The Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne
Editor: Terry L Meyers
The Pickering Masters
978 1 85196 774 2: 234x156mm: £295.00/$520.00
The three volumes of Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne add more than 550 letters to the canon that were not available when Cecil Y Lang published his collection of Swinburne letters in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This new collection includes hundreds of unpublished letters addressed to Swinburne, as well as providing a number of accounts and descriptions of Swinburne either previously unknown or fallen from scholarly knowledge.
In addition to the full texts of the letters and thorough annotations, the edition includes a major appendix updating Lang’s earlier work – identifying where holographs then missing are now housed (and correcting the printed texts from the originals), identifying correspondents and allusions then uncertain or unknown, and correcting or narrowing mistaken or unknown dates.
- All letters definitively transcribed from the original manuscript texts or from the early printed versions when no manuscripts survive
- All letters fully and expertly annotated
- Almost 450 letters previously unpublished
- Indexed
Sample pages
Contents
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) set out to challenge the proprieties of his Victorian contemporaries in every way: from the explicit sexuality and blasphemy of his early poetry to his political radicalism and his enthusiasms for such then uncanonical writers as Blake, Shelley and the Elizabethan dramatists surrounding Shakespeare. This edition gives new details about virtually all his literary undertakings (including his publishing income) and provides much new biographical information.
For the first time too the texts of Swinburne’s letters to and from his cousin Mary Gordon Leith appear, letters often written in a transparent code and using fictional personae that illuminate and intensify the curiously erotic, even flagellatory, relationship that appears to have existed between them.
Among Swinburne’s correspondents were such writers and artists as John Morley, Simeon Solomon, Lord Tennyson, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel, Christina, and William Michael) and William Morris. Other correspondents represented include Swinburne’s companion Theodore Watts-Dunton, his publisher Chatto and Windus, his mother, sisters, and aunt, and such friends as John Nichol and George Powell.
The appearance of these volumes moves Swinburne studies a significant step forward. They will no doubt stimulate even further the accelerating critical and scholarly interest in a notorious poet whose works even today are sometimes controversial enough that the editor, working in Virginia, needed permission from the state to quote and annotate some of Swinburne’s poems and letters with excerpts from his unpublished erotica.
Reviews
'The purple cloth of these three volumes of uncollected Swinburne letters is going to become as familiar a shelf companion [as Cecil Y Lang's earlier edition].
...Meyers's often extraordinary footnotes are little gems of Swinburneiana in themselves which add considerably to the value of the edition...a wonderful achievement that joins a small group of essential Swinburne texts.'
– Rikky Rooksby, Victorian Poetry
'Terry Meyers's long-awaited edition is much more than an essential contribution to Swinburne studies; it is an important resource for any Victorianist...[we] owe a great debt of gratitude to both Terry Meyers and Pickering & Chatto. All libraries with any pretensions to covering Victorian studies respectably will need to acquire this work.'
– Margot K Louis, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies