Horatio Brown (1854-1926)

Horatio Robert Forbes Brown was a gay, Scottish writer and historian who specialised in the history of Venice and Italy. He was also the first biographer of Bristol born writer and historian John Addington Symonds, a pioneer of homosexual acceptance of world significance. Symonds was one of the closest and most formative friendships of Brown’s life. Symonds (14 years his senior) replaced the father that Brown lost aged 12, and Brown took the place of the son Symonds never had.

Born in Nice in 1854, Brown’s paternal family had a large estate in Midlothian, Scotland. He attended Clifton College, Bristol, from 1864-1873 together with his brother, Allan. After the death of his father in 1866, his mother moved to Clifton to be near her sons.

Horatio and Allan were pupils during the 17-year tenure of the first headmaster of Clifton College, Rev’d John Percival, later headmaster of Rugby school. Percival was much concerned about “impurity” and insisted boy’s football shorts should be worn below the knee and secured with elastic. The 1871 census shows Brown, aged 17, living in the “Headmaster’s House” in College Road with over 60 boys aged 13-19.

Symonds joined the Clifton College council in 1869 and lectured on Greek poets which is how he met and befriended Brown in 1872-73. Brown became one of Symonds’s closest gay friends and confidants. Brown was described as a “fair haired, breezy, out of doors person, with a crisp, Highlands-Scottish accent”. Friend and fellow historian Frederick York Powell called him “a real good sort, cheery, broad faced, shock headed, and tumble dressed”. An obituary referred to him as “a Scottish laird, with ruddy countenance, muscular limbs and sturdy frame”. Fellow Scot and Oxford contemporary, Richard Lodge, noted “in his youth … his features were remarkably beautiful”.

In 1879 Brown and his mother left England to live in Italy, where he spent most of the rest of his life. They first stayed in Florence but then settled in Venice where Brown became a leading figure in the English speaking community. He befriended local gondoliers and fishermen, gaining material for his first book Life on the Lagoons (1884). Symonds often spent holidays with Brown and they both enjoyed the attractions of sexually compliant muscular gondoliers, one of whom, Antonio Salin, became the love of Brown’s life and, together with his wife and children, lived with Brown for some years.

In the 1890s other visiting gay friends included the sculptor Lord Ronald Gower, Frank Miles – friend and possible first male lover of Oscar Wilde, and artist Henry Scott Tuke who painted Brown’s portrait in 1899. Brown’s salon at his Grand Canal palazzo became hugely popular for “gentlemen who preferred gentlemen”. Italy, and Venice in particular, had been a centre for gay men since at least the 16th century. Italy legalised homosexuality for both men and women in 1889 with an age of consent of 14, and became a haven for wealthy gay and bisexual men who faced persecution in their own countries.

Symonds appointed Brown as his literary executor. Brown published the first biography of Symonds in 1895 and his letters and papers in 1923. In both, he heavily suppressed Symonds’s sexuality in deference to Symonds’s widow and family, and was therefore seen as a hindrance to the gay “Uranian” writers of the period and homosexual emancipation. In the biography Brown does however quote from Symonds’s diary of 1862 regarding Venetian boys: “the boys here are quite amphibious, and run about quite naked, but for a wrapper around the middle … without shame or restraint, fair to look upon, but oh, how animal”.

Brown was attracted to sailors, footmen and “strapping members of the lower orders”. In 1900 he published Drift, a collection of homoerotic poems. Although not outspoken they prominently feature strong working class men and the nature of the poems were immediately clear to other gay men such as Cambridge scholar, librarian and poet, Charles Edward Sayle, who visited Brown and dreamt of him naked using a page of his poems as a fig leaf! One poem, Bored, depicts a boring society musical evening during which Brown can’t take his eyes off a broad shouldered servant when he should be concentrating on the performing artiste. Each stanza ends with the line “I like their footman, John, the best”.

Brown’s mother died in 1909 and he began to spend summers in Scotland, or staying with his friend Archibald Primrose (Lord Rosebery), former Liberal prime minister. Rosebery was said to have had a romantic, if not sexual, relationship with his private secretary, Francis, Viscount Drumlanrig, brother of Lord Alfred Douglas, lover of Oscar Wilde.

During the First World War, Brown moved to Florence, then Scotland, returning to Venice after the armistice. He died aged 72 at Belluno, near Venice in 1926.

Jonathan Rowe 2024

 

Wikipedia: Horatio Brown
Elisa Rolle: Queer Places – Horatio Brown
Online Books: Horatio F Brown
Drift – Verses by Horatio F Brown.  216 page scan of book published by Grant Richards, London, 1900

The Passions of John Addington Symonds. Shane Butler (2022)