Swinburne was born at 7
Chester Street,
Grosvenor Place,
London, on 5 April 1837. He was the eldest of six children born to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry Swinburne (1797–1877) and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the
3rd Earl of Ashburnham, a wealthy
Northumbrian family. He grew up at East Dene in
Bonchurch on the
Isle of Wight. The Swinburnes also had a London home at Whitehall Gardens, Westminster. As a child, Swinburne was "nervous" and "frail", but "was also fired with nervous energy and fearlessness to the point of being reckless". He rode horses and wrote plays with his first cousin
Mary Gordon who lived nearby on the Isle of Wight. They secretly collaborated on her second book,
Children of the Chapel, which contained an unusual number of beatings. Swinburne attended
Eton College (1849–53), where he began to write poetry. At Eton, he won first prizes in French and Italian. from the university in 1859 for publicly supporting the attempted assassination of
Napoleon III by
Felice Orsini. He returned in May 1860, but never received a degree. At Oxford, Swinburne met several
Pre-Raphaelites, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He also met
William Morris. After leaving college, he lived in London and started an active writing career, where Rossetti was delighted with his "little Northumbrian friend", probably a reference to Swinburne's diminutive height—he was just 5'4". Swinburne spent summer holidays at
Capheaton Hall in
Northumberland, the house of his grandfather,
Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet (1762–1860), who had a famous library and was president of the
Literary and Philosophical Society in
Newcastle upon Tyne. Swinburne considered Northumberland to be his native county, an emotion reflected in poems like the intensely patriotic "Northumberland", "
Grace Darling" and others. He enjoyed riding his pony across the moors; he was a daring horseman, "through honeyed leagues of the northland border", as he called the Scottish border in his
Recollections. In the period 1857–60, Swinburne became a member of
Lady Trevelyan's intellectual circle at
Wallington Hall. , standing; 2. George Rankine Luke, sitting; 3. John Warneford Hoole, standing; 4. Swinburne, sitting; 5.
Thomas Hill Green, standing; 6.
John Nichol, sitting; 7.
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce, standing; 8.
Albert Venn Dicey, sitting; 9.
Aeneas James George Mackay, standing; 10.
Thomas Erskine Holland, sitting) After his grandfather's death in 1860, Swinburne stayed with
William Bell Scott in Newcastle. In 1861, Swinburne visited
Menton on the
French Riviera, staying at the Villa Laurenti to recover from the excessive use of alcohol. From Menton, Swinburne went to
Italy, where he travelled extensively. , Isle of Wight, pictured in 2013 Swinburne was an
alcoholic and
algolagniac and highly excitable. He liked to be
flogged. His health suffered, and in 1879 at the age of 42, he was taken into care by his friend,
Theodore Watts-Dunton, who looked after him for the rest of his life at
The Pines, 11 Putney Hill,
Putney. Watts-Dunton took him to the lost town of
Dunwich, on the Suffolk coast, on several occasions in the 1870s. In Watts-Dunton's care Swinburne lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability. ==Career==