Abstract
Twelve years after the Symonds case analysed by George Rousseau in chapter 6 of this book, Benjamin Jowett, who had in the meantime become Master of Balliol College in 1870, found himself confronted with another potentially scandalous case of a cross-generational homo-erotic relationship between a don and a student. In 1874 Walter Pater, a 35-year-old fellow of Brasenose College, was found to be involved in an affair with a 19-year-old undergraduate from Jowett’s own Balliol. Pater had been an undergraduate at Queen’s College from 1858 to 1862, had become a fellow of Brasenose in 1865, and had recently gained fame as the author of a controversial volume of essays on the Renaissance (1873). William Money Hardinge, the student in question, had already built a reputation for profligacy, blasphemy, and lack of modesty in his homoerotic inclinations; he was moreover the author of some privately circulated indecent poems and had in fact become known among some of his peers as the ‘Balliol bugger’. The exact particulars of the case were successfully hushed up at the time and have never since been fully clarified. It is only in the last 25 years or so that research by literary scholars has been able to provide a more comprehensive account of the Pater-Hardinge events.1 According to a possible reconstruction by Billie A. Inman, W. H. Mallock, another Balliol undergraduate and the future author of the academic satire The New Republic (1877), provided Jowett with some incriminating letters in which Pater and Hardinge had called each other ‘darling‘ and had signed themselves ‘yours lovingly’.
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Notes
See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), pp. 58–9;
Laurel Brake, ‘Judas and the Widow; Thomas Wright and A.C. Benson as Biographers of Walter Pater: The Widow’, Prose Studies, 4: 1 (1981), 39–54;
Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 158–64;
and the definitive Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William Money Hardinge’, in Laurel Brake and Ian Small (eds), Pater in the 1990s (Greensboro: ELT Press, 1991), pp. 1–20. I would like to thank George Rousseau for his many suggestions and Robin Darwall-Smith for his comments and his generous help in providing me with the material from the Jowett papers housed in Balliol College, Oxford. I thank the Jowett copyright trustees for permission to quote from the Jowett papers.
Evelyn Abbot and Lewis Campbell, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A., 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1897);
Geoffrey Faber, Jowett: A Portrait with Background (London: Faber & Faber, 1957). There is a mention of the episode in a more recent biographical sketch, ‘Benjamin Jowett and the Balliol Tradition’, in Noel Annan, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses (London: Harper Collins, 1999), pp. 74–5. The information contained in the latter clearly derives from Inman.
Edmund Gosse, ‘Pater, Walter Horatio (1839–1894)’, in The Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to 1900 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998);
A.C. Benson, Walter Pater (London: Macmillan, 1906).
Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).
For a full account of Symonds’s years at Harrow and of the Vaughan affair, see Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds: A Biography (London: Longmans, 1964), pp. 22–41.
A recent reassessment of Symonds’s testimony of Harrow and of Vaughan’s career is contained in Christopher Tyerman, A History of Harrow School 1324–1991 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 277–83.
Richard St John Tyrwhitt, ‘The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature’, The Contemporary Review, 29: March 1877, 552–66, respectively pp. 557 and 562. Tyrwhitt (1827–95) was an Oxford-educated art historian. He was vicar of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford, between 1858 and 1872 (that is, at the time of the Shorting events) and was the author of Greek and Gothic: Progress and Decay in the three Arts of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting (1881). Just like Symonds, Pater entered the competition but withdrew in the last phases of the election, probably for fear of further scandal or public exposure. For a full account of the academic and sexual politics of the events of 1877, see Dellamora, pp. 158–64; and Grosskurth, pp. 168–73.
Cf. K. O. Müller, The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1839), originally published in German in 1824.
The evidence of erotic vase paintings suggests that the ‘passive’ or younger partner was mostly a pre-pubescent youth who had attained full height. See Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London: Duckworth, 1978), p. 16.
Symonds was also the author of paederastic verse. For a selection of this, see Ian Venables, ‘Appendix: Symonds’s Peccant Poetry’, in John Pemble (ed.), John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 178–85.
Walter Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, in The New Library Edition of thc Works of Walter Pater, 10 vols (London: Macmillan, 1910), vol. 1, p. 174.
See, for instance, Dellamora, pp. 102–16; Dowling, pp. 95–8 (‘Winckelmann’ is the ‘crucial text for any account of Pater’s tacit recovery of the paider-astic dimension of Western culture’, p. 95); Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 238–53.
Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), vol. 1, p. 482.
This figure has been suggestively identified by Martha Vicinus in ‘The Adolescent Boy: Fin-de-Siècle Femme Fatale?’, in Richard Dellamora (ed.) Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 83–106.
A useful tool for understanding this issue is George Rousseau’s concept of ‘homoplatonism’, discussed in ‘“Homoplatonic, Homodepressed, Homo-morbid”: Some Further Genealogies of Same-Sex Attraction in Western Civilization’, in Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 12–52, pp. 20–26.
‘Platon reste toujours le sublime guide des hommes supérieurs, invertis de naissance ou d’occasion’. Marc-André Raffalovich, Uranisme et Unisexualité: Etude sur Différentes Manifestations de l’Instinct Sexuel (Lyon: A. Storck; Paris: Masson & C.ie, 1896), p. 29.
W.H. Mallock, The New Republic: Culture, Faith and Philosophy in an English Country House (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1975), respectively pp. 27, 232, 272.
See Richard Davenport’s entry on Oscar Browning in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Browning went on to become a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Pater had been involved in an unpleasant episode following one of his visits to Browning, when the two men were alleged to have encouraged a boy at Eton to read Théophile Gautier’s sexually explicit novel Mademoiselle de Maupin. For an account of this, see Lawrence Evans (ed.), Letters of Walter Pater (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 16.
Notes
Cf. Timothy d’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1880 to 1910 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).
Coventry Patmore, Poems, eighth edition (London, 1903), 1: 22. For a classic essay on the angel in the house, see Carol Christ, ‘Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House’, in Martha Vicinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington, In Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 146–62.
David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. ix.
Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 232 n. 17.
For Spartan-model pederasty, see Richard Dellamora, ‘Dorianism’, in Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 43–64.
George Edward Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
For Pater’s critique of Spartan pederasty in terms of the subordination of the individual to the state, see ‘Dorianism’. For Wilde’s socialism, see his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’. Democracy in this context, however, is not populist. And political idealism for these writers was quite compatible with various sorts of snobbery. (Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, in De Profundis and Other Writings, introd. Hesketh Pearson (London, 1986), pp. 19–53.
Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London, 1873), p. 118.
Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 207.
Cited in Stefano-Maria Evangelista, ‘Narcissism and Romantic Reflections in Pater’s Plato and Platonism’, third annual meeting of NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association), Charlottesville, Virginia, 2 October 2005, 6.
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Evangelista, S. (2007). Platonic Dons, Adolescent Bodies: Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater. In: Rousseau, G. (eds) Children and Sexuality. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230590526_7
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