Queer Places:
Rugby School, Lawrence Sheriff St, Rugby CV22 5EH, UK
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Albion
Cottage, Snape
Charles George Horatio Shorting (1841–1897) was educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, matriculated 12th May 1859; scholar at Corpus Christi College 1860-62; BA from New Inn Hall 1863.
Charles George Horatio Shorting was born in Stonham Aspall, Suffolk, the son of Canon Charles Shorting (1810-1864), vicar at Stonham Aspel, and Elizabeth Harriet Cobbold (1817-1910).
When John Addington Symonds first arrived in Oxford, his friends included Edward William Urquhart, who, he reports, “had high church proclivities and ran after Choristers.” His friend Randell Vickers was “a man of somewhat similar stamp.” “In their company,” he notes, “I frequented antechapels and wasted my time over feverish sentimentalism”. Symonds also became “intimate friends” at Oxford with Charles Shorting, a friendship terminated when the latter’s “conduct with regard to boys, especially the choristers at Magdalen, brought him into serious trouble”. Symonds later blamed Shorting for bringing his “peculiar atmosphere of boy-love into [his] neighbourhood” around 1862.
At Oxford in 1861, John Addington Symonds fell "violently in love with a cathedral chorister," Alfred Brooke, a "passion" Symonds experienced as "more intense, unreasonable, poignant," and "sensual" than his feeling for William Fear Dyer. Brooke had "the most beautiful face I ever saw and the most faschinating voice I ever heard." His passion for the seductive Brooke made it more difficult for Symonds to resist acting upon his sexual impulses, but resist he did. The two exchanged not a single kiss. In November 1862, a vindictive Charles Shorting, publicly charged Symonds with having earlier supported Shorting's pursuit of a choirboy and with sharing Shorting's interest in choristers. A month later, at a general meeting of the college, Symonds received a "complete acquittal," though two of his letters to Shorting were "strongly condemned."
In 1881 in Her Majesty's Legation, Berne, Switzerland, Charles Shorting married Constance Mary Anne Cotton, daughter of Rev. Henry James Cotton (her grandfather was Dean of Bangor Cathedral and her great grandfather was Dean of Chester Cathedral) and Elizabeth Emma Stovin, and they two sons, Hester Agnes Tuckey Shorting (died unmarried in 1934) and Horace Arthur Shorting. In the 1891 census they are living in Penge, London.
Charles Shorting died at Albion Cottage, Snape, Suffolk, in 1897. In the 1901 census his family is living in Bournemouth and in the 1911 census in Christchurch Hants.
My published books:
