During the war years the elder Symons enjoyed a degree of business success that allowed the family to know briefly the satisfaction of a middle-class existence, but this prosperity was short-lived. When the elder Symons died in 1929, his estate was valued at four pounds.
Symons's formal education ended when he was fourteen years old. In his late teens, Julian embarked on an intensive course of self-education. He read the British writers of the 1890s, the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope. He read more verse than prose, but among novelists he preferred Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and, above all, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He generally avoided the major Romantic and Victorian writers preferred by his literary friends. This was in part, he would later perceive, a matter of cultural snobbery, but it also reflected a genuine preference for the harsh over the bland, for satire and realism over romance.
Symons's self-designed course of study yielded a kind of intellectual excitement that perhaps could not have been generated by the prescriptions of formal education and prepared him well for the immersion in modern literature that was the next major stage in his intellectual development.
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