Partner Cecil Castle
Queer Places:
Woodroffe House, Chiswick Mall, London W4 2PJ, UK
Charles
Philip Castle Kains Jackson (December 20, 1857 – December 1, 1933) was an
English poet closely associated with the Uranian school. Charles Kains Jackson
edited The Artist and Journal of Home Culture between 1888 and 1894. The
journal itself served what Laurel Brake describes as a community of
self-identifying gay readers and writers, and during Jackson's tenure it
published homoerotic verse and features, often in Hellenic vein, as well as an
explicit call for the legitimisation of homosexual relations. Sonnet on a Picture by Tuke (1889), Antinous (1891) and The New Chivalry (1894) are cited as examples in Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English
Literature from 1850-1900, by Brian Reade.
Beginning in 1888, in addition to a career as a lawyer, he served as editor
for the periodical The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, which became
something of an official periodical for the movement. In it, he praised such
artists as Henry Scott Tuke (to
whom he dedicated a homo-erotic sonnet entitled "Sonnet on a picture by Tuke")
and Henry Oliver Walker.
He also befriended such similar-minded contemporaries as Frederick
William Rolfe, Lord Alfred Douglas and John
Addington Symonds.[1]
The homosexual aspects of The Artist and Journal of Home Culture declined
after the replacement of Kains Jackson as an editor in 1894. The final issue
edited by Kains Jackson included his essay, the New Chivalry, an argument for
the moral and societal benefits of erotic male friendship on the grounds of
both Platonism and Social Darwinism.[2] According
to Kains Jackson, the New Chivalry would promote "the youthful masculine
ideal" over the Old Chivalry's emphasis on the feminine. Jackson's volumes of
poetry include Finibus Cantat Amor (1922) and Lysis (1924). Kains Jackson was
a member of the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society for homosexuals founded
in 1897 by George Ives,
which was named after the location of the battle where the Sacred Band of
Thebes was finally annihilated in 338 BC.[3] Other
members included Samuel Elsworth Cottam, Montague
Summers, and John
Gambril Nicholson. Jackson discovered the poetry of Edward
Cracroft Lefroy. He published two small books of poetry, both concerning
his romance with his cousin Cecil Castle who
died in 1922. A third unpublished collection of 85 poems, titled Alba
Ligustra, dating from 1925–28, was sold by an American book dealer in 2017.
Many of the poems concerned Kains-Jackson's memories of Castle, and other
poems and notes referred to Henry Scott Tuke.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kains_Jackson
- Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from
1850-1900, by Brian Reade