John Gambril Nicholson, a private schoolteacher all his life, is arguably the most representative and ubiquitous ‘Uranian,’ writing dedications and introductions to works by others, in addition to much prose and poetry published by specialist Francis Murray, including this book. Nicholson explored in his writing a tension between sexual desire for boys and the consequences, or impossibility, of its expression. While moral relativism is undoubtedly a danger when considering such expressions of desire, it is striking to read the back cover of the 1989 Gay Men's Press edition of his verse, which openly states that it deals with ‘a sexuality rarely expressed and socially scorned; the love of men for boys’. In this context, the photograph of Nicholson’s charges at his school, roused from bed to rehearse, remains troubling.