1840–1893
○ Died
Renaissance historian and poet who co-authored Sexual Inversion with Havelock Ellis
He defended “Greek love” in A Problem in Greek Ethics (1873), and Sexual Inversion, written with Ellis, became in 1897 the first English medical textbook on homosexuality.
A British poet, critic and cultural historian from a Bristol physician’s family, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He made his name with the seven-volume Renaissance in Italy (1875–1886) and from 1877 lived at Davos in Switzerland for his health. Married with four daughters, he supported male love, defending Greek love in A Problem in Greek Ethics (1873). Sexual Inversion, written with Havelock Ellis, appeared in English in 1897 as the first medical textbook on homosexuality. He died in Rome in 1893.
Activities and affiliations
-
1862–1893
Scholarship and theory
Related historical events
“Greek love” and Sexual Inversion
In 1858, at Harrow, he was shocked by a friend’s letter describing an affair with the headmaster Charles John Vaughan, even as he was becoming aware of his own homosexuality. At Oxford the Latin professor John Conington, who approved of romantic relationships between men and boys, gave him William Johnson Cory’s homoerotic verse and encouraged him to tell his father, who forced Vaughan to resign. In 1864 he married Janet Catherine North, with whom he had four daughters, but from 1868 a four-year attachment to his pupil Norman Moor in Clifton inspired his most productive period of poetry.
In 1873 he wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics, a work of what would later be called gay history. Inspired by Walt Whitman, this “most exhaustive eulogy of Greek love” lay unpublished for a decade and then appeared only in a limited edition for private distribution; in it he used the word “homosexual” before the 1892 instance credited by the Oxford English Dictionary. In poems such as “The Meeting of David and Jonathan” (1878) and in translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets that restored the male pronouns earlier editors had changed, he made some of the first direct references to male love in English literature. In 1891 he tried to visit Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.
Sexual Inversion, written with Havelock Ellis, appeared in German in 1896 and in English the next year, the first English medical textbook on homosexuality; it did not treat homosexuality as a disease, immoral or a crime, but Symonds’s executor bought out the first edition and forbade any mention of him in the second. He died in Rome in 1893 and was buried near Shelley. His memoirs, written in 1889–1893, are the earliest known self-conscious gay autobiography, though in 1926 Edmund Gosse burned all his other papers.