SYMONDS, John Addington. Verses. [Drop-head title:] Verses by John Addington Symonds, M.D., F.R.S.Ed., &c., &c.

Inscribed by Symonds

SYMONDS, John Addington. Verses. [Drop-head title:] Verses by John Addington Symonds, M.D., F.R.S.Ed., &c., &c. [Bristol: Arrowsmith] ‘Printed for private circulation only’. 1871.

8vo. Original blue pebble-grained cloth, filleted in blind, upper board lettered in gilt, yellow endpapers; pp. viii, 100, [4 (blank)]; joints lightly rubbed; uniform light browning, occasional light spotting (heavier to first and final leaves); a good copy; front free endpaper inscribed ‘From the Editor’ in ink.

First edition of the poems of John Addington Symonds, MD (1807–1871), edited and posthumously published for private circulation by his son, the ‘Uranian’ poet John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), co-author (with Havelock Ellis) of Sexual Inversion, and the first English-language writer to use the word ‘homosexual’ in print.

Symonds primus, as he was known, had been a successful medical practitioner. ‘Averse to hobbies or non-academic diversions to the extent of denying his son music lessons, Symonds was a leader of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Bristol. He bought the elegant Clifton Hill House in 1851. His reputation attracted prominent people to Bristol and Clifton. A man able to discuss Greek prosody with Gladstone and Tennyson, he frequently entertained Benjamin Jowett, Robert Louis Stevenson, Leslie Stephen, Holman Hunt, Professor James Forbes, Edmund Gosse, and Edward Lear among many friends’ (ODNB).

Symonds secundus was educated at Harrow, where he was ‘was disturbed by the boys' sexual rough-housing. The headmaster Charles Vaughan's affair with one of the boys appalled Symonds because of Vaughan's hypocrisy and because it threatened the idealization of homosexual love that Symonds was formulating with the help of Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus. Symonds dated the birth of his real self from spring 1858, when he fell in love with Willie Dyer, a chorister at Bristol Cathedral. He confessed his romantic affection to his father, who persuaded him gradually to end the affair. In 1859 Symonds revealed the story about Vaughan to a friend during an argument about 'Arcadian love', and was persuaded to tell his father, who forced Vaughan to resign his headmastership and hindered his subsequent career’ (ibid.). He subsequently studied at Balliol College, Oxford and became a fellow at Magdalen College; after ‘unsuccessful attempts to repress his forbidden desire for another cathedral chorister, Alfred Brooke’, he suffered a nervous break as well as an eye infection, and was urged to marry a woman as a ‘cure’.

The preface to the present work was written at Dr Symonds's Clifton Hill House in Bristol; Symonds moved there with his wife (with whom he had an open marriage) and four children seven months after his father’s death in February. Symonds primus, prior to his death, had chosen the paper, the type, and even the binding, and the publication of the present work is a fulfillment of his last wishes and the execution of a ‘scheme which had been planned and partly carried out by him’ (p. 5). In spite of the complexity of their relationship, Symonds secundus remarked after the physician's death that 'I have not only lost a father, but a best friend' (Brown, John Addington Symonds: a Biography (1903), p. 280).

It is during his period at Clifton that he produced his earliest books, An Introduction to the Study of Dante (1872) and Studies of the Greek Poets (1873), and later Sketches in Italy and Greece (1874), Renaissance in Italy: the Age of the Despots (1875), and Studies of the Greek Poets, Second Series (1876). ‘He withdrew his nomination for the professorship of poetry at Oxford in 1876 when he was violently attacked for defending paiderastia‎ in the last chapter of Studies of the Greek Poets’ (ODNB). It was also at this time that he wrote his A Problem in Greek Ethics (1873), although it would not be printed until 1883, in an edition of ten copies. ‘The first history of homosexuality in English’, the work ‘carefully argues that if homosexual relationships were honourable in ancient Greece, they cannot be diagnosed as morbid in modern times’ (ibid.).

SKU: 2119731