The Letters of John Addington Symonds. Volume I: 1844-1868. Volume II: 1869-1884. Volume III: 1885-1893. [Three volume set, complete].

Symonds, John Addington. Edited by Herbert M. Schueller, Wayne State University and Robert L. Peters, University of California, Riverside.

Edité par Detroit: Wayne State University Press, , 1968, 1969., 1967

A propos de cet article

Three volume set. Octavo, green cloth (hardcover), gilt lettering, black spine labels, 867 pp., 1011 pp, 931 pp. Fine, in Very Good, mylar protected dust jacket with edgewear. From dust jacket: This. three-volume collection, numbering some two thousand separate letters, notes, and enclosures, which provides at once a portrait of an age and a richly detailed account of an important Victorian writer's mind and career. Nearly every month of John Addington Symonds' life (1840-93) from his adolescence in Clifton, England, to his death near Rome is amply represented. Among his correspondents were Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, Edmund Gosse, Mrs. Arthur Hugh Clough, Henry Graham Dakyns, Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Havelock Ellis, Arthur Symons, Vernon Lee, and T. s. Perry. Gladstone, Benjamin Jowett, John Conington, Josephine Butler, the Leslie Stephens family, and Jenny Lind are among the Victorian personalities who figure in these letters. The letters bear out R. L. Stevenson's report that Symonds was a conversationalist of depth and charm. Yet the reader will often be struck by the presence of a profound melancholy, of a personal Angst almost Dostoyevskian in its scope. Symonds was burdened with advanced consumption, poor eyesight, and a traumatic homosexual drive intensified by an exaggerated moral idealism. Even when he struck Leopardian poses and confused his torments with St. Augustine's, he revealed himself in a way he perhaps only vaguely understood. The veils of his soul were not always neatly drawn. This vast array of letters is important not only as a biographical record, but also for the views it provides of upper middle class Victorian life, views stereoscopic and set rather than kaleidoscopic and fleeting. Symonds' father, one of the leading doctors of the age, provides glimpses into the practical Victorian world of medicine, politics, and ethics. The letters written nearly every week by Symonds to his sister Charlotte from Harrow School and from Balliol and Magdalen Colleges, Oxford, are a remarkable firsthand account of Victorian public school and university life. We see Symonds' struggle as an upper middle class man to settle down in life, trying first the law and finally letters. We see the inner works of his marriage and of the difficult adjustments he was forced to make because of his psychological bent and his poor health. We see, finally, the step by step progress of his literary career, one sufficiently successful to warrant his ranking as one of the leading writers of his day. Symonds was one of the most complex and fascinating of Victorian writers: this scholarly compilation exposes both the man and his times with a thoroughness rare in such collections. Literature, Biography bxsli.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Letters of John Addington Symonds. Volume I: 1844-1868. Volume II: 1869-1884. Volume III: 1885-1893. [Three volume set, complete].
• Éditeur: Detroit: Wayne State University Press, , 1968, 1969.
• Date de parution: 1967
• Reliure: Couverture rigide
• État de la jaquette: Jaquette