"Let JAS words stand": Publishing John Addington Symonds's Desires

Abstract

By now, the basic history of John Addington Symonds's Memoirs is fairly familiar to scholars of Victorian literary culture—perhaps all too familiar, judging from the swiftness with which Christopher Craft sums it up: "[W]ritten between 1889 and 1891 in a fever of self- disclosure, consigned immediately thereafter to the closet, not to see public light until the Grosskurth edition of 1984" (1). Symonds did undertake the Memoirs rather feverishly. Having translated the autobiographies of Benvenuto Cellini and Carlo Gozzi from 1886 through 1889, the English translator, historian, and man of letters found himself "infected...with their Lues Autobiographica"—their autobiographical plague—and in March 1889 began "scribbling [his] own reminiscences" (Letters 3: 364), composing a lengthy and large manuscript detailing his lifelong struggle to comprehend and accept his homosexuality. But since 1891 the Memoirs have not simply passed through successively less private realms and into the public eye, from confession to concealment to revelation. For one thing, Symonds's self-disclosing manuscript has been neither completely closeted nor completely revealed, its secrets neither silenced nor spoken fully. Substantial portions of the Memoirs appeared in [End Page 7] Horatio Forbes Brown's 1895 biography of Symonds, and much more reached the public through Phyllis Grosskurth's edition. But nearly one- third of the manuscript remains unpublished; moreover, because of the nature of the 1984 edition, this unpublished material's absence is virtually invisible, a fact which, inevitably, has shaped scholarly treatment of the Memoirs.