ABSTRACT

The story of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s life should begin with the sea. Whatever gifts the gods bestowed on Swinburne, the medical circumstances of his entry into the world may have contributed to his physical and psychological eccentricities. In 1869 Swinburne wrote of his father’s ‘anti-democratic traditions of class and profession’. The Swinburnes would often go north in the late summer to escape the heat of East Dene. Swinburne’s earliest extant letter is to Revd Foster Fenwick’s daughter Ulrica, sending a book mark as he travelled to Capheaton in December 1848. There had been one earlier writer in the family, Henry Swinburne, the author of Travels through Spain and Travels in the Two Sicilies. Charles Henry Swinburne and his wife were 39 and 24 respectively when their first child Algernon was born. Swinburne later had a rich fund of memories associated with the area between Northcourt and East Dene.