Introduction

The role of Watts-Dunton in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s life was a mixed blessing, certainly as far as his later fame is concerned. A Swinburne who died before 1879, before Watts-Dunton and The Pines, before the daily walks over Wimbledon Common, before pram-stopping, Bardolatry and patriotic verse, would have been a phenomenon more conducive to lasting fame. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s description of Swinburne as ‘a plague of mankind’ indicates that if Swinburne had not existed in Victorian England it would definitely have been necessary to invent him. The regime at The Pines was the price Swinburne paid for being unable to curb his self-destructive behaviour, an ironic fate for the poet of Liberty who once wrote, ‘Save his own soul he hath no star’. Like Lewis Carroll, Swinburne was comfortable in the presence of children, relating to them without the self-consciousness that gave some of his adult relationships a certain distance and rigidity.