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Algernon Charles Swinburne was one of the most controversial literary figures of the
Victorian period. His first collection of poetry,
The eldest of six surviving children, Swinburne was born on 5 April 1837 into an
aristocratic High-Church family. His father Captain (later Admiral) Swinburne and his
mother Lady Jane (née Ashburnham) settled at East Dene, Bonchurch, on the Isle of
Wight, where Swinburne spent his childhood and developed his love of the sea. He
quickly showed a keen interest in literature, especially poetry, and his mother, a
gifted linguist, taught him French and Italian. Aged twelve, he entered Eton College
where he won the Prince Consort’s Prize for Modern Languages in 1852. However, the
larger part of his formal education was in the classics, which dominated the public
school curriculum at this time. His love of Greek literature, in particular the
lyrical fragments of Sappho first encountered at Eton, would have a lasting impact on
his poetry. His enduring sexual obsession with pain and flagellation also dates from
his school days, when discipline was commonly enforced by flogging, a
Swinburne left Oxford in 1860 without taking his final examinations and moved to
London, where he published two verse-plays as the collection
Swinburne’s only known sexual relationship was a brief affair in 1867 with the actress and poet Adah Menken (1835-1868), which was probably unconsummated. He frequented a flagellant brothel in St John’s Wood in 1868-1869. During the 1870s he suffered increasingly poor health due to alcoholism but was eventually rescued from an untimely death by his friend Theodore Watts (1832-1914) (Watts-Dunton after 1896), a solicitor and literary critic, who took him off to recuperate in Putney. The pair moved into No. 2 “The Pines,” where Swinburne lived peacefully for the rest of his life, protected by Watts, who weaned him off alcohol and kept him out of the way of his more disreputable acquaintances. He died on 10 April 1909.
Swinburne’s poetry after 1866 was much less sexually provocative although he never
managed to shrug off his early notoriety. His political passion for a reunified Italy
resulted in the revolutionary verse of
© 2011, Catherine Maxwell
Catherine Maxwell is Professor of Victorian Literature at Queen Mary, University of
London, and author of