ABSTRACT
Symonds (1840-93), biographer, poet, and historian, whose The Renaissance in Italy (7 vols, 1875-86) is his best-known work, received a copy of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, which contained Wilde’s novel, from its author. On 22 July, the same day that he wrote a letter to Brown, Symonds wrote to Edmund Gosse to voice his displeasure at ‘the morbid and perfumed manner of treating such psychological subjects’ as Wilde had dramatized in his novel (Phyllis Grosskurth, The Woeful Victorian: A Biography of John Addington Symonds, New York, 1964, p. 267).
