Algernon Charles Swinburne (5^th April 1837 – 10^th April 1909)

I was on holiday at Shankhill on the Isle Of Wight and decided to visit Bonchurch on the south east part of the island. I was looking for the home and grave of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne.

I set off to walk there. I asked a man digging the road to estimate the walk and he said 40 minutes. After 40 minutes of walking I asked another islander how far the walk was. “About an hour” he said so I jumped on a bus. While waiting for the bus I walked through marmalade-coloured fields and saw fox cubs gambolling in one corner.

I arrived at Bonchurch village, a quaint quiet place with winding roads leading down to its own bay. I soon found the home and final resting place of Algernon (I only knew him as “Swinburne” at school.) Across the road from the house is Winterbourne Country House which Charles Dickens rented one summer and wrote six chapters of David Copperfield.

Algernon was a prolific poet, playwright and novelist born into an affluent family at 7, Chester Street, Grosvenor Place in central London, the eldest of six children. He was when born and not expected to live long. He survived though and the home shown here is the childhood home where he grew up. Later he attended Eton College then Balliol College, Oxford.

After leaving Oxford he lived in London and started an active writing career. I won’t go into here but he was one of the most accomplish lyrical poets of the Victorian era. He was known to be a frail-looking, small (just over 5 feet tall), odd, excitable character. This large-headed puny-bodied, red-haired, falsetto-voiced masochist had a fixation with being whipped (leftover from his days at Eton.) He attended flagellation brothels where he liked beautiful women to lash him. He pedalled a story that he had sex with a monkey then ate it. He was known to have experienced two epileptic fits in public, possibly brought on from his alcoholism. Despite all his problems his writing displayed great imagination and perception.

At just 42 he nearly died from alcoholism. His legal advisor Theodore took pity on him and looked after him for the rest of his life. Many said Algernon became respectable and this killed the poet in him. He died of pneumonia in Putney, London at 72 and is buried here with his parents in St Boniface Church (about a five minute walk from his childhood home.)

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Walking from the hotel to Bonchurch; it was such a long walk I leapt on a bus. In a marmalade-coloured field…

His childhood home is to the left…

The garden in June 2015…

Close by, only up the road, is the grave…

In the cemetery I found the grave of a 19 year old lad killed in the war…