Pederasty - Post-classical and Modern Forms - Europe - England

England

In England, public boarding schools, with its homosocial environment, often encouraged an homoerotic atmosphere, due to the emphasis on the Classics, and homosexual relations were formed and quietly accepted, both between the older and younger boys and even between the teachers and the boys. However, there had been some scandals around such relationships. In the mid-19th century, William Johnson Cory, a renowned master at Eton from 1845 until his forced resignation in 1872, evolved a style of pedagogic pederasty which influenced a number of his pupils. His Ionica, a work of poetry reflecting his pederastic sensibilities, was read in intellectual circles and “made a stir” at Oxford in 1859. Oscar Browning, another Eton master and former student of Cory, followed in his tutor’s footsteps, only to be likewise dismissed in 1875. Both are thought to have influenced Oxford don Walter Pater, whose aesthetics promoted pederasty as the truest expression of classical culture.

Also in 19th-century England, pederasty was a theme in the work of several writers known as the "Uranian poets". Although most of the writers of Uranian poetry and prose are today considered minor literary figures at best, the prominent Uranian representatives --- Walter Pater, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Oscar Wilde -- are figures of worldwide renown. Hopkins and Wilde were both deeply influenced by Pater's work. Wilde wrote of pederastic and homoerotic culture—though not in the "elevated" pederastic sense that it held for Pater and Hopkins -- in a number of works. In the case of Hopkins, "Hopkins often was, it must be admitted, strikingly Ruskinian in his love of Aristotelian particulars and their arrangements; however, it was at the foot of Pater -- the foremost Victorian unifier of ‘eros, pedagogy, and aesthetics’ -- that Hopkins would ever remain." Another notable late 19th-century writer on pederasty was John Addington Symonds, whose essays A Problem in Greek Ethics and A Problem in Modern Ethics were among the first ever defenses of homosexuality in the English language.