The Concept of Anxiety
All of Kierkegaard's books have either a preface, dedication, or prayer at the beginning. This book includes a lengthy introduction. "The Concept of Anxiety" was published on exactly the same date as "Prefaces", June 17, 1844. Both books deal with Hegel’s idea of mediation. Mediation is a common thread throughout Kierkegaard’s works. His work up to this point was to show that faith was being mediated by knowledge. Here he takes up the questions of sin and guilt.
John Addington Symonds
Symonds was born at Bristol, England in 1840. His father, the senior John Addington Symonds, M.D. (1807–1871), was the author of "Criminal Responsibility" (1869), "The Principles of Beauty" (1857) and "Sleep and Dreams". Considered delicate, the younger Symonds did not take part in games after age 14 at Harrow School, and he showed no particular promise as a scholar. Symonds moved to Clifton Hill House at the age of ten, an event which he believed had a large and beneficial impact towards his health and spiritual development. Symonds' delicate condition continued and he suffered from nightmares as a child in which corpses in and under his bed prompted sleepwalking, and on one such occasion he was almost drowned when sleepwalking in the attic of Clifton Hill House when he reached a cistern of rainwater. According to Symonds, an angel with "blue eyes and wavy, blonde hair" woke him and brought him to safety; this figure frequented Symonds' dreams and was potentially his first homosexual awakening.