Almost everyone has thought, at one point in their life, that they’ve been gifted with the art of literacy, and has wanted to rush to bring their story into the world. For some, the hardest part is actually writing the story down, in all its completeness. For others, it’s trying not to write too much, having too many plot points for any reasonable tale. However, the final hurdle is trying to get published in order to bring your book to the general public. Sure, your dad might say your book is interesting, but he’s not a publishing company.

Now imagine a world where the most difficult part of getting published wasn’t whether your book was boring, or poorly written, or simply didn’t suit the publisher’s image. Imagine the content was downright illegal. Imagine that going through the usual channels would put you in jail, so you’re forced to seek out a personal printer, fund the publishing endeavor yourself with patron donations, and publish the story under a pseudonym, even claim a fake address for your fake publishing company.

That was the case for men like John Addington Symonds and Richard Francis Burton, one trying to print the story of his life, living semi-secretly as a homosexual (importing the term in German in A Problem in Modern Ethics), the other being a little too interested in Latin erotica. Both men died before or soon after their books were published, so they couldn’t be arrested anyway. But Burton put a lot of effort into circumventing the law to get the dirty poems of the Priapeia into the hands of his friends and patrons in a fully translated book.

The Priapeia was a collection of 80 erotic Latin poems credited to the god Priapus, whose statues were placed in gardens as a protective measure against theft. He couldn’t strike a thief down with lightning, like Zeus, but he could make them his next sexual pursuit, and with his statues being inhumanly endowed, that was threat enough (as explained in poem XVI). Though the poems are in the voice of the god himself, some people believe they were likely composed by a single poet, but others think a group of people may have composed the poems. Some of these possible authors include Ovid, known for works such as Metamorphoses and Amores, and Catullus, whose many poems vacillate between ridiculous lamenting and threats of sodomy, such as in poem 16, where he threatens to have sex with two men, Aurelius and Furius, for questioning his manhood.

I will make you my boys and bone you, sexually submissive Aurelius and Furius the sodomite, who think, because my verses are voluptuous, that I am not chaste enough. For it is right that a poet be chaste himself; it is not at all necessary for his verses to be. My verses, in a word, may have a spice and charm, if they are voluptuous and not chaste enough, and because they are sexy and can arouse—I do not say boys—but this hairy pair who can’t shake their stiffies. Because you have read of many thousand kisses, do you think me less a man? I will make you my boys and bone you!

“C. Valerius Catullus, Carmina, Poem 16.” n.d. Perseus Project. Accessed April 18, 2023.

Many of these poems are obviously obscene, containing subjects such as sexual assault, unreasonably large phalluses, public indecency, and many more sexually explicit and violent behaviors. For example, poem V, where a wooden Priapus claims his inanimate status won’t stop him from chasing and catching a girl.

Another example is in poem VIII, where Priapus defends his blatant public indecency, by comparing his nether regions to Poseidon’s trident and Zeus’ thunderbolts—if they can have their weapons out why can’t he?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there, he proceeds to threaten yet another person with sodomy in poem X, this time claiming to have 12 impractical inches to his name.

Others are slightly more “censored,” less like pornographic poems and more like dirty jokes, such as Priapus complaining about thieves being kept from his garden, and thus his retribution in poem XVI.

Similarly, he brags about his endowment in poem XVII.

Finally there is the example of a poor thief lamenting his punishment over stealing a cabbage in poem XXXIII.

Among these poems there are even stranger subjects that can only be loosely tied to the overall theme, such as the begging of an old woman in XI:

What does it mean that these ancient poems of unclear authorship, ranging from pornographic to humorous, found new life in a London printing press centuries later? Even more, what does it mean that a man like Burton went to the most extreme of lengths to get these ancient dirty jokes to his friends, even if he’d passed away by the time they were distributed? At the very least, both Ancient roman and Victorian British men enjoyed being vulgar in the safety of ink and paper (papyrus).

Even more than that, why would someone have to sneak around in the shadows to get their Latin erotica printed? Especially one that didn’t even include pictures? That answer lies in 19th century Britain, a country swamped in unhealthy levels of sexual repression. From about 1820 to 1900, Britain was in its Victorian phase, where the upper class turned their noses up to such things as “pornography” and “sexual intimacy,” but everyone was secretly really interested. Women were expected to be innocent, doe-eyed creatures who’d never even heard of intercourse, yet men were expected to be experienced, the classic double standard that not only still exists today, but also continues to create strife among men and women. So you’re presented with a newly bolstered middle class, hailing themselves as morally upright citizens, while someone’s brother has a copy of the Priapeia hidden away in their bookcase.

Burton specifically was a man who took Victorian Britain’s prudishness as a personal challenge, venturing out into the world to not only experience what he thought was a healthier relationship with sex, but also going out of his way to translate erotica and bring it from the Mediterranean to Britain’s scandalized shores.

Bibliography

Brodie, Fawn McKay. 1967. The Devil Drives; a Life of Sir Richard Burton. New York: W. W. Norton.

Elomaa, Heather Elaine. n.d. “The Poetics of the ‘Carmina Priapea.’”http://archive.org/details/devildriveslifeo0000brod.

Fuente, Ariel de la. 2018. “Sir Richard Burton’s Orientalist Erotica: The Thousand Nights and a Night and The Perfumed Garden.” In Borges, Desire, and Sex, 84–108. Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvhn09p9.9.

Kenney, E. J. 1963. “Corpvs Non Ita Vile.” Edited by Vinzenz Buchheit. The Classical Review 13 (1): 72–74.

Priapeia Or the Sportive Epigrams of Divers Poets On Priapus: the Latin Text Now for the First Time Englished In Verse and Prose (the Metrical Version by “outidanos”) with Introduction, Notes Explanatory and Illustrative, and Excursus by “neaniskos.”. Cosmopoli: Printed by the Translators … for Private Subscribers Only, 1890. (physical copy consulted from the Johns Hopkins special collections of Sheriden Libraries)

Priapeia, or the Sportive epigrams of divers poets on Priapus: the Latin text now for the first time Englished in verse and prose-the metrical version by “Outidanos” [i.e. Sir Richard F. Burton]-with introduction, notes explanatory and illustrative, and excursus, by “Neaniskcs” [i.e. Leonard C. Smithers]. [The prose versions also by L. C. Smithers.]. N.p., 1890. Archives of Sexuality and Gender, link.gale.com/apps/doc/IKYEAF496689898/AHSI?u=balt85423&sid=gale_marc&xid=243378e5&pg=57. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Robert Needham Cust. 1895. Linguistic and Oriental Essays Written from the Year 1870 to 1901. Trübner & Company. http://archive.org/details/bub_gb_RhYYAAAAYAAJ.

A large part of who we are comes from the influence of our environment, and this environment includes the media we consume. While we may have the internet and social media today, some of the main forms of media back in the day of John Addington Symonds were newspapers, letters, and, of course, books. As a wealthier member of society, he had both the time and the resources to access and read many books, and that he did. Thus, I thought it would be interesting to try to dive into some of the books we know passed through his collection to try to understand a little of how these media impacted him.

To a degree, we already know how some of the media Symonds consumed impacted him. In his Memoirs, he notes how stories of male heroes as well as Greek sculptures helped to open his eyes to the reality that he didn’t share the heterosexual attractions and desires of many of his peers, but that his attractions were a little more taboo. He also turned to books to help him understand and explain these desires as he got older, especially returning to the Greeks and their stories. And, of course, even besides helping him understand himself and his sexuality, books were important for Symonds in that he was also a prolific author.

With the transition of Symonds’ collection to Hathi Trust comes the ability to search for keywords within the texts he owned that are available here. This enables me to investigate his collection using keywords to get a general sense of the books that he was reading and the effect they may in turn have had on his thinking and writing. I thought it would be informative to look up antithetical words and see how many of the books in his collection contain them at least once.

The pair of opposites I looked up were “hopeless” and “hopeful,” which, of the 535 works in the collection when I searched for the words, brought up 293 and 154 results respectively, or in percentages, 54.8% and 28.8% respectively. I think it’s fascinating to see that “hopeless” appears in almost twice as many works as “hopeful” and is in fact present in a little over half of the collection. I think this is a very interesting find, and I wonder how much this influenced any actual negative, or even hopeless, feelings in his life.

One concern in this search is that some of the findings for the terms may just be for common things like “I’m hopeful you get better soon,” whereas hopeless is more likely to be used in texts suiting its definition. Thus, I randomly selected ten of the texts generated by each of the searches to see how the terms were generally used.

Although it is true that “hopeful” was often used in relatively mundane contexts, there were still a couple of examples of it being used a little more fittingly, including in one place in Frederic William Farrar’s Seekers After God. Although the quote is describing the legacy of Marcus Aurelius to the people of Rome after his death, its use of “hopeful” is one of the few truer uses of the word.

We are not surprised that all…felt themselves more hopeful and more happy from the glorious sense of possibility which was inspired by the memory of one who…showed himself so wise, so great, so good a man.

Frederic William Farrar, Seekers After God, 275

Conversely, however, I also found usages of “hopeful” in contexts that were actually more hopeless. Towards the end of The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, the book uses “hopeful” in a scene where there is little to be found, as it’s used in reference to his wife’s vain hope of his prevailing over his illness at the end of his life.

His wife, almost exhausted with anxious watching, looked vainly for any hopeful symptom. One day his fine sense perceived that mortification had set in…and [he] spoke of his approaching end with composure, saying ‘he feared not to die, but he was afraid lest the pangs of death should be so grievous that he might lose his understanding.’

Julius Lloyd, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 216

When looking through the works containing usages of “hopeless,” although I also found a few instances of more mundane usage, it much more often carried a negative tone more true to its meaning than the usages of “hopeful” did a positive one.

Thus, at least in terms of the contrast of these two words, it could be said that the books in Symonds’ library were more negative than positive, although it’s still uncertain whether this itself influenced any “hopeless” feelings in him, or if maybe he bought and read them because he was simply already feeling this way (or maybe neither).

I think an interesting further analysis would be to go through the works that these words occur in and see when Symonds read and/or owned them. This might tell us if, for example, the larger prevalence of “hopeless” in his collection compared to “hopeful” was true of maybe his earlier collection but maybe not so much his collection closer to his death. Either way, I think this is a fascinating way to dive deeper into his literary influences in a way that was pretty much impossible until now, and hopefully it reveals new insights into Symonds and his work.

Works Cited

Farrar, Frederic William. Seekers After God. Macmillan, 1884.

Lloyd, Julius. The Life of Sir Philip Sidney. Longman, 1862.

This semester in the lab, we have been working on putting a collection of books owned/read by John Addington Symonds together in HathiTrust. At the time of writing this, our current collection is 427 books. Something so amazing about having these books together in one place is that you can search for a word or phrase in all of the books at the same time. While playing around with this feature, I decided to plug in the word religion and was rather surprised to find out that out of the 427 books, 341 of them mention religion. 

From there I wanted to know more so I dived into both The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, edited by Amber K. Regis, as well as John Addington Symonds: A Biography Compiled from His Papers and Correspondence, edited by Horatio F. Brown. As well as learning more about the Crisis of Faith that occurred in the 19th century, I stumbled across an episode that had Symonds contemplating suicide. In fact, he called this the worst night of his whole life, his last night in Cannes in 1868.

I hope to answer one question: how did this night transform his views on religion? 

The last night I spent in Cannes was the worst of my whole life. I lay awake motionless, my soul stagnant, feeling what is meant by spiritual blackness and darkness. If it should last forever! As I lay, a tightening approached my heart. It came nearer, the grasp grew firmer, I was cold and lifeless in the clutch of a great agony. If this were death? Catherine, who kept hold of me, seemed far away. I was alone, so utterly desolate that I drank the very cup of the terror of the grave. The Valley of the Shadow was opened, and the shadow lies still upon my soul.

– Memiors, 342

What drew me in is that this seems to be a turning point in Symonds’ life, especially when it comes to religion. 

Symonds later wrote when reflecting on this night,

I emerged at last into Stoical acceptance of my place in the world, combined with Epicurean indulgence of my ruling passion for the male. Together, these two motives restored me to comparative health, gave me religion, and enabled me, in spite of broken nerves and diseased lungs, to do what I have done in literature. I am certain of this fact; and I regard the utter blackness of despair at Cannes as the midnight in which there lay a budding spiritual morrow.

– Memiors, 341

Here is Brown’s edited version,

I emerged at last into stoical acceptance of my place in the world, combined with epicurean indulgence. Together, these two motivates restored me to comparative health, gave me religion, and enabled me, in spite of broken nerves and diseased lungs, to do what I have done in literature. I am certain of this face, and I regard the utter blackness of despair at Cannes as the midnight in which there lay a budding spiritual morrow.

–John Addington Symonds: a Biography, 245

One thing about the above quote that is important to note is that Brown’s version removes the line “of my ruling passion for the male,” which in a way exaggerates Symonds’ crisis as being only religious, when in fact it is one due to the coexistence of his sexual and religious dilemmas. But though Brown imposes this interpretation, religion seems to have been important to Symonds regardless. For example, he had his mother’s prayer book by him on his deathbed in 1893, though of course, this could have been for sentimental reasons or religious ones.

This horrible experience was compensated with a newfound belief. A “budding spiritual morrow” is the result of his acceptance of this sexual desire, which contributed to a more positive religious state. It was a night that led him to a freer form of religion, unlike the evangelical Protestantism in which his family raised him (a religion he said suffocated his soul). He wrote,

[Later on, I found the affirmation of religion and contentment in love—not the human kindly friendly love which I had given liberally to my beloved wife and children, my father and my sister and my companions, but in the passionate sexual love of comrades.] Through the whole of my malady and my discourses on it, I had omitted the word Love. That was because I judged my own sort of love to be sin. But when, in the stage of indifference, I became careless about sinning, then, and not until then, I discovered love, the keystone of all the rest of my less tortured life.

– Memiors, 344 (the bracketed portion was marked for deletion in the manuscript, Brown did not reproduce it)

Another important factor that I believe influenced Symonds’ spiritual identity is the 19th-century Crisis of Faith. There was a rise of Biblical criticism, expansion of scientific knowledge (for example, the rise in popularity of Darwin, about whom Symonds’ wrote), and increased exposure of Europeans to other religions. Symonds was also in a very delicate time in his life at this point: he was in his twenties and finding his way. In a letter to his friend W. R. W. Stephens in 1867, he gives some reasons he is not a believer. Two of these are that he can’t acknowledge any principles from which God’s presence can be proved and he is incapable of ascending to ideals as he believes in facts and evidence. As he studied different religions like Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, he came to believe that the deities of all races are the ideal of the people that worship them. Pretty clearly, as a human of the 19th century, these ideals influenced Symonds tremendously, and his night at Cannes pushed him over the edge. 

Once he became indifferent to his old beliefs, he was able to be himself freely (as freely as he could) and live a better version of his life. Here is how Symonds’ biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, summarizes what he learned from this night at Cannes,

The experience at Cannes has tellingly revealed to him that peace would elude him as long as he resisted his own nature.

–John Addington Symonds: a Biography, 127

Citations:

Symonds, John Addington, and Amber K Regis. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds : a Critical Edition.London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Symonds, John Addington, and Horatio F Brown. John Addington Symonds: a Biography. London: J. C. Nimmo, 1895.

Bradstock, Andrew. Masculinity and Spirituality In Victorian Culture. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press , 2000.

Meyer, D. H. “American Intellectuals and the Victorian Crisis of Faith.” American Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 5, 1975, pp. 585–603.

Grosskurth, Phyllis. John Addington Symonds: a Biography. [London]: Longmans, 1964.

Throughout the first volume of Symonds’s Letters, Symonds rarely writes about leaving a book unfinished. Often, Symonds discusses how engaged he is in his reading, from describing how “enchanted” he was with Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge to how he “devoured” Collins’s Woman in White (Letters, 158, 242). There are moments when Symonds describes a book as difficult, with one example being Spinoza’s infamously incomprehensible Ethics, but even then, he says that he reads it with “great labour, interest, & profit” (Letters, 296). The picture that the Letters paint of Symonds is a man deeply in love with his books.

This tone is somewhat to be expected. After all, these are the letters that Symonds sent to his friends and family; why would he talk about the books that bored him? Given how prolific Symonds was as a reader, many of the books he did not finish most likely would not have made their way into his Letters. So when Symonds mentions a book in his Letters that was so terrifying that he had to stop reading it, that book merits some attention.

That book is The Life and Death of Silas Barnstake by Talbot Gwynne¹, which Symonds writes about in a letter to his father. Of the book, Symonds writes the following:

In the evening we had a great fright. We had got a book called Silas Barnstake by Gwynne from the Library, & I began to read it out. It was the most horrible beginning all about dying people, & winter’s nights, & diabolically hard hearted little boys, so that we had to relinquish it. But its lugubrious influence remained, & we fell to talking “ghosts,” robbers, etc. At last Edith was worked up to a climax, & said she could not sleep in her room (which was the best room, on the drawing room floor, with no one beneath her), & that she & I must exchange.   

Letters, 162

In this letter, Symonds recalls a night of reading with his oldest sister Edith while staying in Edinburgh. According to the story, Symonds borrowed the book (presumably from the house library), read the book out loud, and stopped after he and Edith were frightened by the beginning of the book and its talk of “dying people, winter’s nights, & diabolically hard hearted little boys.” However, after they stopped and returned the book, they could not stop thinking about it, leading them to discuss it and other “scary” topics such as ghosts and robbers until, at some point, Edith was so scared that she could no longer sleep in her room and asked a young Symonds to swap rooms with her for the night.

At first glance, Symonds’s and Edith’s experience in this letter feels like a common childhood response to reading a scary story: they read it, they were scared by it, and they were unable to stop thinking about it to the point that it prevented them from sleeping normally. If Symonds and his sister were children at the time of this letter, then this would seem to be a normal response. However, this letter was written on September 28^th, 1858. For reference, Symonds was born in 1840 and started at Oxford in 1858, close to the time that this letter was written (Memoirs, 169). Meanwhile, we know that Edith, Symonds’s “eldest sister,” is at least 20 at the time of this letter² (Memoirs, 181). Rather than a story of two young children responding to a scary book, the incident described in the letter involves an Oxford student and his 20-odd-year-old sister being so terrified of a book that the older sister had to ask her 18-year-old brother to swap rooms with her. While such an event is not impossible by any means, it is undoubtedly strange.

What about The Life and Death of Silas Barnstake managed to scare the two of them so much? And how should we interpret their fear? Just from the letter, it is impossible to tell exactly how far into the book Symonds read that night. However, the three aspects he mentions, “dying people, winter’s nights, & diabolically hard hearted little boys,” all appear within the first twenty pages of the book, which detail Silas’s mother dying from childbirth, his father dying from grief, and Silas’s separation from his little brother Walter (Gwynne, 1-20). What is strange about these first twenty pages in relation to Symonds’s story is that they do not seem to be scary in a traditional sense. For example, the description of a winter’s night starts off the book, as Gwynne writes, “The night was dark – dark with the melancholy, mysterious blackness of a winter midnight, and so still that distant sounds seemed near at hand” (Gwynne, 1). The note about diabolically hard-hearted little boys seems to reference Silas’s cold character, especially in relation to his grieving father and Silas’s “thoughtless questions and remarks” (Gwynne, 7). Finally, there are two descriptions of death within the first twenty pages, one being Silas’s mother’s death and the other his father’s. However, these descriptions seem grim and sad, as opposed to something that would inspire fear or terror. Consider the following passages:

[Edmund Barnstake] stept [sic] up to the bed where lay his wife: she feebly put forth her hand. He took it in his, which were cold and trembling. His words choked him: to speak was, to him, impossible.

The night was over, day was breaking, and the snow still fell from the clouds; the clouds that hung so low, that were so sad-looking, grey, dark, and heavy.

The light still burned in the room where throughout the night Barnstake had watched, or wearily slept. The cull light of morning struggled with that of the candle, giving a melancholy air to the large low room, and seeming to add to the chilly cold of the now fireless chamber.

Barnstake sat before his table, his arms folded and resting on it, whilst his face was buried in his arms.

He remained motionless for hours, with teeth tight set, and brows knit closely together; whilst a mown burst from him at rare intervals.

In the room above, behind the closed curtains of the ponderous, dark bed, lay the clay-cold body of his wife.

A sound rang through the still air and smote his ear.

It was the tolling of the church bell, announcing that a soul had passed away.

Gwynne, 4-5

Delirium soon seized him, during which he raved of the happy days of his love, nor seemed once to dream of his loss and sorrow. For many days, for many nights, he raved, muttered, and wearily tossed in his burning bed.

A fortnight after the burial of his wife, [Edmund] Barnstake, an unconscious corpse, was placed beside her. He had died without recovering the senses which pain and fever had scared away. Thus, within but a brief space of time, were Silas and his little brother left orphans.

Gwynne, 17

Examining the prose, none of it fits what today would be considered “scary.” The descriptions of the sky and Silas’s uncompassionate nature are not only strange candidates for something “scary,” especially for two people eighteen and above, but are also extremely short, to the point that it would be difficult to imagine them inducing terror. Meanwhile, the descriptions of death are undoubtedly saddening (which explains Symonds’s use of the term “lugubrious”), but not fear-inducing. So why does Symonds express his night reading The Life and Death of Silas Barnstake as “a great fright?”

What makes slightly more sense here is to interpret Symonds’s fear not as terror, but as a sort of existential dread. After all, Symonds’s mother died of scarlet fever when he was only four (Memoirs, 63). Maybe Gwynne’s descriptions of death were a little too familiar, either raising memories of their mother or worries about the possible death of their father. Symonds also acknowledges that talk of his mother was scant during his childhood and that his father “showed no outward sign of grief, and said nothing” about his mother’s death (Memoirs, 63-64). This reluctance might have represented a taboo regarding discussions of mourning and familial death. Gwynne’s descriptions would then have personally resonated for Symonds and his sister, on a topic that they had for a long time avoided.

While this interpretation is stronger, it does not yet account for Symonds’s own feelings about his mother’s death. Symonds notes in the Memoirs that he has no “distinct memory” of his mother and that he had not “exactly felt the loss of her” (Memoirs, 63-64). Instead, Symonds describes his feelings around his mother’s death as a sort of “vague awe” at the “mystery” of death (Memoirs, 64). With his mother’s death occurring so early in Symonds’s life, Symonds’s impassionate tone here makes some sense. However, Symonds’s feelings are not completely opposed to this interpretation. For example, Symonds’s lack of connection with his own mother explains why Edith’s response to reading Silas Barnstake was much more powerful than his, as she almost certainly had more experience with their mother due to her elder status. Nevertheless, the question of why Symonds was affected so much despite that lack of connection remains unanswered.

One interesting possibility is that it is precisely that lack of connection that led Symonds to resonate with Silas Barnstake to such an extent. In the Memoirs, Symonds himself laments that he lacked that connection with his mother, worrying that he was “heartless and sinful” because he did not feel more (Memoirs, 64). Even though Symonds admits that those feelings were irrational due to that lack of physical connection, it is apparent that, when it came to writing the Memoirs, some of those thoughts stuck with him. These thoughts might explain why he found Gwynne’s “hard hearted little boys” so troubling. He might have seen a reflection of himself in the character of Silas Barnstake, a young boy, uncaring and dispassionate despite the death of someone close to him. It most certainly was not a positive reflection of Symonds’s character, which might have been why he decided to stop.

There are some parts of the story that are still unexplained. For example, why does Symonds makes note explicitly of the descriptions of night –which, while vivid, do not evoke the same sense of dread that the descriptions of death do? Why did Symonds and Edith, after being reminded of the death of their mother and facing a feeling of existential dread, choose to discuss “robbers” and “ghosts” (Letters, 162)? These questions are left unanswered. So, for a reader as prolific as Symonds, the reason why he stopped reading The Life and Death of Silas Barnstake is still up for interpretation.

It is very possible that Symonds’s story in this letter and The Life and Death of Silas Barnstake are insignificant blips in the story of Symonds’s life. However, to note a book in a letter, especially one to a parental figure, implies that the book held some significance, and, for a reader like Symonds who writes prolifically about how engaged he becomes with the texts that he reads, the one text that he not only drops within a night but notes to his father raises a few questions. The possibility that the reason he stopped was that the book and its rather mild prose evoked an overwhelming sense of terror or dread while he and his sister were both above the age of 18 raises a few more.

¹ Talbot Gwynne is a masculine pseudonym used by Josepha Heath Gulston. As the gender of Talbot Gwynne/Josepha Heath Gulston is unclear, for the purposes of this blog post, I have avoided using any gendered pronouns in describing them.

² Symonds notes that another one of his elder sisters, Mary Isabella (Maribella), was born in 1837 (Memoirs, 68). As Symonds describes Edith as his eldest sister, we know that Edith was born at earliest in 1837, meaning that she was around 20 in 1858 when this letter was written.

Gwynne, Talbot. The Life and Death of Silas Barnstake: A Story of the Seventeenth Century. Smith, Elder, & Co. London, 1853. Accessed https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiuo.ark:/13960/t77t0ww4h

Symonds, John Addington. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, edited by Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters, vol. 1, Wayne State University Press, 1967.

Symonds, John Addington. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, edited by Amber K. Regis, Palgrave Macmillan Publishing. London, 2016.

Network theory, also commonly referred to as graph theory, uses graphs to represent relations between distinct objects, whether those be people, neurons, companies, or even abstract concepts. Due to its versatility, network theory can be applied to a variety of fields such as sociology, neuroscience, operations research, and public health, and offers an efficient way for researchers to visualize and analyze all the connections among one’s objects of interest.

As part of the John Addington Symonds Project, I have been working with one of my peers, Kendra Brewer, on building a network of people surrounding John Addington Symonds. We used The Memoirs to compile a list of people who had an impact on Symonds’s life, both directly and indirectly. We included the people that he interacted with in real life, but we also included those who he never met but who still inspired him and influenced his work, such as authors, ancient philosophers, and mythological figures.

We grouped the people based on their relationships with Symonds, using the categories “Family,” “Ancestor,” “Friend / Colleague,” “Amour / Comrade,” “The Stranger,” “General Acquaintance,” “Inspiration,” and “Other.” “Family” includes relatives of Symonds by blood or marriage with whom Symonds had in-person contact, “Ancestor” includes relatives of Symonds who were dead before his time, “Friend / Colleague” includes people that Symonds was close to, “Amour / Comrade” includes people who had a romantic and/or sexual relationship with Symonds, “The Stranger” includes people with whom Symonds did not have a romantic or sexual relationship but about whom he fantasized, “Inspiration” includes those whose work inspired Symonds, and the “Other” category includes anyone who did not fit into any of the above-mentioned categories. The following figure depicts a breakdown of the different groups shown in the data we collected from The Memoirs.

In basic network theory, a graph is defined as a collection of nodes and edges, where an edge represents a connection between two nodes. In this case, we defined the nodes as people, and every edge signified the existence of a relationship between people. The original dataset focused mostly on the relationship each person had with Symonds and not necessarily on the relationships they had with each other, so we arbitrarily sub-sampled a few notable figures from The Memoirs and Symonds’s Letters to construct a preliminary graph representation of Symonds’s network. We chose people whose relationships with one another can be clearly inferred from our sources, and we used Palladio [1], a web-based data visualization tool developed by the Humanities + Design Lab at Stanford University.

Our sub-sampled graph provides a good partial visualization of Symonds’s network, but there is much room for improvement. Palladio does not allow for much manipulation of network features such as node color, edge color, or edge thickness, which would be a very effective visual aid to the user. The nodes could be colored based on location or profession, the edges could be colored based on the relationship categories as defined above, and edge thickness could represent how close two people were. There are several ways we could quantify closeness, such as the number of mentions in The Memoirs or the number of letters sent between two people. It may be necessary to create a scale with bins, where a certain thickness corresponds to a range of the number of mentions/letters. For example, we could define the transformation such that 10 to 20 mentions correspond to a “closeness” value of 2, 20 to 30 mentions correspond to a “closeness” value of 3, and so on. Thus, it would be interesting to see if we could add any extensions or make any modifications to the program that would allow the user to change various network features as they see fit, making the program more interactive and flexible.

Once we have a more robust graph that can represent a larger dataset effectively, there are several ways we could characterize the network, such as finding the largest connected component, which is defined as the largest subgraph where the nodes are all connected to one another; this component would represent the largest community in which everyone was connected to one another. Or we could find triangle subgraphs in the network, which would tell us if there were any trios that maintained strong communication. We could also try clustering the nodes in the network based on various metrics, to see whether they would cluster differently from their original categories.

There are many creative methods we could use to analyze the network once it has more visually identifiable features as well as more information on not just how the people are related to Symonds but how they are related to each other. The results might act as additional evidence to simply reinforce the knowledge we already have about Symonds’s network or they could shed light on some new connections and communities. I hope future cohorts will be able to build on the basic network that we have created, to unveil novel information from a new, more mathematical perspective.

Works Cited

[1] Stanford University Digital Humanities, “Palladio,” https://digitalhumanities.stanford.edu/palladio.

After spending time thinking about Symonds’s name and family history in my previous post (entitled “What’s in a name?”), I decided to continue along the same theme with this one. Within the Johns Hopkins University Special Collections Library appears a copy of Agamemnon: A Tragedy taken from Aeschylus that was translated by Edward FitzGerald and owned by both Symonds and William W. Gay, as evidenced by their bookplates in this copy. This book and the bookplates found within it offer several branches of research. One is Symonds’s relationship to the text itself, which has already been explored in a post by another student (visible here). Another branch explores which of these men owned this book first and thus who was given it “With the publisher’s compliments”–a manuscript inscription that appears on the front endpaper. This mystery was solved after I had the chance to read a letter, laid into this copy, from the publisher, Bernard Quaritch, to William W. Gay, dated November 5, 1912. In this letter, Quaritch explains the differences between the edition of FitzGerald’s Agamemnon that was privately printed in 1865 and the one Quaritch himself published in 1876. The fact that this letter was written nearly two decades after Symonds’s death and Gay’s need for this explanation suggest that Symonds was the original owner of this book. While this is fascinating information, as a student of art history, I was most interested in studying the bookplate itself.

The first step to deciphering this heraldic symbol was to understand the different elements represented on the bookplate. The Handbook to English Heraldry by Charles Boutell served as a resource for this research. Using this book, I learned not only the different colors and metals present on Symonds’s coat of arms but also the terms and some histories for the different heraldic symbols. To give a brief overview of terminology, coat of arms refers to “a complete armorial composition” (Boutell 1914, 109). This encompasses not only the shield of arms or shield, which derives its name from the battle-shields that would have once been decorated, but also the helm or helmet and the crest both of which are found atop the shield (Boutell 1914, 32, 133, 128-129). Any supporters, or figures that appear alongside the shield, that might exist are also considered part of the coat of arms (Boutell 1914, 152-153).

Figure 1

With this information, we can begin to decipher the coat of arms present on the bookplate within Agamemnon (Figure 1). The animal present in the Symonds family crest is identified as an ermine by Symonds (1894, 28-29). This ermine is standing on four paws, looking forward, a position termed statant in heraldry (Boutell 1914, 85). In its mouth appears a rose that, according to Symonds (1894, 29), should be red and have green leaves. The crown supporting this crest is called a crest-coronet in heraldry (Boutell 1914, 113). This sits atop the helm of a gentleman, which is always steel-colored and which appears with “the vizor closed, and set in profile” (Boutell 1914, 129). The next element of the coat of arms is the shield. When using proper heraldic terminology, the shield depicted in Figure 1 can be described in the following terms: per pale; sable and or counterchanged, three trefoils slipped of the second on the dexter side; azure, three fleurs-de-lys argent, passant lion or on the sinister side. In layman’s terms, that means that the shield is split down the middle into two parts. On the left-hand side, there is a black and gold checker-board-like pattern on which three, gold trefoils appear in a specific design. On the right-hand side, the background is blue and three, silver fleurs-de-lys appear alongside a gold lion. To assist in visualizing this colorful coat of arms, see Figure 2. Any heraldic symbol lacking a described color (e.g., the ermine and the crest-coronet) is meant to appear as it would in real life. Given that a stoat is only called an ermine when wearing its winter coat, its coloring is white with a tail terminating in black (“Ermine”). The crest-coronet, however, can have many color variations. Also note that the artistic flourishes to the coat of arms do not appear in color in this depiction.

Figure 2

Another element generally included in a coat of arms is a motto, which oftentimes in heraldry serves as a pun on the family name (Boutell 1914, 138). For example, while the family motto on Symonds’s bookplate is “Humi tutus,”² Symonds wrote in On The English Family of Symonds the following:

My father invented a motto: ‘In mundo immundo sim mundus³,’ which plays upon the family name as we pronounce it. A friend of mine suggested that this might be improved into: ‘Si mundus immundus sim mundus,’ which plays upon the two pronunciations of the name.”

John Addington Symonds, On The English Family of Symonds (1894, 30)

This play on names is quite common in heraldry according to Boutell (1914, 138). Interestingly, in his adulthood, Symonds (1894, 30) “ha[d] little to say” about his family’s motto only touching upon the suggestions of his father and his friend; however, the same can not be said for a much younger Symonds. As a teenager, Symonds became interested in his family genealogy and heraldry. Symonds’s own assessment of this research and of his family motto appear in a letter to his sister, Charlotte. Symonds wrote:

My inner life has been much perturbed on genealogical subjects, owing to the booklabel which Bosanquet bought me. It is a regular heraldic enigma. How cruel our Ancestors were not to pay more attention to their colours & metals! One thing settled is that our crest is correct with the substitution of a red rose for the cinquefoil. Joshua S. the surgeon of London must have been an unaspiring individual as his motto is “Humi tutus.” I wonder whether he wished to transmit this grovelling sentiment to his descendants! If so, he has been frustrated as we have certainly made a change for the better.”

Letters 1:131 (58) to Charlotte Symonds (Harrow January 17, [1858])

This excerpt is interesting for several reasons. Not only does he mention his bookplate, or at least this very first one, as being a gift—most likely from his “bosom-friend at Harrow,” Gustavus Bosanquet (Symonds 2016, 140)—Symonds also mentions that it was this bookplate that, in part, led to his interest in his family genealogy and heraldry. Further, Symonds’s early assessment of “Humi tutus” as both “unaspiring” and “grovelling” greatly contrasts with his later, seemingly disinterested stance on the subject.

Now that all the elements of Symonds’s coat of arms have been discussed, there is an interesting twist to this story: Symonds believed the coat of arms present on the bookplate to be inaccurate. In fact, Symonds (1894) dedicates a significant portion of On The English Family of Symonds not only to the history of the family coat of arms but also to a series of corrections the shield should have. In his opinion, “the proper arms and crest of my own immediate family” would have a shield designed with the following specifications:

Quarterly 1 and 4: per fess sable and or, a pale counterchanged, three trefoils slipped of the second: 2 and 3 azure three trefoils or. […] Crest, on a ducal coronet an ermine statant holding in his mouth a rose gules stalked and leaved vert.”

Symonds 1894, 28-29

According to Symonds, while the crest is accurate, the shield that appears on the bookplate would need several corrections. First, the shield should be split into four separate parts with each diagonal pair sharing the same characteristics. The top-left and bottom-right sections of the shield should have the same black and gold pattern that appears on his bookplate as well as the same three, gold trefoil designs. The top-right and bottom-left sections should have a blue background and three, gold trefoils rather than three, silver fleurs-de-lys. There is no mention of a lion in this design. Figure 3 creates one possible rendition of this “proper” coat of arms, though positioning for the gold trefoils on the blue background can be varied. Note again that the colors chosen for the crest-coronet can also vary.

Figure 3

The differences between the coat of arms on the bookplate in the Johns Hopkins University collection and the one that Symonds considered correct carry with them one important question: did Symonds ever change his bookplate to match the proper coat of arms? While I have only come across this one design in my own research, it does appear that at least two versions of his bookplate might exist. After all, as a teenager, Symonds wrote that there was a “cinquefoil” present on the crest of the coat of arms that should be replaced by a “red rose” (Letters 1:131 (58) to Charlotte Symonds (Harrow January 17, [1858])). The bookplate in Agamemnon: A Tragedy taken from Aeschylus and in other works I have seen (e.g., The Life and Death of Jason: A Poem, in the Sheridan Libraries collection) includes this adaptation, so it is not impossible to imagine other changes occurring. Additionally, if there is not and never was a bookplate with Symonds’s corrections, that begs the question as to why the changes were never made. These questions are worth exploring in future attempts to understand Symonds’s relationship with his past and how it affected his present. 

Endnotes:
^1. My own description from heraldic information in Boutell.
^2. Translated by Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters as “Safe on the ground” (Letters 1:132 (58) n4 to Charlotte Symonds (Harrow January 17, [1858])).
^3. Translated by author as “In an unclean world, I am clean” using Harper’s Latin Dictionary (1907) edited by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, pp. 895, 911, and 1175.
^4. Translated by author as “If the world is unclean, I will be clean” using Harper’s Latin Dictionary (1907) edited by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, pp. 895, 1175, and 1688-9.

References:
Boutell, Charles. 1914. The Handbook to English Heraldry. Edited by A. C. Fox-Davies. London: Reeves & Turner. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23186/23186-h/23186-h.htm.

“Ermine.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Last modified June 6, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/animal/ermine-mammal.

Harper’s Latin Dicitonary, ed. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short. `1907. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago: American Book Company.

Morris, William. 1868. The Life and Death of Jason: A Poem. London: Bell and Daldy. From Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

Quaritch, Bernard. Bernard Quaritch to William W. Gay, November 5, 1912. Letter. From Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

Symonds, John Addington. 1894. On The English Family of Symonds. Oxford: Privately printed. Google Books. https://www.google.com/books/edition/On_the_English_Family_of_Symonds/sQMPAAAAQAAJ

Symonds, John Addington. 1967. The Letters of John Addington Symonds. Edited by Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Symonds, John Addington. 2016. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition. Edited by Amber K. Regis. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

The commonplace book developed in the hands of sixteenth- through nineteenth-century European women as a form of privatized intellectual engagement. A dearth of formal women’s education and an emphasis, rather, on domestic skills both necessitated the search for academic outlets and provided women with ample time to find them. Women turned to commonplace books to fulfill their intellectual needs by engaging meticulously with contemporary literature, drawing or cutting out illustrations, and filling pages with their reflections and musings.

Sophia Elers was one such woman. Although we do not know much about her as a person besides her likely residence in the Bickenhill Vicarage, and, based upon this residence, her being in an elite, educated family of clergymen,¹ we do know that she traveled intellectually in her Victorian-era commonplace book, beginning with her transcription of a lengthy passage from William Edward Parry’s 1824 Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.² Elers supplemented the passage with her own painstakingly detailed illustrations, which depict the “Snow Village of the Eskimaux”³ and “Eskimaux Man & Woman of Savage Island.”⁴ In this brief foray into Parry’s writings, Elers established herself as his colleague – adding and eliding words and visual representations – and entered into the literary tradition characterized by and filled with her male peers.

So, too, did Elers venture into France with clippings from a book of French women’s clothing⁵ and into Asia with an imagined, silhouetted scene cut from thick black paper and a meticulously carved fan.⁶ These intellectual travels, however, appear not to be associated with any specific text, but rather exist as mere longings for exploration or otherness that was unsupported by the little education Elers likely did receive, which Elers intimates once again by randomly populating the bottom third of a page filled with arithmetic with a cut-out rabbit sitting in the grass:⁷ even the illustrations seem to be hoping to be removed from the dull arena in which she was situated.

Particularly striking in Elers’ work, though, is the series of questions she posed. Whether they are philosophical ones, riddles, or jokes missing their punchlines is unclear, but these questions do work to express Elers’ unanswered desire to engage intellectually with someone other than herself. She asks,

Why is a large E like London?

Can you look at In till you make it a word of four syllables?

What Island is the lightest colour?

When are eggs like a stolen game?

and many more.⁸

British women in the mid nineteenth century had few opportunities to receive an advanced education. Although some feminist debate sparked around this period surrounding the fitness of women to enter academic settings and universities, nearly a century remained before these feminist longings were properly addressed and women were incorporated into a coeducational scholarly arena. Elers’ attempt to liberate herself and travel through the work in her book helps, though, to emphasize the important self-educations that took place and paints education during this time as “fundamentally identified with women’s personal, intellectual, emotional and spiritual emancipation.”⁹ Formal women’s education during this period, however, fell prey to patriarchal structures, enforced largely by the Miltonic and adjacently influential structures of male dominance and “benevolent patriarchs.”¹⁰

And so, the book of Sophia Elers can be seen as representative of a woman’s intellectual yearning during the Victorian era. Charlotte Symonds, to whom John Addington Symonds addressed most of his early letters, likely worked similarly in her own commonplace books, which we, unfortunately, do not have, and with the pieces of writing and literary recommendation provided to her by her brother. Instead, we must turn to these snapshots of life that Sophia Elers has provided to imagine how Charlotte Symonds might have filled the time left available after responding to her brother, fulfilling his library requests, and consuming the novels he lauded.

^1. Circuit, Carol, The practice of concealment: Developing social history from physical evidence: a detailed exploration of artefacts hidden within a Victorian chaise longue and an interpretation of the significance of the contents (Buckinghamshire New University, Coventry University, 2017).
^2. Parry, William Edward, Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Performed in the Years 1821 – 1822 – 1823. in His Majesty’s Ships Fury and Hecla Under the Orders of Captain William Edward Parry, R.N., F.R.S., and Commander of the Expedition (London: Published by authority of the Lord’s Commissioners and Admiralty, 1824).
^3. Elers, Sophia, Commonplace Book, 5.
^4. Ibid., 11.
^5. Ibid., 62.
^6. Ibid., 56.
^7. Ibid., 64.
^8. Ibid., 47.
^9. Schwartz, Laura, “Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England,” Oxford Review of Education, 37, 5 (2011): 679.
^10. Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth, “Milton’s Daughters: The Education of Eighteenth-Century Women Writers,” Feminist Studies 12, 2 (1986): 275.