ABSTRACT
Safely ensconced at Holmwood in early October, Algernon Charles Swinburne turned his thoughts to Italy and the Anti-Catholic Council of Naples. In early October Dante Gabriel Rossetti obtained a permit from the Home Office to open Lizzie Siddal’s grave and recover the manuscript of his poems. A. L. Munby expressed frustration at the habit of freethinkers of identifying Christianity with Roman Catholicism. On 17 July Swinburne wrote to John Thomson asking for various manuscripts and clothes to be sent to Holmwood. On 4 August Swinburne wrote from Holmwood, ‘being for some time to come under sentence of exile from London’. Swinburne spoke a good deal about the very strong religious Christian feelings he used to have from the age of fifteen to eighteen or so; and attributes partly to this fact the continual use which he makes of Christian or biblical framework in his poems, even when the gist of them is of the most extraneous or conflicting kind.
