Early Life
John Symonds was born at Bristol, England in 1840. His father, the senior John Addington Symonds, M.D. (1807–1871), was the author of Criminal Responsibility (1869), The Principles of Beauty (1857) and Sleep and Dreams (2nd ed., 1857). Considered delicate, the younger Symonds did not take part in games after age 14 at Harrow School, and he showed no particular promise as a scholar.
In January 1858 Symonds received a letter from his friend Alfred Pretor (1840–1908), telling of Pretor's affair with their headmaster, Charles John Vaughan. Symonds was shocked and disgusted, feelings complicated by his growing awareness of his own homosexuality. He did not mention the incident for more than a year until, in 1859 and a student at Oxford University, he told the story to John Conington, the Latin professor. Conington approved of romantic relationships between men and boys. He had earlier given Symonds a copy of Ionica, a collection of homoerotic verse by William Johnson Cory, the influential Eton master and advocate of pederastic pedagogy. Conington encouraged Symonds to tell his father about his friend's affair, and the senior Symonds forced Vaughan to resign from Harrow. Pretor was angered by the younger man's part and never spoke to Symonds again.
In the fall of 1858, Symonds went to Balliol College, Oxford as a commoner but was elected to an exhibition in the following year. In spring of that same year, he fell in love with Willie Dyer (William Fear Dyer 1843-1905), a Bristol choirboy three years younger. They engaged in a chaste love affair that lasted a year, until broken up by the senior Symonds. The friendship continued for several years afterward, until at least 1864. Dyer became organist and choirmaster of St Nicholas' Church, Bristol.
At Oxford, Symonds became engaged in his studies and began to demonstrate his academic ability. In 1860 he took a first in Mods and won the Newdigate prize with a poem on "The Escorial"; in 1862 he obtained a first in Literae Humaniores, and in 1863 won the Chancellor's English Essay.
In 1862 Symonds was elected to an open fellowship at the conservative Magdalen. He made friends with a C.G.H. Shorting, whom he took as a private pupil. When Symonds refused to help Shorting gain admission to Magdalen, the younger man wrote to school officials alleging "that I had supported him in his pursuit of the chorister Walter Thomas Goolden (1848-1901), that I shared his habits and was bent on the same path." Although Symonds was officially cleared of any wrongdoing, he suffered a breakdown from the stress and shortly thereafter left the university for Switzerland.
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