The Complete Winchester Letters
of
Lionel Johnson

edited by Ruth Derham and Sarah Green

Lionel Johnson, Decadent poet and critic, was one of the leading voices of the British 1890s. When he died suddenly at the age of 35, his old school friend Frank Russell—brother to Bertrand Russell and by then a radical member of the House of Lords—published a series of Johnson’s early letters as “Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson (1919)”.

Carefully edited and anonymized, Russell claimed that these letters showed ‘the true Lionel’, rather than the ‘later genius’, to be a ‘loving, suffering man, burning with zeal to help and comfort his fellow-sufferers in the world’. But why were the correspondents anonymized? What was missing from those edited sections? Were there aspects of the friendship Russell wished to conceal?

This new edition, edited by historian Ruth Derham and scholar Sarah Green, restores for the first time the full text of Johnson’s Winchester Letters from the recently discovered originals. Instead of pronouncements from a young prophet, these letters reveal something altogether more human, as four young men navigate some of the biggest questions of their day. Was religion still possible or desirable? Did sin still exist? And when did love of one’s friends become something more?

About the Editors
Ruth Derham is a biographer and social historian whose work has centred on Victorian attitudes to marriage and divorce. Her first book, Bertrand’s Brother: The Marriages, Morals and Misdemeanours of Frank, 2nd Earl Russell—a biography of the original editor and recipient of Lionel Johnson’s Winchester Letters—was published in 2021; and her second, Decadent Divorce: Scandal and Sensation in Victorian Britain, is due for publication in 2024.

Sarah Green is a scholar specialising in the literature of the 1890s. Her monograph, Sexual Continence and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, and explored the work of Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore. She has also published on the work of J. M. Barrie and is particularly interested in the history of sexuality and sexual health. She lives in Cambridge, UK.

Paperback, 296 pages
Release date: March 5, 2024
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-140-8
Price: US$23.00