[[File:Nicholson and Melling.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|A widely reproduced

Biography

John Gambrill Nicholson (the Francis was added later and the -ll / -l spelling varied over the years) was born in Essex in 1866.

Nicholson was a member of the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society for homosexuals founded in 1897 by fellow Uranian George Ives. He was also an officer of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology,

Nicholson's first book of poems Love in Earnest (1892) was dedicated to the memory of his mother, but the first section, a sequence of 50 numbered sonnets (which open with "Some lightly love, but mine is Love in Earnest -/My heart is ever faithful while it hears/An echo of itself in thine, though years/Should pass ere its full passion thou returnest"), was dedicated to "W.E.M." This was the flaxen-haired blue-eyed William Ernest Mather (1877–99)—second son of Sir William Mather—a pupil of his at Rydal Mount School 1888–90, who died young after being thrown from his horse. A photograph of Nicholson with Ernest, taken at Llandudno in June 1889, was published in The Book Collector (Summer 1978).

Love in Earnest attracted the notice of the Uranian poets, including John Addington Symonds, and it is believed to have contributed to the use of earnest as a coded term for homosexuality among Uranians. Some scholars have speculated that Oscar Wilde exploited this allusion in his 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest.

In 1894, Nicholson contributed "The Shadow of the End", an "intensely poetic prose meditation" on the death of a beloved boy, to the sole issue of the Uranian magazine The Chameleon.

Nicholson's second volume of poetry A Chaplet of Southernwood (1896), celebrated the beauty of another Rydal Mount pupil (1891–94), William Alexander (Alec) Melling (1878–1962). "Southernwood" and "Ladslove" are alternative English names for the aromatic plant from southern Europe Artemisia abrotanum.

The Romance of a Choir-Boy

Nicholson's semi-autobiographical novel The Romance of a Choir-Boy was written between 1896 and 1905 but not published until privately printed in 1916.

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