Eric Stenbock born 14 March 1860 (d. 1895)'Scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men' - W. B. Yeats.
Count Eric Stanislaus (or Stanislaus Eric) Stenbock was a Baltic German poet and writer of macabre fantastic fiction.
Stenbock was the Count of Bogesund and the heir to an estate in Estonia. He was the son of Lucy Sophia Frerichs, a Manchester cotton heiress, and Count Erich Stenbock, of a distinguished Baltic German noble family with Swedish roots.
Stenbock's father died suddenly while he was one year old; his properties were held in trust for him by his grandfather. Eric's paternal grandfather died while Eric was quite young, also, in 1866, leaving him another trust fund.
Stenbock attended Balliol College in Oxford but never completed his studies. While at Oxford, Eric was deeply influenced by the homosexual Pre-Raphaelite artist and illustrator Simeon Solomon. He is also said to have had a relationship with the composer and conductor Norman O'Neill and with other 'young men'.
In Oxford, Stenbock also converted to Roman Catholicism taking for himself the name Stanislaus. Some years later Eric also admitted to having tried a different religion every week in Oxford. At the end of his life, he seemed to have developed a composite religion containing elements of Catholicism, Buddhism and idolatry.
In 1885, Count Magnus died, upon which Stenbock, as the oldest living male relative, acceded to the status of Count and to the possession of the family's estates in Estonia. Eric travelled to and lived in Kolga, Estonia for a year and a half; he returned to England in the summer of 1887, during which time he sank deeper into alcoholism and drug addiction.
He returned to London and entered into London literary circles with the likes of W. B. Yeats, Aubrey Beardsley, Robert Ross, Charles Shannon, Charles Ricketts, Lionel Johnson and Oscar Wilde - who he rivalled for his sense of exotic decadence.
Stenbock lived in England most of his life, and wrote his works in the English language. He published a number of (now largely forgotten) books of verse (generally morbid, opium-drenched) during his lifetime, including Love, Sleep, and Dreams (1881), and Rue, Myrtle, and Cypress (1883). In 1894, Stenbock published The Shadow of Death, his last volume of verse, and Studies of Death, a collection of short (gothic gay-ish vampyr) stories that were good enough to be the subject of favourable comment by H P Lovecraft.
Stenbock died, either of cirrhosis of the liver, or from a blow to the head from a fall in Brighton. Rumour has it that on April 26th 1895, he died after a drunken incident involving taking a swing at someone with a poker and toppling into the grate. It was the first day of Oscar Wilde's trial. London's society's attention was thus focused elsewhere. His death certificate lists 'sepatic cirrhosis' as the cause of death.
In a macabre final twist, although his body is buried in Brighton, his heart was removed and sent to Estonia, where it was preserved in a glass urn in the family church.
A Secret Kept: A Brief Life of Count Stenbock