The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds

A Critical Edition

Amber K. Regis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137291233
• eBook ISBN: 9781137291240
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This edition is the first to reproduce John Addington Symonds's Memoirs in its entirety. It offers a panoramic view of middle-class Victorian life, shedding light upon sexual cultures and life histories too often hidden from history. Symonds (1840-93) began writing his Memoirs in 1889. It was, he confessed, 'a foolish thing to do.' Symonds was a respected man of letters, an historian, translator, essayist and poet; he was also married with children. But rather than unfold a simple tale of public and private achievement, the Memoirs record his struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with these professional and familial identities. His autobiography offers a confessional account of relationships beyond the accepted bounds of nineteenth-century social mores, presenting an alternative case study that contests the legal and medical authorities that would label his desires a crime or disease. Yet being so eloquent on matters of heterodox sexuality, the Memoirs were suppressed. The manuscriptsurvives because Symonds recognised its import, however 'foolish': he instructed his literary executor to preserve the text, a duty ultimately discharged by placing the manuscript under embargo in the care of the London Library.

The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds

© The Author(s) 2016

Amber K. Regis (ed.)The Memoirs of John Addington SymondsGenders and Sexualities in History10.1057/978-1-137-29124-0_2

Begin Abstract

Preface

Amber K. Regis¹

(1)

School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

End Abstract

It would be difficult to say exactly why I have begun to write the Memoirs of my very uneventful life. ¹ The most obvious reason for my doing so, perhaps, is that I have been to a large extent occupied during the last three years with the autobiographies of Benvenuto Cellini and Carlo Gozzi, both of these personal histories. ² I have translated them into English and sent them to press, acquiring in the process certain opinions with regard to the method of self-portraiture, and considerably adding to the interest which I always felt for this branch of literature. Other and more important reasons—more important in their bearing on my psychological condition and the anxious problem of the coming years—will reveal themselves to those who read the ensuing chapters.

Carlo Gozzi called his Memoirs ‘useless’, and published them (as he professes) from motives of ‘humility.’ Mine are sure to be more useless than his; for I shall not publish them; [and it is only too probable that they will never be published] ³ —nobody’s humility or pride or pecuniary interests being likely to gain any benefit from the printing of what I have veraciously written concerning myself.

That I have a definite object in the sacrifice of so much time and trouble ⁴ upon a task so useless and so thankless, will not be doubted by men who understand the nature of human indolence, and who are also able to estimate the demands made upon the industry of a fairly successful writer in his forty-ninth year. {Without vanity, I may affirm that the author of Renaissance in Italy and Studies in Greek Poets ⁵ has had to refuse lucrative offers and to postpone labours of remunerative literature for many months, in order to produce this piece of sterile self-delineation.}

My object is known to myself. But it is not one which I care to disclose in set phrases. Someone, peradventure, will discover it; and if he is a friend, will shed perhaps a tear at the thought of what these lines have cost me—if he is a scientific student of humanity, will appreciate my effort to be sincere in the dictation of a document—if he be but a fellow creature ⁶ will feel some thrill of pity, and will respect the record of a soul which has still to settle its accounts with God.

A life without action seems to fall naturally into three main sections. The first of these comprises childhood, boyhood, and adolescence. The second extends over early manhood, when habits are formed and character is fixed. The third exhibits the mature man in his development and in possession of his faculties.

I propose therefore to divide my Memoirs into three unequal parts. The first part will be concerned with my life from birth in 1840 to November 1864 when I married and took leave of Oxford. The second part will deal with the years 1864-77. The third will be devoted to my intellectual, emotional and religious experience—partly retrospective and partly confined specially to the period which I have spent in residence at Davos Platz. What cross-divisions and subdivisions I shall introduce into these main sections, I am unable to foresee. It is the peculiarity of an autobiography, which consists of self-delineation, and is not determined by the narration of salient events, that the third of these parts should be resumptive of the earlier and to a large extent a commentary on the past.

Palazzo Gritti. Santa Maria Zobenigo. Venice

May 1889

When I read the book, the biography famous,

And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?

And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?

(As if any man really knew aught of my life,

Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real

life,

Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections

I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

Walt Whitman, ‘Inscriptions’ ⁷

Notes

1. 1.
   Marginal note: ‘Written in 1889 partly at Venice mostly at Davos Platz’ (MS i).
2. 2.
   The Life of Benvenuto Cellini (1888) and The Memoirs of Carlo Gozzi (1890).
3. 3.
   Material underlined and accompanied by a marginal note: ‘NB HFB’ (MS i).
4. 4.
   Deletes ‘labour’, substitutes ‘trouble’ (MS ii).
5. 5.
   Renaissance in Italy (1875-86) and Studies of the Greek Poets (1873 and 1876).
6. 6.
   Deletes ‘man’, substitutes ‘fellow creature’ (MS ii).
7. 7.
   From ‘When I Read The Book’, part of the ‘Inscriptions’ cluster in Leaves of Grass (1881-82 edition) by Walt Whitman. This poem first appeared in the 1867 edition, but Symonds quotes the later version.

© The Author(s) 2016

Amber K. Regis (ed.)The Memoirs of John Addington SymondsGenders and Sexualities in History10.1057/978-1-137-29124-0_3

Begin Abstract

Chapter 1: Childhood—No. 7 Berkeley Square, Bristol—From the Year 1840 to the Year 1851

Amber K. Regis¹

(1)

School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

End Abstract

I was born upon the 5th October, 1840, at 7 Berkeley Square, Bristol. Here I lived until June 1851, when our home was changed for Clifton Hill House. This section of my autobiographical notes will be confined to recollections of the first ten years of my life.

I cannot say that I have a distinct memory of my mother. ¹ She died of scarlet fever when I was four years old, and she had been always too weak in health to occupy herself energetically in the household. Those who knew her intimately, were unanimous in saying that she combined rare grace and beauty of person with singular sweetness of character, and distinguished mental endowments.

The one thing which I can clearly remember about her is that we were driving alone together in my father’s ² carriage {(a chariot with glass windows at the front and sides, drawn by two horses)} down a steep hill by Cornwallis Terrace to the Lower Crescent, when the horses plunged and broke into a gallop. Her fright must have made a deep impression on me. I can still see a pale face, a pink silk bonnet and beautiful yellow hair. These have for background in my memory the glass windows of a coupé and the red stone walls overhung with trees which embanked the garden of Cornwallis Terrace. I do not know now whether the road has been altered. It is long since I walked there. But the instantaneous flash of that moment on my brain persists as I describe it.

I can also remember the morning of my mother’s funeral. We children were playing in our nursery with tin soldiers and clumsy wooden cannon painted black and yellow. These were on the floor beside us. We were dressed in black. The nurses took us away to my grandmother’s house in the Lower Crescent.

This is all I recollect about my mother. I have been told that my name was the last upon her lips when she was dying. But my father never spoke to me much about her, and only gave me a piece of her hair.

He sometimes took me with him to her grave. This was in the Arnos Vale Cemetery, high up upon a grassy hill-side, where harebells and thyme blossomed in the short turf of a down. A plane tree spread its branches over the tomb; and the flat stone which marked her resting place was enclosed by iron railings. My father took jealous care that these railings should be over-rioted with ivy, roses, and clematis, growing in unpruned luxuriance. He wished to withdraw the sacred spot from vulgar eyes. I could not see inside it. It was our custom to pluck leaves from the plane tree and the creepers, and to return in silence to the carriage which stood waiting by the gate. These leaves, gathered from my mother’s grave, were almost all I knew about her, all I had of her. I used to put them into a little book of texts called Daily Food ³ which had belonged to her, and which I read every night, and still read at all hours of the day in the year 1889. [It was Auntie ⁴ who gave me this little amulet in the year 1854.] ⁵

I cannot pretend that I greatly desired to have a clearer notion of my mother, or that I exactly felt the loss of her. It was all dreamy and misty to my mind. I did not even imagine what she might have been to me. Sometimes I thought that I was heartless and sinful because I could not want her more. But this was foolish, because I had never really felt the touch of her. My father showed no outward sign of grief, and said nothing. He was only more than usually reserved on these occasions, and inspired me with a vague awe. Death was a mystery, into which the mother I had never really known was now forever drawn away from me.

I doubt whether the following is worth reading. But, since it is the first event of which I seem to have a distinct recollection, I must do so. My sister Charlotte, younger than myself by two years short of two months, was christened at St George’s Church, Bristol. So far as I can now recall it, the building is of pseudo-Graeco-Roman architecture, rectangular in the body, faced with a portico, and surmounted with a nondescript Pecksniffian ⁶ spire in the bastard classic style. Of its internal arrangement I remember nothing definite. And yet I seem to see this picture vividly—an area of building, dim, grey, almost empty; a few people grouped about in my immediate neighbourhood; tall enclosed pews of a light yellow colour round the groups; something going on at no great distance to our left, which makes the faces turn in that direction, looking backwards; myself dressed in white, with a white hat and something blue in the trimmings of it, half standing, half supported, so as to took over the rim of the pew. This is what I remember, or think I remember, of my sister’s christening.

It is surely impossible to be certain whether these very early memories, definite as they may be, and not improbable, are actual impressions of scenes left upon our senses, or whether they are not rather the product of some half-conscious act of the imagination working reflectively upon what has been related to the child.

About another of these recollections I have not the same kind of doubt. I was in the nave of Bristol Cathedral during service time, lifted in my nurse’s arms and looking through the perforated doors of the organ screen, which then divided nave from choir. The organ was playing and the choristers were singing. Some chord awoke in me then, which has gone on thrilling thro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• 1. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds
• Backmatter