Now and then, the coolest things show up in your inbox. Like the email from Lauren Dolman of the Balliol College Library at Oxford, who had kindly replied to my query about a bookplate last year. (Here I go citing myself again, but if you’re interested in finding out about that, look here.)
Lauren was more than helpful then. Now came my chance to return the favor, in whatever small way I could. An edition of A.C. Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon with a Byrdcliffe bookplate had been donated to the Balliol College Library, as part the collection of Jeremy Mitchell, a noted Swinburne scholar. Once Lauren had gotten past her surprise at finding herself cited in my blog when she Googled the bookplate, she wrote to enquire after any further information I might have on the volume. I immediately sent her photographs of all the entries from the Byrdcliffe card catalogue for Swinburne, along with my Excel transcription of the lot. According to those entries, Byrdcliffe had at least sixteen volumes of Swinburne. Not in the least a surprise, given the Whiteheads’ aesthetic proclivities, and I am waiting breathlessly to hear whether any other of the volumes at Balliol have a Byrdcliffe bookplate.
As for Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)? According to Wikipedia, he was an alcoholic and algolagniac. If you don’t know what the latter means, go look it up. All I’ll say is that, like several other poets casually described as decadent, Swinbune turned to a fervent religiosity after a youth devoted to singular and outrageous decadence – including sliding naked down the banisters at the house he shared with Dante Gabriel Rossetti at 16 Cheyne Walk. Rossetti was also the man who asked Adah Menken, the American circus rider, to introduce Swinburne to heterosexual love – only to find himself rebuffed with the comment, “I can’t make him understand that biting’s no use.” But Swinburne’s delight in what the critic and biographer, Cecil Lang, calls “Algernonic exaggeration,” must be tempered by Oscar Wilde’s scathing characterization of Swinburne as “A braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestialiser.”
My kind of research interest, if not exactly my kind of guy. For the journey of this volume reflects everything that fascinates me about this project to recreate the Byrdcliffe library. Swinburne attended Balliol College from 1856 to 1860, with a brief hiatus when he was rusticated in 1859 for having publicly supported the attempted assassination of Napoleon III. Swinburne never graduated, but Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead earned an M.A. from Balliol in 1880. As any collector knows, books travel far more eccentrically than humans; nonetheless, it seems logical that Whitehead might have obtained the Swinburne volume during his time at Oxford – only to bring it with him to America, along with such other ornaments to an educated gentleman’s library as the Dryden in my personal collection. How satisfying to see the circle close once more, and this Balliol-related volume returned to the College that may well have inspired it.
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