scholars believe, Swinburne was ernist poets" (Maxwell and Evangelista 2013). in love, and whose inaccessibility helped to Swinburne burst forth as the bad boy of shape Swinburne's early pessimism and Victorian poetry in Poems and Ballads (1866), nihilism as well as his plunging in the 1860s though his unconventionality was apparent and 1870s into a dissolute life of alcoholism earlier. Born April 5, 1837, in London to and flagellation brothels. This descent he Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry anticipated in a poem articulating in arche Swinburne and Lady Jane Swinburne, typal terms the devastation of unrequited Swinburne was the eldest of five siblings ( a love, "The Triumph of Time;' when his cousin twin to one of his sisters died early and his married Colonel Disney Leith. Unraveling favorite sister, Edith, died in 1863, darkening the relationship between the two cousins his worldview). Difficulties in birthing may has taken scholars decades - a curious have occasioned a characteristic excitability psychological harmony between the two in Swinburne's behavior throughout his life. shaped a number of works written by each, Swinburne's grandfather, Sir John Swin not least Swinburne's novels. burne, had a grand home in Northumberland, Swinburne's early life was typical of his Capheaton Hall, where as a child Swinburne class: private tutoring, Eton, Oxford. At Eton, frequently visited and which imprinted on his small stature and red hair led to his being him a deep consciousness of Scottish connec bullied, and the school's traditional punish tions. He collected and wrote Border Ballads ment, birching, helped to shape his lifelong in his youth, and identified with Mary Queen obsession with sadism and masochism, a of Scots, the subject of several of his historical taste encouraged by a friend in the 1860s, dramas, including Chastelard (1865) and Lord Houghton, who introduced him to the Bothwell (1874), the longest play in English works of the Marquis de Sade, which he took literature. up obsessively. At Capheaton, too, he came under the The psychology behind such an attraction, mentorship of Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, as John D. Rosenberg has suggested, opens an whose nearby home, Wallington, was deco insight into not just Swinburne's being but rated with murals commissioned from also his poetry, which is William Bell Scott, the earliest of Swinburne's acquaintances among the Pre-Raphaelites. charged with the tension of delicately poised Lady Trevelyan was among those who tried opposites: shadows thinned by light, lights to counsel Swinburne into less confronta broken by shade, sunset passing into moonrise, tional modes, both in his personal life when sea merging with sky. He is obsessed by the she warned him about rumors and insinua moment when one thing shades off into its opposite, or when contraries fuse, as in tions concerning his sexual orientation ( a "Hermaphroditus" ... Yet apart from his pro question still open to investigation) and in found esthetic affinity with [the painter] his literary life as he was working on Poems Turner, there is the unique idiosyncrasy of and Ballads. Swinburne himself, who was equipped with SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES 1615 superb senses, each of which must have trans several early essays, including what purported mitted a peculiar counterpoint. In a sense, to be a review of an English writer he made Swinburne perceived in paradoxes, and his up (in 1862, he tried but failed to place reviews recurrent synesthetic images express perfectly of two purported and shocking French poets that passing of pain into pleasure, bitter into sweet, loathing into desire, which lay at the root in the Spectator). of his profoundest experiences. (Rosenberg A third influential figure from Oxford days 1967, 149-50) was the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, brought to Oxford to paint murals at Even at school, Swinburne was immersed in the Student Union, and whose magnetic such unconventional literary enthusiasms as personality drew in Swinburne as well as the Jacobean and Caroline dramatists, whose William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, works he was in his later life to champion. close friends for the rest of his life. Though One memoir of him at Eton pictures him in a Swinburne was to back away from the window "with some huge old-world tome, influence, the rebelliousness of Pre almost as big as himself, upon his lap, the Raphaelitism permeated his early work, and afternoon sun setting on fire the great he, along with other Pre-Raphaelite writers, mop of red hair. There it was that he emanci was attacked by an unsympathetic critic, pated himself, making acquaintance with Robert Buchanan, as being a practitioner of Shakespeare minus Bowdler, Marlowe, Spenser, the "fleshly school of poetry;' indifferent to Ben Jonson, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and the higher callings Victorians largely expected Fletcher:' One result was a juvenile play, from their writers. "The Unhappy Revenge;' into which, char Swinburne's first book publication, Queen acteristically, he reported, he'd "contrived to Mother and Rosamond, appeared in 1860, pack twice as many rapes and about three underwritten by his father, who also gave him times as many murders as are contained in an allowance to move to London to pursue a the model:' literary career.

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