The Complete Winchester Letters

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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?