Discovering John Addington Symonds

In 1861, John Addington Symonds, a twenty-one-year-old student at Oxford who already knew he loved and was attracted to men, hastily wrote out a seeming renunciation of the long love poem he’d written to another young man. In her book Outrages, Naomi Wolf chronicles the struggle and eventual triumph of Symonds—who would become a poet, biographer, and critic—at a time in British history when even private letters that could be interpreted as homoerotic could be used as evidence in trials leading to harsh sentences under British law.

The following is an excerpt from the book Outrages by Naomi Wolf. It has been adapted for the web.

I was at the Morgan Library and Museum looking for a young man, now long dead—a nineteen-year-old student at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1859, John Addington Symonds was deeply in love with a fellow adolescent whom, I knew, he had identified carefully only as “W.”

I was looking for the only handwritten manuscript of the unpublished love letter Symonds had written, which at once celebrated this teenage love and mourned its apparent renunciation.

The love letter took the form of a long poetic manuscript, written entirely in quatrains. Phyllis Grosskurth, who in 1964 had written a biography of Symonds titled The Woeful Victorian, had in passing described this love poem, as had others who knew about Symonds’s now largely forgotten work. The poem’s name is “In Memoriam Arcadie.”

John Addington Symonds

What had young Symonds meant by the title? In Greek mythology, “Arkady” is the rugged mountainous home of the god Pan, where human beings lived in harmony with the natural order. Pan was also the deity of unbridled sexual impulse, a mischief-maker, and a musician.

“In Memoriam” is Latin for “in the memory of,” a phrase used in elegies—that is, in verses written to say goodbye forever to lost loved ones. This nineteen-year-old, in other words, was signaling in his title that he was writing an elegy for a lost love, and a lost paradise.

But like much of Symonds’s most important writing, the love letter/poem had not been formally published during his lifetime. In fact, this work had never been published at all. And Symonds had made as sure as he could that a researcher would have to track this manuscript down in person and then supplicate a trusted custodian of the text in order to have a look at it.

He had continually buried his true meanings, even while leaving clues for their discovery.

Symonds’s undergraduate college was Balliol College, at the University of Oxford; his graduate college, at the same university, Magdalen. A hundred and fifty-five years later, I was a graduate student too, at New College, just a few streets away from both. My thesis adviser was Dr. Stefano-Maria Evangelista, who had written an influential book about Victorian homosexuality and the idea of the Greeks, called British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile.

One day, in the comfortable top-floor study at Trinity College where we met weekly so he could review my work, Dr. Evangelista handed me two immense volumes bound in a deep-olive-green fabric. There was a third volume waiting on his bookshelf, to be taken up when I was finished with the first two. The books contained the letters of someone of whom I had never heard—John Addington Symonds. “You should read these,” my professor had said.

This began a journey of five years of study, during which I grew increasingly fascinated with this elusive, tormented, world-changing character. The more I got to know John Addington Symonds through his letters, and the more I read about the men and women around him, the more present he seemed: in spite of the lapse of time between our lives, in Oxford especially, he often seemed to be just down the street; at times, when I was reading his letters in the Bodleian, the main research library at the University of Oxford, or the New College Library, his prescient voice seemed just a carrel away.

Every day, as I walked over the cobblestones leading out of New College, passed under the arched Bridge of Sighs, and went out along Broad Street, I saw Balliol’s neo-Gothic doorway on my right. I could glance in at the smooth lawns of the courtyard and at the gabled rooms where this love affair, between lovers who were just grown out of boyhood, had been carried out—and then, it seemed, been cut painfully short.

John Addington Symonds, his sister Charlotte Symonds Green, and the imperious Dr. Symonds, 1867.

In life, Symonds composed volumes and volumes—biographies, travel essays, books of verse, art criticism, translations, and textbooks. His letters alone, as I mentioned, constitute three massive tomes. He was, if anything, persistent in expressing himself. Nonetheless, he also insisted on silences. Symonds became the centerpiece of my 2015 doctoral thesis—but even after that was completed and handed in, I kept learning more about him from the astonishing clues that he had left behind for archivists and scholars.

Though little known today outside the academic disciplines of Victorian studies and queer studies, Symonds should have a far more prominent place in history. He can truly be identified as one of the fathers of the modern gay rights movement. He can even be called an originator of what we now understand as the modern identity of male homosexuality in the West. His insistence regarding how to think about love—and his demand that male-male love and attraction be recognized as innate, natural, and healthy, rather than as acquired “neuroses,” degeneracies, or diseases—helped craft our modern understanding of what it means to be a man who loves and desires other men.

Symonds would, until the very end of his life, use code to express his messages about love between men: he employed metaphors, misdirections, visual emblems, embargoed manuscripts, and lockboxes both rhetorical and real. He would spend his life creating and then hiding those true meanings, leaving signals for us, the men and women of the future, to decipher.

He tried to address the issue of men loving men in a wide range of genres: translating biographies and sonnets of homosexual artists such as Michelangelo Buonarroti and Benvenuto Cellini; composing a textbook of the lives of classical Greek poets; offering thinly veiled satire to a college journal; producing unpublished manifestos that scarcely saw the light of day; and publishing collections of love poems, using feminine pronouns to mask the true gender of the Beloved.

He tried to address the central issue of his life and work by publicly collecting art by a disgraced artist, and by publishing reviews to defend homosexual writers who were under attack.

He died relatively young. But by working assiduously for slightly more than three decades, he scattered deliberately into the future a set of seeds for a more progressive world than the one in which he lived—seeds of the world we now see around us, if we live in the West. Symonds tried to express his belief that sexual love between men was innate and natural before there were concepts, let alone language, to support this idea. He was one of the people who invented the language. He spoke in every way he could as doing so became more and more illegal.

Recommended Reads

Making Your Own Hope

All In the Question: What If We Started Asking Better Questions?