Havelock Ellis

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Havelock Ellis (credit: The Mansell Collection)

(born Feb. 2, 1859, Croydon, Surrey, Eng. — died July 8, 1939, Washbrook, Suffolk) British sexuality researcher. A medical doctor, he gave up his practice to devote himself to scientific and literary work. His major work, the seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897 – 1928), was a comprehensive, groundbreaking encyclopaedia of human sexual biology, behaviour, and attitudes whose topics included homosexuality, masturbation, and the physiology of sexual behaviour. Sale of the first volume led to a trial when the salesman was arrested on obscenity charges; the later volumes had to be published in the U.S. and were legally available only to the medical profession until 1935. Ellis viewed sexual activity as a natural expression of love and sought to dispel the widespread fear and ignorance surrounding it. He was also known as a champion of women's rights.

For more information on Henry Havelock Ellis, visit Britannica.com.

The pioneering studies in human sexuality of Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) challenged the taboos and hypocrisies of Victorian society and paved the way for greater openness that has characterized the modern era.

Born on February 2, 1859 in Croydon, England, Havelock Ellis was the son of a prosperous sea captain. Father and son went on a round-the-world voyage when Ellis was only seven years old. Ellis was a child prodigy. Reading soon became his passion. After having gone through the volumes of Nature Displayed, which he found at home, he proceeded to make his way through the works of several literary giants. At the age of twelve, he prepared a manuscript titled "The Precious Stones of the Bible," which he intended to publish, but decided the cost of publication was prohibitive. He then planned a second book, about flowers, and wrote various essays.

Ellis was sent to the Poplars, an English boarding school. It was an average school for its day and though in some areas it stifled the young boy - Ellis learned no Greek and very little Latin - in others it allowed his natural curiosity and aptitude to expand. He quickly picked up French, German, and Italian. As an adult, this facility with modern languages enabled Ellis to remain on the cutting edge of contemporary thought. Shy at that age, Ellis was nevertheless intellectually fortified by literature and the world of ideas. It was at Poplars that he first became truly inspired by ideas and words. Unfortunately for Ellis, the school's curriculum was deficient in science. He had to discover the fundamentals of chemistry, geology, and botany on his own, through various manuals.

Traveled to Australia

Ellis left the Poplars at age sixteen and began tutoring his younger sisters at home, and reading poets such a Percy Bysshe Shelley and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Later that year (1875), he set off on another round-the-world voyage with his father. The ship eventually put in at Sydney, Australia (one of its main ports of call), and was to proceed from there to Calcutta. However Ellis, who had been ill since before leaving England, was advised to remain in Australia. In Sydney, he secured a job as an assistant school-master at Burwood. When he was fired after a month, he took a job as a private tutor. This time he lasted a year before accepting a position as assistant master at Crafton. When the headmaster died before the opening of the new term, Ellis was promoted to fill the position. However, Ellis was not cut out for the headmaster's role and resigned the position nine months later, returning to Sydney. He resolved to become certified as a teacher by the New South Wales Council of Education. Upon doing so, he was given a post at Sparkes Creek - a two-room schoolhouse: one room for classes and the other for his living quarters. It was a self-described pleasant isolation he lived.

Among the many books he read, one made a lasting impression. Life in Nature by James Hinton explained nature as a conscious being, a concept that appealed to Ellis's anti-materialistic notions. In The Dance of Life Ellis writes of the impact the book had upon him: "My whole attitude towards the universe was changed. It was no longer an attitude of hostility and dread, but of confidence and love. My self was one with the Not-self, my will one with the universal will."

Ellis spent a year at Sparkes Creek and four years all told in Australia, returning to England in 1879. He decided to study medicine. While searching for a means to pay for his education he took a job as assistant master in a Birmingham school. At this time, he made the acquaintance of the Hinton family, relatives of the author of Life in Nature. Caroline Haddon, a sister-in-law of the Hintons, hearing of his plight, loaned Ellis £200 to pay for his medical education. Ellis accepted the offer after some soul searching and began his medical training in 1881 at St. Thomas's Hospital in London.

Editor and Writer

Demanding as his medical studies were, medicine was not his only field of interest. Other interests included anthropology, archaeology, architecture, botany, ethics, ethnology, geology, history, literature, music, mythology, painting, philosophy, physics, and sculpture. Ellis's first noteworthy piece was an essay on the writer Thomas Hardy that elicited a letter of appreciation from Hardy himself and an invitation from the editor of the newspaper Westminster Review. After their meeting, Ellis was placed in charge of the theological and religion section of the paper, a post he held for a few years.

Ellis became involved with a group of young intellectuals known as The Fellowship of New Life. It was at the Fellowship meetings where he was introduced to George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and Arthur Symons. The Fellowship had a general socialist orientation that was geared toward an ethical lifestyle rather than politics. The more political members of the Fellowship formed an offshoot, which became the Fabian Society. The Fellowship of New Life, besides expanding his outlook, provided Ellis with important contacts that enabled him to earn a living as an editor of a literary series and a writer. He edited volumes for the "Camelot Series" and the "Mermaid Series," which published seventeenth-century dramas. Ellis was also publishing his own work in periodicals such as The Nineteenth Century and The Contemporary Review. In 1889, he became editor of the "Contemporary Science Series." The following year that series published his first book, The Criminal. It was an expansive sociological study that gained a reputation for the reforms that it advocated. In many of these reforms, Ellis proved to be ahead of his time. In 1890, Ellis published The New Spirit, containing essays on Denis Diderot, Heinrich Heine, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, and Walt Whitman.

In 1883, Ellis published in the Indian Review a review of a book titled, The Story of an African Farm. Ellis was sufficiently taken with the book that he wrote to the author, Olive Shreiner, and the two met and became close friends. In his biography of Ellis, John Stewart Collis noted that "she was a great stimulus to him in finding himself, and so was he to her." It was Shreiner who pointed out to Ellis that literature and science, not medicine, would be his true calling. Nevertheless Ellis received his M.D. in 1889.

He married Edith Lees on December 19, 1891, but it was a marriage of intellectual rather than physical passion. In 1892, he published The Nationalization of Health. This was followed in 1894 by Man and Woman. The research for this book eventually led to Ellis's most important work, and the book itself serves as an introduction to Studies in the Psychology of Sex.

Studies in the Psychology of Sex

Studies in the Psychology of Sex is a seven-volume opus which Ellis worked on for the better part of his career. The volumes are titled: I: The Evolution of Modesty, Sexual Periodicity, Auto-Eroticism; II: Sexual Inversion; III: The Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain, the Sexual Impulse in Women; IV: Sexual Selection in Man. Touch. Smell. Hearing. Vision; V: Erotic Symbolism, the Mechanism of Detumescence, the Psychic State in Pregnancy; VI: Sex in Relation to Society; and VII: Eonism and OtherSupplementary Studies. This final volume was published in 1928. Victorian England, however, was not ready for the Studies. In what reads almost like a comic opera, in 1897 the first completed volume, Sexual Inversion, was brought out by a small publisher, Roland de Villiers, who was actually an international confidence man. De Villiers never cheated Ellis, though, and often assisted him. He placed the book with The Legitimization League, an organization that sought to legitimize children born out of wedlock. At the time, this organization was under surveillance by Scotland Yard for attracting anarchists. Eventually the book became the focal point for a celebrated obscenity court case. Ellis lost the case and the press turned away from him. Yet in the end, he and the Studies prevailed. An American publisher agreed to publish the Studies, with a slight change. The Evolution of Modesty became the first book in the series while Sexual Inversion was published as the second volume. Some legal restraints remained. Until 1935, only the medical profession had legal access to the Studies.

Ellis was a prolific writer. During the thirty-one-year span that it took him to complete Studies in the Psychology of Sex, he wrote sixteen other books that included poetry, a travel book ( The Soul of Spain ), hygiene, examinations of the nineteenth century, of dreams, of genius, a study of conflict, and his most famous book of this period, The Dance of Life. During his lifetime Ellis published thirty-six books (including the seven volumes of the Studies ) and left behind manuscripts that evolved into five more books, including his autobiography, My Life. He was an incomparable essayist and thinker whose breadth of knowledge left men such as H. L. Mencken in awe. In 1924, Ellis again proved he was ahead of his time as he speculated about nuclear deterrence. In his third volume of Impressions and Comments he discussed the possibility of creating rudimentary nuclear weaponry, and of using such weaponry as a deterrence to war. He made no speculation on the psychological impact of the policy and therefore argued the point from a solely hypothetical view - a view that nevertheless favored life over death.

Ellis is best remembered as a pioneering sexual researcher who broke down barriers for others, such as Alfred Kinsey. His masterstroke was to place one of humanity's most elemental biological functions in the realm of the psychological. Despite the ensuing censorship, this turned a modern eye on the topic. It followed from this experience and from experiences of his life that he would champion women's rights and sex education, but in reality all of Ellis's work was an expression of his philosophy of liberation: of the mind, the body, and the soul. The irony of Ellis's life is not that most of his other work is often overlooked, but that his key notions of liberation are diminished. He died on July 8, 1939 in Washbrook, England.

Further Reading

Collis, John Stewart. Havelock Ellis: Artist of Life. William Sloane Associates, 1959.

Ellis, Havelock. The Dance of Life. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1923.

Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. Grolier, 1997

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition. 1997.

All his working life was spent in major libraries and archives, at the Bodleian and the British Museum. He was a leading figure among the literary-antiquarians of his day, and was Secretary for the Society of Antiquaries for 40 Years from 1814. For folklorists, Ellis's main claim to fame is that he undertook the daunting task of editing the mass of material collected by Brand for a second edition of his Observations on Popular Antiquities. Ellis managed this by 1813, publishing a two-volume set, but without grasping the nettle of arrangement, and the work rapidly became famous for its irritating lack of clear structure and footnotes upon footnotes. Nevertheless, the new edition immediately became a standard work in the burgeoning antiquary-folklore field, being referred to as ‘Brand-Ellis’ by later writers, and Ellis returned to the subject with a new three volume edition, better organized, and with additional material, in 1849.Dorson, 1968: 17-20, 22-4; DNB.

Quotes:

"Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?"

"There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether."

"The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands."

"It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution."

"Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom."

"Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive."

See more famous quotes by Havelock Ellis

Havelock Ellis
Havelock Ellis
Born	2 February 1859(1859-02-02)
Died	8 July 1939 (aged 80)
Nationality	British
Ethnicity	British
Spouse(s)	Edith Ellis

Henry Havelock Ellis (2 February 1859 - 8 July 1939) was a British sexologist, physician, and social reformer.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Teaching 1.3 Medicine 1.4 Marriage 2 Sex 3 Eugenics 4 Works 5 References 6 External links

Biography

Early life

Ellis, son of Edward Peppen Ellis and Susannah Mary Wheatley, was born in Croydon, then a small town south of London. His father was a sea captain, his mother the daughter of a sea captain, and many other relatives lived on or near the sea. At seven years of age, his father took him on one of his voyages, during which he called at Sydney, Callao and Antwerp. After his return, Ellis went to a fairly good school, the French and German College near Wimbledon, and afterward attended a school in Mitcham.

Teaching

In April 1875, Ellis left London on his father's ship for Australia, and soon after his arrival in Sydney, he obtained a position as a master at a private school. It was discovered that he had had no training for this position, and so he became a tutor for a family living a few miles from Carcoar. He spent a year there, doing a lot of reading, and then obtained a position as a master at a grammar school in Grafton. The headmaster had died and Ellis carried on the school for that year, but was too young and inexperienced to do so successfully.

At the end of the year, he returned to Sydney and, after three months' training, was given charge of two government part-time elementary schools, one at Sparkes Creek and the other at Junction Creek. He lived at the school house on Sparkes Creek for a year, which turned out to be the most eventful year of his life up to that point, as he called it afterwards. In his own words, "In Australia, I gained health of body, I attained peace of soul, my life task was revealed to me, I was able to decide on a professional vocation, I became an artist in literature . . . these five points covered the whole activity of my life in the world. Some of them I should doubtless have reached without the aid of the Australian environment, scarcely all, and most of them I could never have achieved so completely if chance had not cast me into the solitude of the Liverpool Range."

Medicine

Ellis returned to England in April 1879. He had decided to take up the study of sex, and felt his first step must be to qualify as a medical man. He studied at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, but never had a regular medical practice. His training was aided by a small legacy^[1] and also income earned from editing works in Mermaid Series, editions lesser known Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.^[1] He joined The Fellowship of the New Life in 1883, meeting other social reformers Edward Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw.

Marriage

In November 1891, at the age of 32, and still a virgin, Ellis married the English writer and proponent of women's rights, Edith Lees (none of his four sisters ever married). From the beginning, their marriage was unconventional; Edith Ellis was openly lesbian, and at the end of the honeymoon, Ellis went back to his bachelor rooms in Paddington, while she lived at Fellowship House. Their 'open marriage' was the central subject in Ellis's autobiography, My Life.

Sex

According to Ellis in My Life, his friends were much amused at his being considered an expert on sex, what with the fact that he suffered from impotence until the age of 60, when he discovered that he was able to become aroused by the sight of a woman urinating. Ellis named the interest in urination "Undinism" but it is now more commonly called urolagnia.

His book Sexual Inversion, the first English medical text book on homosexuality, co-authored with John Addington Symonds, described the sexual relations of homosexual men and boys, something that Ellis did not consider to be a disease, immoral, or a crime. The work assumes that same-sex love transcended age-taboos as well as gender-taboos, as seven of the twenty-one examples are of intergenerational relationships. A bookseller was prosecuted in 1897 for stocking Ellis' book. Although the term homosexual itself is attributed to Ellis, he wrote in 1897, “‘homosexual’ is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it,”^[2] the hybridity in question being the word's mix of Greek and Latin roots. Other psychologically important concepts developed by Ellis include autoerotism and narcissism, both of which were later taken up by Sigmund Freud.

Eugenics

Ellis was a supporter of eugenics. He served as vice-president to the Eugenics Education Society and wrote on the subject a.o. in The Task of Social Hygiene.

“

Eventually, it seems evident, a general system, whether private or public, whereby all personal facts, biological and mental, normal and morbid, are duly and systematically registered, must become inevitable if we are to have a real guide as to those persons who are most fit, or most unfit to carry on the race.

”

Works

• The Criminal (1890)
• The New Spirit (1890)
• The Nationalisation of Health (1892)
• Man and Woman: A Study of Secondary and Tertiary Sexual Characteristics (1894) (revised 1929)
• translator: Germinal (by Zola) (1895) (reissued 1933)
• Sexual Inversion (1897) (with J.A. Symonds)^[3]
• Affirmations (1898)
• The Evolution of Modesty, The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity, Auto-Erotism (1900)^[4]
• The Nineteenth Century (1900)
• Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain, The Sexual Impulse in Women (1903)^[5]
• A Study of British Genius (1904)
• Sexual Selection in Man (1905)^[6]
• Erotic Symbolism, The Mechanism of Detumescence, The Psychic State in Pregnancy (1906)^[7]
• The Soul of Spain (1908)
• Sex in Relation to Society (1910)^[8]
• The Problem of Race-Regeneration (1911)
• The World of Dreams (1911)
• The Task of Social Hygiene (1912)
• Impressions and Comments (1914-1924) (3 vols.)^[9]
• Essays in War-Time (1916)^[10]
• The Philosophy of Conflict (1919)
• On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue (1921)
• Kanga Creek: An Australian Idyll (1922)^[11]
• Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922)
• The Dance of Life (1923)^[12]
• Sonnets, with Folk Songs from the Spanish (1925)
• Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies (1928)
• The Art of Life (1929) (selected and arranged by Mrs. S. Herbert)
• More Essays of Love and Virtue (1931)
• ed.: James Hinton: Life in Nature (1931)
• Views and Reviews (1932)^[13]
• Psychology of Sex (1933)
• ed.: Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection, by Walter Savage Landor (1933)
• Chapman (1934)
• My Confessional (1934)
• Questions of Our Day (1934)
• From Rousseau to Proust (1935)
• Selected Essays (1936)
• Poems (1937) (selected by John Gawsworth; pseudonym of T. Fytton Armstrong)
• Love and Marriage (1938) (with others)
• My Life (1939)
• Sex Compatibility in Marriage (1939)
• From Marlowe to Shaw (1950) (ed. by J. Gawsworth)
• The Genius of Europe (1950)
• Sex and Marriage (1951) (ed. by J. Gawsworth)
• The Unpublished Letters of Havelock Ellis to Joseph Ishill (1954)

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Thomson, Robert (1968) (in English). The Pelican History of Psychology (First ed.). Pelican. pp. 463. ISBN 0140209042. 
2. ^ Online Etymology Dictionary at www.etymonline.com
3. ^ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 by Havelock Ellis at Project Gutenberg
4. ^ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 by Havelock Ellis at Project Gutenberg
5. ^ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 by Havelock Ellis at Project Gutenberg
6. ^ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 by Havelock Ellis at Project Gutenberg
7. ^ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 by Havelock Ellis at Project Gutenberg
8. ^ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 by Havelock Ellis at Project Gutenberg
9. ^ Impressions and Comments by Havelock Ellis at Project Gutenberg
10. ^ Essays in War-Time by Havelock Ellis at Project Gutenberg
11. ^ "www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300801.txt". http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300801.txt. 
12. ^ "www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300671.txt". http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300671.txt. 
13. ^ Views and Reviews at www.gutenberg.net.au

• Serle, Percival (1949). "Ellis, Henry Havelock". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. http://gutenberg.net.au/dictbiog/0-dict-biogE.html#ellis2. 

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Havelock Ellis

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Havelock Ellis

• Biography
• Works by Havelock Ellis at Project Gutenberg
• Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise
• Archival material relating to Havelock Ellis listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• Works by or about Havelock Ellis in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Persondata
NAME	Ellis, Havelock
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Ellis, Henry Havelock
SHORT DESCRIPTION	British Sexologist
DATE OF BIRTH	1859-02-02
PLACE OF BIRTH	Croydon, England
DATE OF DEATH	1939-07-08
PLACE OF DEATH

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