Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was a British poet, writer and playwright. Active in the aesthetic circle, romantic and then decadent, he met Oscar Wilde and other famous intellectuals and artists of the same environment, attending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and becoming a friend of the poet, artist and initiate Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Eccentric personality, with a strong taste for artistic provocation, his poetry was very controversial and his lyrics were also characterized by original versification solutions, by the cult of paganism and the idealized Middle Ages. From 1903 to 1909 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is considered one of the most representative lyric poets of Victorian literature.
Swinburne's literary output is vast and includes poems, plays, songs, novels, short stories and essays on literary criticism. He also wrote articles and short essays for the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. This short but interesting biography of the great French Romantic writer, initiate and politician Victor Hugo fits into this context. It was published in the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1911, two years after Swinburne's death.