Introduction: (Re)Reading John Addington Symonds (1840–93)

The articles in this special issue of English Studies began life as papers delivered or offered by delegates at the “(Re)Reading John Addington Symonds” conference held at Keele University, UK, in September 2010. This event provided a forum within which new work and approaches to Symonds’s diverse corpus of writings could be assimilated and evaluated. It was the first such conference since John Pemble and Annie Burnside organised their international symposium on Symonds—“The Public and Private Face of Victorian Culture”—at Bristol University, UK, in April 1998. The publication of John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire in 2000, a collection of articles emerging from the symposium and edited by Pemble, was the first modern study of Symonds’s work as a nineteenth-century cultural critic and homosexual apologist. The Bristol symposium and Pemble collection were the result of increased interest in Symonds after the publication in 1984 of an abridged edition of his Memoirs, edited by Phyllis Grosskurth. The Memoirs made public and explicit, for the first time, Symonds’s experiences as a homosexual man living in Victorian Britain. Grosskurth had brought Symonds out of the closet in her 1964 biography— an open secret during his lifetime among family, friends and sympathetic literary circles—but she was unable to quote directly from the manuscript of his Memoirs, locked away in the archives at the London Library where it had been placed by Symonds’s literary executor, Horatio F. Brown, subject to a fifty-year embargo. With the embargo expired and the Memoirs in print, contributors to the Pemble collection were able to begin the important work of repositioning Symonds as a central part of Britain’s nineteenth-century queer heritage. The Pemble collection also continued the important work of “Surpassing the Modernist Reception of Symonds”, as contributor Howard J. Booth puts it: countering pathologised, often phobic dismissals of Symonds’s work on account of his perceived transgression and excess, both sexual and textual. The collection broke new ground in