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2015

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Terry L. Meyers College of William and Mary, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Meyers, Terry L., Algernon Charles Swinburne (2015). Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs/610

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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. Until his virtual collapse and Swinburne matriculated at Balliol College, rescue in 1879, the years in London were Oxford in January 1856. Benjamin Jowett, heady ones of intense intellectual, literary, soon to become the Master of Balliol, and artistic excitement, mixed with drunken remained a mentor and friend even after episodes from which Swinburne had to be Swinburne's rustication, a rustication he rescued, removed by his father to the family affected to think echoed that of Shelley, home, Holmwood, at Shiplake. An early biog­ another of his extracanonical heroes. Another rapher, Edmund Gosse, recorded, in an influence at Oxford was John Nichol, a account he sealed for decades, that Swinburne Scotsman and lifelong friend, who went on to was a frequent client at "a mysterious house a career as a professor of English literature at in St. John's Wood where two golden-haired Glasgow University. Though Swinburne and rouge-cheeked ladies received, in luxuri­ abandoned his early and intense High ously furnished rooms, gentlemen whom Anglican, virtually Catholic, faith at Oxford, they consented to chastise for large sums:' the standard claims that Nichol was resp on - Swinburne published in 1862 the first criti­ sible for Swinburne's apostasy and alcoholism cal notice in England of Baudelaire and, later, are false. Swinburne and Nichol were members an elegy, "Ave atque Vale;' a tribute to the of Old Mortality, a literary society that pro­ French poet within the pastoral tradition but duced a short-lived magazine, Undergraduate also a riposte to the optimistic asseverations Papers, where Swinburne was able to publish of faith promulgated by Tennyson in In 1616 SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES

Memoriam. In 1868 he published William threat of a review from The Times had made Blake, the first critical study of a poet little his publisher refuse to proceed, and the regarded at the time, an ambitious explora­ volume appeared from John Camden Hotten, tion, but also an essay self-serving in its whose reputation was not wholly salubrious. reading art for art's sake into Blake. Though in places disingenuous, Swinburne Swinburne's notoriety, however, came not defended himself in terms that made clear his so much from his critical interests, but from dedication to free thinking and free speaking his own works. In 1865 he published a Greek in a pamphlet, Notes on Poems and Reviews tragedy at twice the usual length, Atalanta in (1866), which has some claim to stand with Calydon, pulsating with an antitheism that Milton's Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill's went largely unnoted ( though Christina On Liberty (both admired by Swinburne) as a Rossetti, a friend and admirer, could not bear document expanding especially artistic to read the climactic denunciation in one license in England, encouraging the currents chorus of ((the Supreme Evil, God"). Critical toward aestheticism and modernism swirling outrage was reserved for Poems and Ballads not far beneath the surface of the dominant ( 1866). The volume's sexual explorations as in values of the age. Another defense came in a 'J\nactoria" (lesbian love), ((The Leper" (nec­ book, Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866), rophilia), and ((Dolores" (domination and from William Michael Rossetti, brother of the flagellation), as well as in other sexually poets, and a lifelong friend. explicit poems, outraged critics, even such an Political intimations in Poems and Ballads enlightened one as John Morley: were present, if somewhat muted, but friends concerned about the moral irregularity of no language is too strong to condemn the both Swinburne's poetry and his lifestyle mixed vileness and childishness of depicting determined to channel his poetic virtuosity the spurious passion of a putrescent imagina­ into support of the Italian Risorgimento, and tion, the unnamed lusts of sated wanton, as if introduced him to Giuseppe Mazzini, who they were the crown of character and their wrote asking him "to give us a series of 'Lyrics enjoyment the great glory of human life. The for the crusade:" Swinburne did, in Songs only comfort about the present volume is that such a piece as "Anactoria" will be unintelli­ before Sunrise (1871), a volume of political gible to a great many people, and so will the poetry which includes "Hertha;' Swinburne's fevered folly of "Hermaphroditus;' as well as working out of a higher force supportive of much else that is nameless and abominable. humanism and freedom. The shift from (Morley 1866, 24) Poems and Ballads was marked, and empha­ sized by Swinburne in his "Prelude" to the Though some students at Oxford delighted in volume, a palinode: chanting the more outrageous lines from the volume, students at Cambridge debated Then he stood up, and trod to dust whether Poems and Ballads should be added Fear and desire, mistrust and trust, to the university library. And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet, Swinburne had delighted in increasing the And bound for sandals on his feet Knowledge and patience of what must shock value of Poems and Ballads, as when he And what things may be, in the heat reveled in having "added yet four more jets of And cold of years that rot and rust boiling and gushing infamy to the perennial And alter; and his spirit's meat and poisonous fountain of 'Dolores;" but he Was freedom, and his staff was wrought wa taken aback by the critical fuss; just the Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought. SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES 1617

The shift toward an optimism and spiritu­ of spirited disputes among men of letters. alism (both at times attenuated) colored One of the most enduring, though perhaps Swinburne's writings for the rest of his career. little edifying, was with Frederick James Still, even decades later one reader of "Before Furnivall, where each addressed the other a Crucifix" was outraged at what he regarded insultingly, for example Swinburne as as Swinburne's blasphemy and wrote him, Pigsbrook and Furnivall as Brothelsdyke. The "you do credit to your name, for your lan - dispute was over disparate approaches to guage is of Swine:' such matters as determining authorship, The excesses of Swinburne's lifestyle threat­ Swinburne resisting newer, supposedly more ened to become debilitating until, in 1879, a objective and scientific, approaches. friend, a solicitor and developing literary Swinburne's critical work during this critic, Theodore Watts-Dunton, virtually kid­ period included George Chapman (1875), napped Swinburne, moving him to Putney, Essays and Studies (1875), A Note on Charlotte then a quiet suburb of London, and into No. Bronte ( 18 77), A Study of Shakespeare ( 1880), 2, The Pines, where for the next thirty years Miscellanies (1886), A Study of Victor Hugo Swinburne lived a chastened life. His suscep­ (1886), A Study of Ben Jonson (1889), Studies tibility to suggestion bore fruit as Watts­ in Prose and Poetry (1894), and The Age of Dun ton weaned him from alcoholism, Shakespeare (1908). His plays included allowing him one bottle of Bass Ale a day, Bothwell (1874), Erechtheus (1876), Mary drunk by Swinburne at the Rose and Crown Stuart (1881), Marino Faliero (1885), Locrine pub in Wimbledon, where he made his way (1887), The Sisters (1892), Rosamund, Queen in a daily perambulation. The routines at The of the Lombards (1899), and The Duke of Pines have held little interest for biographers - Gandia ( 1908). Among his volumes of poetry they were a far cry from Swinburne's Dionysian were Songs of Two Nations (1875), Poems and years in London; a memoir, The Home Life of Ballads, Second Series (1878), Songs of the Swinburne (1922), by one of the later denizens Springtides (1880), The Heptalogia (1880), of The Pines, Clara Watts-Dunton, enforces parodies, published anonymously, Tristram of the idea of domesticity. But as his letters and Lyonesse (1882), A Midsummer Holiday publications reveal, the years were rich in (1884), Poems and Ballads, Third Series intellectual and poetic activity, and Swinburne (1889), Astrophel and Other Poems (1894), remained engaged with a number of friends The Tale of Balen ( 1896), and A Channel and acquaintances. Passage (1904). Editions of his complete Much of Swinburne's literary energy dur­ Poems and Tragedies appeared in 1904 and ing his last decades was expended not just in 1906, still the best texts available. writing poetry but in writing historical In addition Swinburne wrote two novels. A dramas, which have received little critical Years Letters, which appeared serially and attention, and especially volumes of criticism under a pseudonym, Mrs. Horace Manners, which, though little regarded today, ensured in 1877 (published in 1905 as Loves Cross his stature at the time as a major critic. Currents), sardonically depicts Swinburne's Though characterized by thoughtful reading own class, and, like the unfinished Leshia and scholarship, Swinburne's critical prose Brandon (published posthumously, 1952), is will often seem to the modern reader impres­ redolent of sadomasochism. sionistic, idiosyncratic, and labored. His Though one recent critic, Yisrael Levin, has ebullience can nevertheless be taking, as can encouraged a reconsideration of Swinburne's his pleasure in the nineteenth-century sport later poetry, the consensus that the poet was 1618 WI BURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES largely defanged, drained of fervor and fire, ometimes flagellatory, an 1ng from tran - i unlikely to change. Swinburne him elf posing the initial letters of word . In her acknowledged hi waning in a contribution to memoir on winburne' boyhood, Leith the canon of nineteenth-century bird poetry - denied a published report of a romantic «To a Seamew": attachment, but mo t scholars today ee her a Swinburne's inamorata. When I had wings, my brother, Although Swinburne, be ome more con­ uch wings were mine as thine: servative, even jingoi t at time a he aged, uch life my heart remembers had been considered to ucceed Tenny on a In all a wild eptembers A thi when life seems other, Poet Laureate (Queen Victoria i uppo ed to Though weet, than once wa mine. have asked after him as «the best poet in my dominions"), his youthful peches de jeunesse Neverthele s, cattered among an abun­ (a he himself tyled them), hi early republi­ dance of elegies, occa ional poem , baby cani m, and hi more recent antipathy to the poetry, and poems about Bertie Mason, a Rus ian tsar, Victoria' relation, blocked that nephew to Watts-Dunton growing up at The possibility. Nomination for the Nobel Prize Pine , are works of significance and interest - in literature went nowhere ( a fal e report of e pecially «Tristram of Lyone se" ( with it his winning the prize in 1908 plea ed re onance reflecting Wagner and re i ting winburne before it evaporated). Tennyson), «Thala siu ;' «The Lake of Gaube;' Swinburne' death came on April 10, 1909, and <½. ympholepf' Largely for hi private of influenza. He i aid to have died murmur­ delectation, Swinburne during these decade ing Greek, perhap Ae chylu . Even in death, also wrote ver e obse ively recounting he generated controver y, denounced by a epi odes of birching and corporeal punish­ vice dean of Canterbury Cathedral for the ment at Eton. «pollution" he had introduced into English In per onal term , perhaps the mo t poetry. Hi wi h that the Anglican burial er­ intriguing development of winburne's later vice, with it theme of resurrection and life years was a reopened correspondence with everla ting, be omitted from his funeral Mary Gordon Leith after her hu band died in caused further consternation. Watt -Dunton 1892. Relation over the year between the as ured the family that «up to hi la t moment two cou ins had been conducted through [Swinburne] cheri hed the deepe t animo ity family member rather than through letter , again t the Creed which he felt had evered but widowhood brought new freedom . The him from his most beloved ties . . . If he had letter ca t a light on the elective affinities made a light matter of hi antagoni m again t between the two. In their youth they had rid­ Christianity ... it would have been different den together, and Swinburne had composed but with him it increased with hi year and at part of Atalanta in Calydon a Leith played the la t . . . it wa bitterer than ever:' In the the organ at orthcourt. They had even col­ end, winburne' wishe were di regarded, to laborated on one of Leith' early book for the di may of ympathizer pre ent. children, The Children of the hapel (1864), Swinburne's tanding at hi death wa where winburne provided cene reflecting ignificant - Yeat commented that when hi fa cination with flagellation. The letter winburne died he, Yeat , became «King of exchanged by the two in receding middle age the Cat " - and there were ome who thought are infu ed with a mutual intere t in of interring hi remain at Westmin ter choolboy puni hment and the innuendo , Abbey. But a part of the moderni t agenda, . SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON 1619

Swinburne and other Victorians had to be Meyers, Terry L., and Rikky Rooksby, eds. 2009. "A repudiated, and they were. Although T. S. Hundred Sleeping Years Ago:' Victorian Poetry Eliot's "Swinburne as Poet" defined narrowly 47 (4), special issue. the limits of critical and popular interest for Rooksby, Rikky. 1997. A. C. Swinburne: A Poets Life.Cambridge: Scolar Press. many decades, the modernist insistence on a Rooksby, Rikky,and Nicolas Shrimpton, eds. 1993. break between generations obscured a conti­ The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on nuity that recent critics are unveiling. Swinburne. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Swinburne's star is likely on the ascendant, Walsh, John A., ed. 2012. The Algernon Charles propelled by essays and monographs by such Swinburne Project. Bloomington: Digital critics as Antony Harrison, Catherine Culture Lab, School of Library and Information Maxwell, Margot Louis, David Reide, and Science, Indiana University. Accessed October 26, 2014. http://swinburneproject.indiana.edu/ Kerry McSweeney. swinburne/. SEE ALSO: Aestheticism; Italy; Modernism; Poetry; Pre-Raphaelitism; Religion; Sexuality Symonds, John Addington REFERENCES SARAH J. HEIDT Maxwell, Catherine, and Stefano Evangelista, eds. Kenyon College, United States 2013. Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate. Manchester: Manchester University Born in Bristol on October 5, 1840, John Press. Addington Symonds was an essayist, poet, Morley, John. 1866. "Mr. Swinburne's New Poems:' The Saturday Review (August 4): 145-47. historian, translator, life-writer,and student of Reprinted in Swinburne: The Critical Heritage, sexuality. His extensive literary output was edited by Clyde K. Hyder, 22-29. London: concentrated in the last twenty-one years of Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. his life,when he published nearly forty books, Rosenberg, John D. 1967. "Swinburne:' Victorian including the seven-volume Renaissance in Studies 11 (2): 149-50. Italy (1875-86). Though recent works (and international conferences in 1998 and 2010) FURTHER READING have considered a wider range of Symonds's voluminous writings and cultural importance, Eliot, T. S. 1921. "Swinburne as Poet:' In The particularly as a historian and student of Sacred Wood. London: Methuen. http://www. classical and Italian culture, he is still best bartleby.com/200/ sw 12.html. Accessed October known for the Memoirs he penned chiefly in 26, 2014. Henderson, Philip. 197 4. Swinburne: Portrait of a 1889-91. At his death from pneumonia in Poet. New York: Macmillan. Rome on April 19, 1893, Symonds bequeathed Lang, Cecil Y. ed. 1959-62. The Swinburne Letters. the Memoirs to Horatio F. Brown, his literary 6 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. executor, who used parts of them in an 1895 Levin, Yisrael, ed. 2010. Swinburne and the Singing biography and then willed them to the London Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work. Library in 1926, under a fifty-year embargo. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. The Memoirs have never been published in McGann, Jerome. 1972. Swinburne: An Experiment full: a 1964 biography paraphrased them; a in Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meyers, Terry L., ed. 2005. Uncollected Letters of 1984 edition published only two-thirds of Algernon Charles Swinburne. 3 vols. London: their contents; and an unexpurgated critical Pickering & Chatto. edition was not finallyin progress until 2013.