Biography
Swinburne was born at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, on 5 April 1837. He was the eldest of six children born to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry Swinburne (1797–1877) and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham, a wealthy Northumbrian family. He grew up at East Dene in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight. The Swinburnes also had a London home at Whitehall Gardens, Westminster. As a child, Swinburne was "nervous" and "frail", but "was also fired with nervous energy and fearlessness to the point of being reckless". He rode horses and wrote plays with his first cousin Mary Gordon who lived nearby on the Isle of Wight. They secretly collaborated on her second book, Children of the Chapel, which contained an unusual number of beatings.
Swinburne attended Eton College (1849–53), where he began to write poetry. At Eton, he won first prizes in French and Italian. He attended Balliol College, Oxford (1856–60), with a brief hiatus when he was rusticated from the university in 1859 for publicly supporting the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini. He returned in May 1860, but never received a degree. At Oxford, Swinburne met several Pre-Raphaelites, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He also met William Morris. After leaving college, he lived in London and started an active writing career, where Rossetti was delighted with his "little Northumbrian friend", probably a reference to Swinburne's diminutive height—he was just 5 ft 4 in (163 cm).
Swinburne spent summer holidays at Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, the house of his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet (1762–1860), who had a famous library and was president of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle upon Tyne. Swinburne considered Northumberland to be his native county, an emotion reflected in poems like the intensely patriotic "Northumberland", "Grace Darling" and others. He enjoyed riding his pony across the moors; he was a daring horseman, "through honeyed leagues of the northland border", as he called the Scottish border in his Recollections. In the period 1857–60, Swinburne became a member of Lady Trevelyan's intellectual circle at Wallington Hall.
After his grandfather's death in 1860, Swinburne stayed with William Bell Scott in Newcastle. In 1861, Swinburne visited Menton on the French Riviera, staying at the Villa Laurenti to recover from the excessive use of alcohol. From Menton, Swinburne went to Italy, where he travelled extensively. In December 1862, Swinburne accompanied Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on a trip to Tynemouth. Scott writes in his memoirs that, as they walked by the sea, Swinburne declaimed the as yet unpublished "Hymn to Proserpine" and "Laus Veneris" in his lilting intonation, while the waves "were running the whole length of the long level sands towards Cullercoats and sounding like far-off acclamations".
Despite the call of the sea, in October of 1868, Algernon Swinburne's life was spared by another young poet, Guy de Maupassant. At age 18, Maupassant saved him from drowning off the coast of Étretat.
Swinburne was an alcoholic and algolagniac and highly excitable. He liked to be flogged. His health suffered, and in 1879 at the age of 42, he was taken into care by his friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton, who looked after him for the rest of his life at The Pines, 11 Putney Hill, Putney. Watts-Dunton took him to the lost town of Dunwich, on the Suffolk coast, on several occasions in the 1870s. In Watts-Dunton's care Swinburne lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability. It was said of Watts-Dunton that he saved the man and killed the poet. Swinburne died at the Pines on 10 April 1909, at the age of 72, and was buried at St Boniface Church, Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight.
