John Moray Stuart-Young
Encyclopedia
Uranian poetry
The Uranians were a small and somewhat clandestine group of male pederastic poets who published works between 1858 and 1930...
, memoirist, novelist and merchant trader. Born John James Young in the slums of Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
, Stuart-Young was poorly educated and treated badly by those around him. Beaten by his laborer father, his mother was forced to take in washing. All of his siblings died young of tuberculosis. He left school at 13, working for little reward as an office boy and clerk. After having been caught stealing money from a gas-mantle works, apparently to help establish himself as something of a literary gentleman, Stuart-Young was arrested and spent six months in prison. He was only 18.
He later spent many years in Africa, in such diverse places as Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone , officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Guinea to the north and east, Liberia to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west and southwest. Sierra Leone covers a total area of and has an estimated population between 5.4 and 6.4...
, Grand Bassa in Liberia
Liberia
Liberia , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Sierra Leone on the west, Guinea on the north and Côte d'Ivoire on the east. Liberia's coastline is composed of mostly mangrove forests while the more sparsely populated inland consists of forests that open...
, Conakry
Conakry
Conakry is the capital and largest city of Guinea. Conakry is a port city on the Atlantic Ocean and serves as the economic, financial and cultural centre of Guinea with a 2009 population of 1,548,500...
in French Guinea
French Guinea
French Guinea was a French colonial possession in West Africa. Its borders, while changed over time, were in 1958 those of the independent nation of Guinea....
and later, Onitsha
Onitsha
Onitsha is a city, a commercial, educational, and religious center and river port on the eastern bank of the Niger river in Anambra State, southeastern Nigeria....
on the Niger River
Niger River
The Niger River is the principal river of western Africa, extending about . Its drainage basin is in area. Its source is in the Guinea Highlands in southeastern Guinea...
. In Onitsha, he worked as a trader to some measure of success. He would exchange European goods for African materials such as palm-oil, ivory and rubber. Stuart-Young was a strong critic of the work of missionaries. According to Stuart-Young, it was a photograph by Frederick Rolfe
Frederick Rolfe
Frederick William Rolfe, better known as Baron Corvo, and also calling himself 'Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe', , was an English writer, artist, photographer and eccentric...
of a nude Egyptian boy that awoke in him, a schoolboy of fourteen, a fascination for Africa.
He once alleged to have had a relationship, with romantic overtones, with Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
. Stuart-Young claimed to have first met him in June 1894 as a teen, while dining at the Savoy
Savoy Hotel
The Savoy Hotel is a hotel located on the Strand, in the City of Westminster in central London. Built by impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte with profits from his Gilbert and Sullivan operas, the hotel opened on 6 August 1889. It was the first in the Savoy group of hotels and restaurants owned by...
. The two visited the Haymarket
The Haymarket
Haymarket is a street in the St. James's district of the City of Westminster, London. It runs from Piccadilly Circus at the north to Pall Mall at the south...
, seeing Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lady Windermere's Fan, A Play About a Good Woman is a four act comedy by Oscar Wilde, first produced 22 February 1892 at the St James's Theatre in London. The play was first published in 1893...
. Stuart-Young even forged letters allegedly by Wilde to substantiate this. Stuart-Young's memoirs of Wilde and the supposed letters were published in his 1905 volume, Osrac, the Self-Sufficient. According to Timothy D'Arch Smith, it is unlikely Stuart-Young had ever met Wilde. D'Arch Smith further states that the love of Stuart-Young's life was an Englishman named Tommy Todd. Stuart-Young developed close relationships with several young African houseboys, including a mix-raced, 14 year-old boy named Ibrahim, referred to by Moray-Young as 'the Unkissed', and an 11 year-old named Bosa, whom he later took with him to England.
Stuart-Young published dozens of works, including books of poetry, novels, descriptions of African life and autobiographical works. His poems are closely linked to fin-de-siècle and Uranian
Uranian
frame|right|From [[John Addington Symonds]]' 1891 book A Problem in Modern Ethics.Uranian is a 19th century term that referred to a person of a third sex — originally, someone with "a female psyche in a male body" who is sexually attracted to men, and later extended to cover homosexual gender...
themes, being informed by decadence, colonialism and pederasty. Stuart-Young married twice, both times to English women: Annie Knight in 1908 and Nellie Gibson Etheridge Young in 1919. There is no evidence of a marriage to an African woman, in spite of his 1904 novel about such a union, Merely a Negress: a West African Story. He was given the honorary name of Odeziaku by the Igbo people
Igbo people
Igbo people, also referred to as the Ibo, Ebo, Eboans or Heebo are an ethnic group living chiefly in southeastern Nigeria. They speak Igbo, which includes various Igboid languages and dialects; today, a majority of them speak English alongside Igbo as a result of British colonialism...
, which means "keeper, caretaker, manager, or arranger of wealth". In 1939, Stuart-Young died in Port Harcourt, Nigeria
Nigeria
Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...
. He was given a lavish funeral by his friends and employees in Africa, where 10,000 Igbo mourners lined the streets for ceremonies which extended over four days. A study of Stuart-Young, entitled the Forger's Tale: the Search for Odeziaku, was published by Stephanie Newell in 2006.