Swinburne flowered (if that is the word) early as a poet, and his aestheticism and neo-paganism were just the right antidote to the roast-beef-and-broadcloth world of mid-Victorian England, with its stiff biblical morality. Highly strung, a sexual deviant in a mild way (he liked being whipped by ladies), a fine classical scholar, erratic and full of psychic kinks yet a good friend, he came of a quasi-aristocratic background, but managed to combine republicanism with public-school snobbery. The later Swinburne, a virtual prisoner of Theodore Watts-Dunton in suburban Putney, was a sad parody of his earlier lyric ebullience. This is a lively biography, though it enters rather too little into Swinburne's slightly enigmatic inner life.
Brian Fallon