Abstract
The transition in 1892 from clerk’s stool to professor’s chair sounds, and was, dramatic: it permanently changed the course of Housman’s life. Nonetheless there was something inevitable about it: given his strength of will and powers of self-discipline, the years of penance seem in retrospect no more than an interruption of his real vocation, though there must have been hours and weeks when it was hard for him to believe that he would not grow old in the Patent Office, as Maycock and others were destined to do. What was really remarkable was the quiet drama of his scholarly activities during the preceding decade — the heroically patient succession of evenings in the British Museum, the publication of papers of outstanding brilliance and authority, and the growth of an international reputation for one who held no academic post or even degree.
‘He said in his farewell speech to us that we had picked him out of the gutter ...’
(R.W.Chambers)*
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Notes
’scholarly gaiety’: R. W. Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind (1939) 362.
‘the students in Classics’: R. W. Chambers, Philogists at University College: Centenary Address (1927) 29–30, 32.
‘a place of learning’: David Taylor, The Godless Students of Gower Street (1968) 33–4.
’so caustic’: Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, 368.
‘a tall, slender, serious-faced man’: quoted in Richards, 330, from an article in the Birmingham Post, 22 June 1937.
‘we did not mind’: Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, 368.
‘professing Latin’: Mortimer Wheeler, Still Digging (1955) 31.
‘friendly and cordial’: Richard Aldington, A. E. Housman and W. B. Yeats (1955) 6–7.
‘was at his best’: F. W. Oliver, ‘A. E. Housman: Some Recollections’, in Richards, 438 (originally published in University College Magazine, March 1937). Oliver was professor of Botany at UCL.
‘lay an adversary low’: R. W. Chambers, ‘A London Memoir’, in Alfred Edward Housman (Bromsgrovian Supplement), 43.
‘Housman’s reading’: R. W. Chambers, letter in John o’ London’s Weekly, 24 October 1936.
‘Towards the end of it’: S. C. Roberts, Adventures with Authors (1966) 124.
‘things must come right’: R. W. Chambers, ‘A London Memoir’, 43.
‘power of leadership’: F. W. Oliver, ‘Some Recollections’, 439.
‘lay on the open veldt’: Corporal B. Hobden to Mrs Edward Housman, 1 November 1901, in Pugh, Bromsgrove and the Housmans, lxvi
‘I have hardly ever written’: ms. of Leslie Stephen Lecture, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’ (Cambridge University Library).
‘about one third’: Tom Burns Haber, The Manuscript Poems of A. E. Housman (Minneapolis, 1955) 16.
‘touched off a process’: Kenneth Quinn, Catullus: An Interpretation (New York, 1973) 5.
the Wilde case: the Wilde affair was not an isolated phenomenon: at earlier stages of Housman’s time in London, the Dublin Castle affair of 1884 and the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889–90 had made a variously shocked or eager public aware of the prevalence in their midst of homosexual behaviour and male prostitution. England had been slow to modify its archaic legislation — indeed, legal sanctions became more rather than less severe in the nineteenth century — and public tolerance in this area of conduct had lagged behind the general humanitarian advance. In the 1820s, when more than a hundred offences were removed from the list of capital crimes, the death penalty for sodomy instituted in the sixteenth century was re-enacted. In 1859, one learns with astonishment, more men were sentenced to hang for consensual sexual relations with other men than for killing them; Louis Crompton, though conceding that ‘it is probable that no executions took place [for this reason] in England after 1835’, comments that the record ‘indicates a level of homophobia possibly higher than in any other country in the world’ (Victorian Studies, 22 (1979) 212). In 1885, under a Criminal Law Amendment Act primarily directed against female prostitution, all male homosexual acts became illegal. Public hostility to the male homosexual deepened; and when Wilde was committed for trial in April 1895, the magistrate, Sir John Bridges, told him that ‘there is no worse crime than that with which the prisoners are charged’. Jeffrey Weeks has suggested that the Wilde trials ‘created a public image for the homosexual, and a terrifying moral tale of the dangers that trailed closely behind deviant behaviour’ (Coming Out, 21). Havelock Ellis commented that the trials seemed ‘to have generally contributed to give definiteness and self-consciousness to the manifestations of hostility’ (quoted by Weeks, 22). More profoundly, a legacy of the Wilde case to homosexuals was an intensified awareness of their condition. Hitherto, the language had scarcely furnished terms in which it was possible for the homosexual to reflect soberly on his own nature. There was, of course, a vocabulary for homosexual acts (or, rather, two vocabularies, one classical, the other demotic), as well as a vigorous argot descriptive of the flourishing homosexual underworld. But, as John Addington Symonds wrote in 1891, ‘the accomplished languages of Europe in the nineteenth century supply no terms for this persistent feature of human psychology, without importing some implication of disgust, disgrace, vituperation’. In the years immediately following the Wilde case, the language expanded to fill this need. The Oxford English Dictionary records inversion as appearing in 1896 — the year of A Shropshire Lad — and homosexuality in 1897. Housman’s reaction to this sad episode in the history of intolerance is undocumented. On his contact with Wilde, see Letters, 267; Laurence Housman, Echo de Pans (1923) 14.
84_Woolwich cadet: see A.E.H., 103–5; J. M. Nosworthy, ‘A. E. Housman and the Woolwich Cadet’, Notes & Queues, n.s. 17 (1970) 351–3.
‘catapulted himself’: David Cecil, Max (1964) 64.
‘discouraged any show’: William Rothenstein, Since Fifty: Men and Memories 1922–1938 (1939) 6.
‘I once attended’: T. R. Glover, Cambridge Retrospect (1943) 86.
‘hadn’t the ghost of a chance’: Grant Richards, Author Hunting (1943) 29; Richards, 97–8.
Lord Rayleigh, The Life of Sir J. J. Thomson, O.M. (Cambridge, 1942) 264).
J. J. Thomson, Recollections and Reflections (1936) 315.
‘if drinking nothing’: R. W. Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, 380–1.
‘Cambridge has seen’: an oft-quoted story: see, inter alia, A.E.H., 101; Unexpected Years, 365; The Times, 5 May 1936,21; R. W. Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, 380–1
‘in his right setting’: Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, 381.
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© 1996 Norman Page
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Page, N. (1996). ‘Picked out of the gutter’. In: A. E. Housman. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24584-0_5
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