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Ernest Dowson

Ernest Christopher Dowson was an English poet, novelist and short-story writer, most associated with the ‘Decadent Movement’; a literary style giving precedence to artifice and symbolism. Dowson was born in Lee, London, England, on 2nd August 1867. He spent his early education at local schools before attending Queen’s College, Oxford. Dowson left in March 1888 however, before obtaining his degree.

In November of 1888, the young man started work with his father at Dowson and Son, a dry-docking business in Limehouse, East London, which had been established by the poet’s grandfather. He led an active social life, carousing with medical students and law pupils, going to music halls and taking the performers to dinner. He also worked assiduously at his writing during this time. Dowson collaborated on two unsuccessful novels with Arthur Moore, worked on a novel of his own, Madame de Viole, and wrote reviews for The Critic. He had more success later in his career as a translator of French fiction, working on novels by Balzac and the Goncourt brothers, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos.

In 1889, aged twenty-three, Dowson fell in love with the eleven-year-old Adelaide ‘Missie’ Foltinowicz, daughter of a Polish restaurant owner. In 1893 he unsuccessfully proposed to her. His biographer in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography writes cautiously that ‘Through [Dowson’s] letters and poetry there runs a strong current of paedophilia, which has an erotic strain; but it is tempered by a humane and romantic appreciation of the freshness and generosity of children not yet tainted by the manners of society.’ Even for the standards of the early 1890s however, eleven years old was still considered extremely young. Adelaide eventually married a tailor, to Dowson’s despair.

In August 1894 Dowson’s father, who was in the advanced stages of tuberculosis, died of an overdose of chloral hydrate. His mother, who was also consumptive, hanged herself in February 1895, and soon Dowson began to decline rapidly. The publisher Leonard Smithers gave him an allowance to live in France and write translations, but he returned to London in 1897 (where he stayed with the Foltinowicz family, despite the transfer of Adelaide’s affections). In 1899, Robert Sherard (a fellow writer and journalist) found Dowson almost penniless in a wine bar and took him back to his cottage in Catford, where Sherard was living. Dowson spent the last six weeks of his life at Sherard’s cottage and died there of alcoholism at the age of thirty-two.

The young poet had become a Catholic in 1892 and was interred in the Roman Catholic section of nearby Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries. After Dowson’s death, Oscar Wilde wrote: ‘Poor wounded wonderful fellow that he was, a tragic reproduction of all tragic poetry, like a symbol, or a scene. I hope bay leaves will be laid on his tomb and rue and myrtle too for he knew what love was.’ Dowson died on 23rd February 1900. Today, he is best known for his beautiful lyric verse and short fictional novels.