Odd this day

5 April 1837

It’s the 188th anniversary of the birth of one oddest of Victorians — poet and whipping enthusiast Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Swinburne may have had some form of hydrocephalus (fluid on the brain), and epilepsy, and was famously delicate and feminine. His cousin and namesake, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford (1st Baron Redesdale, and grandfather to the Mitford sisters) said he was

fragile … strangely tiny … his sloping shoulders looked far too weak to carry his great head.

He had very pale skin, and a “tousled mass of red hair”, making him just the right sort of person to fall in with the Pre-Raphaelites, which he duly did when he went to Oxford.

By then, though, his life had already been decisively shaped by the bullying and beating he experienced at Eton. He spent the rest of his life self-flagellating, writing poems with titles such as The Flogging Block, Reginald’s Flogging, and A Boy’s First Flogging, and — according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography — finding

sexual diversion in a flagellant brothel in St John’s Wood.

At 29, he published Poems and Ballads, which was both immensely popular and considered utter filth. Admittedly, this was the Victorian era, when the idea of men touching a woman’s lips and changing “in a trice”

The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice

…was considered shocking. The woman in question is Dolores, the “Lady of Pain”, who also prompts him to write “I could hurt thee — but pain would delight thee”, which may tell us more about the writer than any actual woman he’d met.

In the same volume, Sapphics talks of

Lesbians kissing across their smitten / Lutes

…and Hermaphroditus talks of “moist limbs” and

all thy boy’s breath softened into sighs.

So, basically, it’s all very overwrought and intense without necessarily containing a great deal of substance.

Mind you, he did make it clear that he rejected religion, especially in Hymn to Proserpine, which mourns the fact that Christianity replaced paganism. And he was unapologetically himself — to put it mildly. When he heard that people were talking disparagingly of his homosexuality, he started putting about a story that he had shagged and eaten a monkey. It is, perhaps, not a surprise to know that he was also an alcoholic, who often drank enough to cause fits.

He shared a house for a while with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but disturbed the man’s painting — on one occasion by sliding naked down the banisters with a boyfriend. Rossetti asked actress, poet and circus performer Adah Isaacs Menken to interest Swinburne in heterosexuality, which she duly attempted, but reported back:

I can’t make him understand that biting’s no use.

Oscar Wilde later said Swinburne was

a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer.

That is, he was putting it all on for effect. Which was a bit rich coming from Oscar.