John Addington Symonds

Although married with children, Symonds supported male love, which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, referring to it as l'amour de l'impossible (love of the impossible). He also wrote much poetry inspired by his same-sex affairs.

John Addington Symonds studied at Harrow School and University of Oxford. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is poetry, literary criticism and cultural history. Employment is recorded with Magdalen College. Works named in the authority record are A Problem in Greek Ethics and Renaissance in Italy. Work by John Addington Symonds is recorded in the collections of Minneapolis Institute of Art and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Distinctions recorded are Newdigate Prize.

Symonds was born in Bristol, England, in 1840. His father, the physician John Addington Symonds (1807–1871), was the author of Criminal Responsibility (1869), The Principles of Beauty (1857) and Sleep and Dreams. The younger Symonds, considered delicate, did not take part in games at Harrow School after the age of 14, and he showed no particular promise as a scholar. Symonds moved to Clifton Hill House at the age of ten, an event which he believed had a large and beneficial impact towards his health and spiritual development. Symonds's delicate condition continued, and as a child he suffered from nightmares in which corpses in and under his bed prompted sleepwalking; on one such occasion he was almost drowned when, sleepwalking in the attic of Clifton Hill House, he reached a cistern of rainwater. According to Symonds, an angel with "blue eyes and wavy, blonde hair" woke him and brought him to safety; this figure frequented Symonds's dreams and was potentially his first homosexual awakening. In January 1858, Symonds received a letter from his friend Alfred Pretor (1840–1908), telling of Pretor's affair with their headmaster at Harrow, Charles John Vaughan. Symonds was shocked and disgusted, feelings complicated by his growing awareness of his own homosexuality. He did not mention the incident for more than a year until in 1859, when a student at Oxford University, he told the story to John Conington, the Latin professor. Conington approved of romantic relationships between men and boys. Earlier, he had given Symonds a copy of Ionica, a collection of homoerotic verse by William Johnson Cory, the influential Eton College master and advocate of pederastic pedagogy. Conington encouraged Symonds to tell his father about his friend's affair, and the senior Symonds forced Vaughan to resign from Harrow. Pretor was angered by the younger man's part, and never spoke to Symonds again. In the autumn of 1858, Symonds went to Balliol College, Oxford, as a commoner but was elected to an exhibition in the following year. In spring of that same year, he fell in love with William Fear Dyer (1843–1905), a Bristol choirboy three years younger. They engaged in a chaste love affair that lasted a year, until broken up by Symonds. The friendship continued for several years afterwards, until at least 1864. Dyer became organist and choirmaster of St Nicholas Church, Bristol. At Oxford University, Symonds became engaged in his studies and began to demonstrate his academic ability. In 1860, he took a first in Mods and won the Newdigate prize with a poem on "The Escorial"; in 1862 he obtained a first in Literae Humaniores, and in 1863 won the Chancellor's English Essay. In 1862, Symonds was elected to an open fellowship at the conservative Magdalen College, Oxford. He made friends with a C. G. H. Shorting, whom he took as a private pupil. When Symonds refused to help Shorting gain admission to Magdalen, the younger man wrote to school officials alleging "that I [Symonds] had supported him in his pursuit of the chorister Walter Thomas Goolden (1848–1901), that I shared his habits and was bent on the same path." Although Symonds was officially cleared of any wrongdoing, he suffered a breakdown from the stress and shortly thereafter left the university for Switzerland.

In Switzerland, he met Janet Catherine North (sister of botanical artist Marianne North, 1830–1890). They married at Hastings on 10 November 1864. They settled in London and had four daughters: Janet (born 1865), Charlotte (born 1867), Margaret (Madge) (born 1869) and Katharine (born 1875; she was later honoured for her writing as Dame Katharine Furse). Edward Lear wrote "The Owl and the Pussycat" for the three-year-old Janet. • Illustration — Norman Moor While in Clifton in 1868, Symonds met and fell in love with Norman Moor (10 January 1851 – 6 March 1895), a youth about to go up to Oxford, who became his pupil. Symonds and Moor had a four-year affair but did not have sex, although according to Symonds's diary of 28 January 1870, "I stripped him naked and fed sight, touch and mouth on these things." The relationship occupied a good part of his time, including one occasion he left his family and travelled to Italy and Switzerland with Moor. The unconsummated affair also inspired his most productive period of composing poetry, published in 1880 as New and Old: A Volume of Verse.

Symonds intended to study law, but his health again broke down and forced him to travel. Returning to Clifton, he lectured there, both at the college and ladies' schools. From his lectures, he prepared the essays in his Introduction to the Study of Dante (1872) and Studies of the Greek Poets (1873–1876). Meanwhile, he was occupied with his major work, Renaissance in Italy, which appeared in seven volumes at intervals between 1875 and 1886. Since his prize essay on the Renaissance at Oxford, Symonds had wanted to study it further and emphasise the reawakening of art and literature in Europe. His work was interrupted by serious illness. In 1877 his life was in danger. His recovery at Davos Platz led him to believe this was the only place where he was likely to enjoy life. He henceforth made his home at Davos, and wrote about it in Our Life in the Swiss Highlands (1891). Symonds became a citizen of the town; he took part in its municipal business, made friends with the peasants, and shared their interests. There he wrote most of his books: biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1878), Philip Sidney (1886), Ben Jonson (1886) and Michelangelo (1893), several volumes of poetry and essays, and a translation of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1887). It is there that he also completed his study of the Renaissance, the work for which he is chiefly remembered. He was feverishly active throughout his life. Considering his poor health, his productivity was remarkable. Two works, a volume of essays, In the Key of Blue, and a monograph on Walt Whitman, were published in the year of his death. His activity was unbroken to the last. He had a passion for Italy, and for many years resided during the autumn in the house of his friend, Horatio F. Brown, on the Zattere, in Venice. In 1891 he made an effort to visit Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in L'Aquila. He died in Rome and was buried close to the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley. • Illustration — Symonds's tomb in Rome

• The Renaissance. An Essay (1863) • Miscellanies by John Addington Symonds, M.D.: Selected and Edited with an Introductory Memoir, by His Son (1871) • Introduction to the Study of Dante (1872); • Studies of the Greek Poets, 2 vol. (1873, 1876) • Renaissance in Italy, 7 vol. (1875–86) • Shelley (1878) • Sketches in Italy and Greece (London, Smith and Elder 1879) • Sketches and Studies in Italy (London, Smith and Elder 1879) • Animi Figura (1882) • Sketches in Italy (Selections prepared by Symonds, arranged, so as to, in his own words in a Prefatory Note, "adapt itself to the use of travellers rather than of students"; Leipzig, Bernhard Tauchnitz 1883) • A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) • Shakespere's Predecessors in the English Drama (1884) • New Italian Sketches (Bernard Tauchnitz: Leipzig, 1884) • Wine, Women, and Song. Medieval Latin Students' Songs (1884) English translations/paraphrases. • Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1887) An English translation. • A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891) • Our Life in the Swiss Highlands (1892) (with his daughter Margaret Symonds as coauthor) • Essays: Speculative and Suggestive (1893) • In the Key of Blue (1893) • The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1893) • Walt Whitman. A Study (1893) • with Havelock Ellis