The Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne

Abstract

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) set out to challenge the proprieties of his Victorian contemporaries in every way: from the explicit sexuality and blasphemy of his early poetry to his political radicalism and his enthusiasms for such then uncanonical writers as Blake, Shelley and the Elizabethan dramatists surrounding Shakespeare. This edition gives new details about virtually all his literary undertakings (including his publishing income) and provides much new biographical information. For the first time too the texts of Swinburne's letters to and from his cousin Mary Gordon Leith appear, letters often written in a transparent code and using fictional personae that illuminate and intensify the curiously erotic, even flagellatory, relationship that appears to have existed between them. Among Swinburne's correspondents were such writers and artists as John Morley, Simeon Solomon, Lord Tennyson, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel, Christina, and William Michael) and William Morris. Other correspondents represented include Swinburne's companion Theodore Watts-Dunton, his publisher Chatto and Windus, his mother, sisters, and aunt, and such friends as John Nichol and George Powell. The appearance of these volumes moves Swinburne studies a significant step forward. They will no doubt stimulate even further the accelerating critical and scholarly interest in a notorious poet whose works even today are sometimes controversial enough that the editor, working in Virginia, needed permission from the state to quote and annotate some of Swinburne's poems and letters with excerpts from his unpublished erotica.