John Addington Symonds

John Addington Symonds born 5 October 1840 (d. 1893)

John Addington Symonds was born in Bristol and was a writer and critic, like his father, also called John Addington Symonds.

Considered delicate as a child, he showed no particular promise as a scholar. In 1858 he proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford as a commoner but was elected to an exhibition in the following year.

In spring of that same year he had fallen in love with Wilie Dyer, a Bristol choirboy three years younger than himself. They engaged in a passionate but chaste love affair that lasted one year, being broken up by Symonds' father. Their friendship continued for several years afterwards.

In January 1851 Symonds received a letter from Alfred Pretor, a friend of his, in which Pretor told him he was having an affair with their headmaster, Charles John Vaughan. Symonds was shocked and disgusted, feelings complicated by his growing awareness of his own homosexuality. He didn't mention the incident for eight years until, in 1859, he blurted out the whole story to a confidant, a professor at Oxford. He encouraged Symonds to tell his father, which he did. Dr Symonds got Vaughan to resign. Pretor was disgusted with Symonds' part in the whole affair, and never spoke to him again.

At Oxford, Symonds began to reveal his academic ability. However the strain of study proved too great for him. Immediately after his election to a fellowship, his health broke down, and he left for Switzerland.

There he met Janet Catherine North. After a romantic betrothal in the mountains, he married her at Hastings in 1864. They settled in London. Symonds hoped to study law, but his health again broke down and forced him to travel. Returning to Clifton, he lectured and wrote academic works.

Meanwhile he was occupied with his major work, Renaissance in Italy, which appeared in seven volumes at intervals between 1875 and 1886. The Renaissance had been the subject of Symonds' prize essay at Oxford, and this had aroused a desire to produce a more complete picture of the reawakening of art and literature in Europe. His work, however, was again interrupted by illness, this time in a more serious form. In 1877 his life was in danger, and the recovery he made at Davos Platz led to a belief that this was the only place where he was likely to be able to enjoy life.

He practically made his home at Davos. There he wrote most of his books and completed his study of the Renaissance, the work for which he is mainly remembered. He was feverishly active throughout his life. The amount of work he achieved was remarkable, considering his poor health. He had a passion for Italy and for many years resided during the autumn in Venice. He died in Rome and was buried close to Shelley.

He left his papers and his autobiography in the hands of his friend Horatio Brown, who wrote an expurgated biography in 1895, which Edmund Gosse further stripped of homoerotic content before its publication. In 1926, upon coming into the possession of Symonds' papers, Gosse proceeded to burn everything except the memoirs.

While the taboos of Victorian England prevented Symonds from speaking openly obout homosexuality, his works published for a general audience contained strong implications and some of the first direct references to male-male sexual love in English literature. For example, in 'The Meeting of David and Jonathan', from 1878, Jonathan takes David 'In his arms of strength / [and] in that kiss / Soul into soul was knit and bliss to bliss'.

The same year, his translations of Michelangelo's sonnets to the painter's beloved Tommaso Cavalieri return the male pronouns which had been heterosexualised by previous editors. By the end of his life, Symonds' homosexuality had become an open secret in Victorian literary and cultural circles.

Simultaneously to these widely available works, Symonds was writing, privately publishing and distributing more candid writings about homosexuality. As well as a large number of poems written throughout the 1860s and 1870s, Symonds wrote one of the first essays in defence of homosexuality in the English language, A Problem in Greek Ethics, in 1873. A follow-up essay from 1891, A Problem in Modern Ethics, includes proposals for reforming anti-homosexual legislation.

These essays were widely read by an underground of homosexual writers and continued to be secretly published and distributed decades after his death. Some of his other personal writings and letters were finally published in the late twentieth century, and are of great interest to historians for the candid descriptions of an 'unspeakable' sexual culture which existed against the 'social law' of his time that 'regarded this love as abominable and unnatural'.

In particular, Symonds' memoirs, written over a four your period from 1889 to 1893, form the earliest known self-conscious homosexual autobiography.