THE John Addington Symonds Project (JASP) aims to investigate the life and work of Victorian scholar and writer John Addington Symonds (1840–1893). Among his many works, Symonds wrote and privately printed two essays: A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883), one of the first modern studies of Ancient Greek sexuality, and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), which brought the word “homosexual,” recently coined in German, into English-language print for the very first time. Both essays had a significant influence on the emerging movement for gay rights.

As part of the Classics Research Lab (CRL) at Johns Hopkins University, the John Addington Symonds Project aims to examine Symonds’s studies of classical antiquity and his pioneering work on sexuality. Like other CRL projects, JASP also seeks to provide a model for collaborative research between students and faculty in the humanities.

On this site you will find a digital edition of the revised version of A Problem in Greek Ethics (published as part of the first, suppressed edition of Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion, 1897), as well as the first-ever publicly shared scan of the earlier, privately printed 1883 version (from a copy recently acquired by Johns Hopkins—one of only six known to survive!).

You will also find the results of our ongoing effort to reassemble digitally the contents of Symonds’s personal library, dispersed after his death. Our aim is to catalogue and explore the texts that influenced his groundbreaking work.