The Passions of John Addington Symonds

by Shane Butler

John Addington Symonds (Bristol 1840 - Rome 1893) was one of Victorian Britain's most prolific authors, with works that included poems, translations, travel essays, and scholarly studies on topics ranging from classical literature to the Renaissance to the poetry of his contemporaries. Today, however, he is usually remembered for his long unpublished Memoirs , a major early monument of queer life-writing, and for two privately printed, secretly circulated essays, one of which includes the earliest printed appearance in English of the word homosexual. This new word, first coined in German, has long provided a useful milestone for historians of sexuality charting the emergence not only of new typologies but of whole new regimes of knowledge. But what of the rest of Symonds's vast body of work? This book returns to Symonds, not as the origin of a now familiar history, but as a far more complex thinker, with an ambitious vision of the queerness of the world itself--and of what it
means to live in it.

410 pages, Hardcover

Published February 24, 2023

Reviews

[Roisin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Deep shame gives way to deep time which gives way to an almost impossibly deep falling-in-love.” (Shane Butler 120)

“What Symonds finally gives us is a Love that was always already everywhere.” (Shane Butler 220)

I have too much to say about this text; how emotional it was starting to read it while on a plane to London and how I had to put it down for three months after visiting John’s manuscripts and grave.

In his preface, Butler notes that the book is various attempts to make sense of John and his connection to him. I was comforted by Butler’s admission that he had formed a strange, near schizophrenic relationship with John because so did I while traveling through the places he loved. He spoke to me and I wrote notes to him via the visitor books in churches throughout Switzerland and Italy: “JAS You are loved here and everywhere”. We’ll never know if I would’ve been so bold, if it weren’t for Butler granting me licence.

John and all of his complexities (and purple prose) have often been flattened by those who have tried to interpolate his life and writing. However, Butler takes great care to afford John his ambiguities and idiosyncrasies, while looking to his life’s work not as a riddle (with the answer always pointing to his queerness) but rather bolstering John as a philosopher both before his time and deeply intrenched in his own time.

And what a thrill and a delight to have John connected to queer theories such as queer phenomenology. And what a deeply touching and thorough exploration of a man who means so much to me personally and academically.