Byron

Caroline Franklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415268554
• eBook ISBN: 9781134493043
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Lord Byron (1788-1824) was a poet and satirist, as famous in his time for his love affairs and questionable morals as he was for his poetry. Looking beyond the scandal, Byron leaves us a body of work that proved crucial to the development of English poetry and provides a fascinating counterpoint to other writings of the Romantic period. This guide to Byron's sometimes daunting, often extraordinary work offers:

• an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of Byron's texts, from publication to the present
• an introduction to key critical texts and perspectives on Byron's life and work, situated in a broader critical history
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Byron and seeking not only a guide to his works but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.

1 Life and contexts

DOI: 10.4324/9780203968000-1

Introduction

This part attempts to sketch Byron’s life as a writer and show how his poetry was produced through interaction with specific literary cultures in Regency London and abroad. The circumstances of the composition of the verse will be mentioned here briefly but the major poetry will be discussed in more detail in Part 2 and different critical views of it will be indicated in Part 3. Byron’s adventurous life has inspired many biographies, discussed in the ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this section. Reference will be made to these in parenthesis and also to Byron’s Letters and Journals (BLJ) and to accounts of the poet written by his contemporaries.

Childhood and family background, 1788–1805

George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788 at 16 Holles Street, Cavendish Square, London, the son of aristocratic parents: Captain ‘Mad Jack’ Byron and Catherine (née Gordon). His father was a handsome English fortune hunter who soon ran through his plain Scottish wife’s money, and the marriage disintegrated not long after the birth of the baby. Mrs Byron returned to Scotland and took lodgings in Aberdeen in 1789, then in 1791 rented an apartment at 64 Broad Street. Captain Byron died in the same year and she was left to bring up her son alone on only 150 pounds a year. At this time 500 pounds per annum was considered the minimum income for the gentry, and a nobleman needed 10,000 pounds per annum to participate fully in the social season, so this modest lower-middle-class standard of life was considered akin to poverty by an aristocrat such as Catherine Byron.

George had been born lame, perhaps with a club foot, and suffered throughout his childhood both from the stares and taunts of others and from the painful contraptions and treatments ordered by doctors who tried to straighten out his foot. He grew to be handsome like his father yet self-conscious about his disability and also about his tendency to put on weight because of the inability to take much exercise. Yet he loved swimming and riding and also cricket, where another boy ran when he batted. He was spoilt by his mother and did not take kindly to teachers’ discipline but was an omnivorous reader with a retentive memory. He would later look back nostalgically on his Scottish childhood and occasional visits to the wild countryside of the Highlands (see Works, p. 32). In 1794 he had begun his education at Aberdeen Grammar School, but when the news came in May 1798 that, through a succession of unforeseen deaths, he had inherited the Byron title and family estates, he and his mother moved to England. When they arrived at Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, they found the mansion to be near derelict but were nevertheless enchanted with the scene of picturesque desolation, which would later inspire Byron’s earliest verses.

On both his Scottish mother’s side (the Gordons of Gight) and his English father’s (the Byrons of Lancashire and Nottinghamshire), the noble families from which Byron was descended had lost their wealth and importance. This was largely as a result of their own profligacy, but also because power was beginning to pass from the landed aristocracy to the mercantile classes in the nineteenth century (Rowse 1978: 117–52). His mother was a fervent Whig and supporter of the French Revolution, and the young Byron inherited both her aristocratic pride (made hypersensitive by their impoverishment) and the radical politics which seemed so incompatible with it.

Byron’s social status is an important clue to his interest in creating characters who are proud outsiders or out of joint with the times. Because of his rapid transformation from middle-class schoolboy to becoming the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, Mrs Byron and her young son were both extremely sensitive about their rank. This was exacerbated by the fact that in the eighteenth century the Byrons had become a disreputable family and were, anyway, only on the lower rungs of the nobility, so young George would not have been welcome in the very highest circles had he not made a name for himself in literature. His income from the estate was inadequate to pay for the necessary repairs to the mansion and to fund an aristocratic lifestyle, so Newstead Abbey had to be rented out. His mother stinted herself to fund Byron’s education at Harrow (1801–5) and then at Cambridge (1805–7) in accordance with his rank. But for all his early life, until Newstead was sold and the purchase money for the mansion finally paid in February 1819, Byron was plagued by lack of ready money and amassed large debts by attempting nevertheless to live in a suitably lordly style (Beckett 2001: 126–28). He was also uneasy for a long time as to whether a nobleman was lowering himself by engaging in the trade of publishing.

Religious heritage

Byron had been brought up by his mother and tutors in Scotland as a Presbyterian and knew his Bible inside out, particularly the Old Testament (Looper 1978: 287–95). Scots Presbyterians, like English Dissenters, identified with the Jews, having been persecuted and deprived of full civil rights in the historical past because of their religious beliefs. Byron would grow up to be critical of the way the Tory government made loyalty to the Anglican church and monarchy the cornerstone of British patriotism at this time of the Napoleonic wars, when Britain was at war with France. He advocated religious toleration instead. When he became sceptical about orthodox religion as a young man, Byron would vehemently reject the Calvinist belief in which he had been educated: that only a few, ‘the Elect’, were predestined by God to be saved, while the majority were consigned to eternal damnation regardless of their good works. Nevertheless, he could not entirely shake off the pessimism and fatalism which were the heritage of this austere theology.

This was exacerbated by his belief in aristocratic ‘blood’: he knew that his own father had been a dissolute rake, and his great uncle another, who had also killed his neighbour in a duel in dubious circumstances and was tried by the House of Lords and disgraced. When his volatile mother shouted at her headstrong son, she reproached him for following in the footsteps of the Byrons. She was superstitious and probably also saw his club foot as a taint. The lame boy was a prodigious reader (Moore 1860: 20) and particularly fascinated with Gothic fiction such as William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), John Moore’s Zeluco (1789) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), in each of which the sinful protagonist was drawn on by fate to commit evil deeds. He would later find decadent aristocrats portrayed as guilt-ridden villains in the Gothic novels of Mrs Radcliffe and Walter Scott’s poetry, and the younger sons of minor aristocrats turning to banditry in the Sturm und Drang plays of Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. When he became a writer himself, he explored his own ambivalence towards aristocracy through elaborating and combining the characteristics of such anti-heroes, resulting in the creation of a succession of noble outlaws (see Works, p. 51). Critics have labelled this character ‘the Byronic hero’, not because it originated with Byron, but because he created a memorable series of such protagonists and many readers imagined they had something of the poet’s own personality (Thorslev 1962).

Education and reading, 1794–1807

It was clear that Byron could not rely on an empty title to provide him with a place in the world. He needed to make his own way through merit. In Scotland, he had attended a day school and then the Grammar School at Aberdeen, but on inheriting the title he was sent to Dr Glennie’s school at Dulwich to prepare him for entrance to public school. In 1803 his mother rented out Newstead and took a house at nearby Southwell, economising in order to provide him with the requisite upper-class education at Harrow and then Cambridge. Byron took some time to settle at Harrow, but eventually made close friends there and looked back nostalgically at his schooldays in his early verse (see Works, p. 31).

Byron was judged an indifferent scholar in the classics, then central to the curriculum at public school and university, by his chosen biographer; but the nineteen-year-old made a memorandum of an astonishing number of books he claimed to have read for his own amusement: mainly histories, biographies and literature in English and French (Moore 1860: 29, 46). History was then dominated by accounts of heroic men of action shaping the destiny of nations. Such a role seemed barred to a youth with a club foot. But a writer was an equally masterful figure: the French revolution had demonstrated the intoxicating power of ideas, disseminated in print, to inspire the populace to action.

The public schools of Byron’s day, which trained their upper-class pupils to become leaders of their country, specialised in oratory. Many boys grew up to become statesmen, and the future prime minister, Robert Peel, was Byron’s classmate. Byron himself would be entitled to take his seat in the House of Lords at the age of twenty-one, and, though it was less important politically than the House of Commons, it was still a vital part of government. In fact, his mother cherished ambitions that he would become a political leader. Byron performed in three Harrow Speech Days, where the best boys gave recitations to an audience of their friends and relations. He chose passages from Virgil’s Aeneid, Edward Young’s The Revenge and Shakespeare’s King Lear respectively. The scholar Paul Elledge has argued that Byron’s self-creation in literature and in life began here, with ‘a testing and accumulation of roles, a defining of identity through performance’ (Elledge 2000: 3).

Whilst at Cambridge from October 1805 to December 1807, Byron did not spend much time studying, but enjoyed himself and got into debt. He indulged his love of animals and rebellious sense of humour. For example, when the college authorities objected to his keeping a dog, he obtained a bear instead and had it entered for a masters degree. He made some close friends, some of whom he kept for life. These included John Cam Hobhouse, Charles Skinner Matthews and Scrope Berdmore Davies, who were all witty liberal sceptics who shared his passions for literature and politics. Matthews, Hobhouse and Byron were also drawn together through a common gay identity at a time when homosexual acts were a capital offence and there was a rabidly homophobic climate (Crompton 1985: 129). Byron was bisexual: as a schoolboy and student, he experienced intense romantic friendships with boys, such as that for the Cambridge chorister, John Edleston (see Works, p. 37).

Byron was an avid theatre-goer and spent much of the time he should have been studying going to plays in London. In 1806 he also took the lead in organising and starring in two amateur theatrical productions at home in Southwell. For Byron the idea of making a speech to an audience and moving the listeners to action would perhaps always be even more important than the power of the printed word to transcend the historical moment of transmission. His love of theatre, his training in oratory and the examples, in the school and university syllabi, of classical rhetoricians who sought to persuade and move their hearers imbued him with a concept of poetry as performance.

Early writing

This performative aspect of Byron explains why he produced so much ‘occasional’ verse: short poems written on specific occasions to particular people. Through verse he attempted to seduce women, argue with friends, ridicule enemies or set down his response to events of the day. He passed his poems around in manuscript and literary friends would respond in kind. This began when he was a teenager. It was his interaction with the provincial circle at Southwell that inspired him to pay a local printer at Newark in 1806 to publish a collection of such verse, Fugitive Pieces. Second thoughts led him to revise the anthology and entitle it Poems on Various Occasions in 1807 (Pratt 1973: 29). The poems were originally meant only for the entertainment of those who recognised themselves or knew the recipients. Most were love poems, some of which were risqué enough to outrage the local worthies. The furore persuaded the ambitious youth to make great changes when launching the volume in London, now retitled Hours of Idleness (1807) and designed for the public at large (see Works, p. 31 and Criticism, p. 85). Byron chose fewer erotic love poems now, concentrating more on melancholy lyrics exploring his innermost and mixed feelings about his ancestry and ruined mansion and regret on leaving behind the camaraderie of schooldays. The lyrics were not especially promising, but they were unusually personal. They were well reviewed on the whole, and a second edition was published in March 1808 as Poems Original and Translated.

However, Byron was enraged and humiliated when Hours of Idleness was remorselessly mocked in the leading periodical of the day, the Edinburgh Review, as the pretentious trifling of a dilettante whose preface had simultaneously attempted to overawe the public with his rank and obtain sympathy on account of his youth. The crusading Whig lawyer Henry Brougham was the anonymous reviewer, though Byron assumed it was the editor, Francis Jeffrey. The attack was the best thing that could have happened, for it galvanised Byron into declaring himself a serious writer with a moral purpose: the stance he now adopted in a withering riposte to the Edinburgh Review, a Popeian satire in rhyming couplets entitled English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), which attacked the Edinburgh Review as well as many of the leading contemporary poets of the day for good measure (see Works, p. 32 and Criticism, p. 85). The adoption of the Roman satirist Juvenal as a model also enabled the noble poet to retain a patrician persona in his condemnation of shoddy bourgeois culture. This boisterous and unsubtle poem made Byron’s name, going through four editions before Byron suppressed it, for its attack on the Whig periodical eventually proved politically embarrassing for him. In July 1809 he now left England with his friend from Cambridge, J. C. Hobhouse, to make his Grand Tour.

The Grand Tour and the poetry of place

The Grand Tour was the conventional way an aristocrat completed his education, visiting sites associated with classical history, Renaissance art and European culture. Because Europe was ravaged by the Napoleonic wars, the two friends could not take the usual route to Italy to study the great masters. Since 1793 Britain had been at war with republican France, and at this point Napoleon Bonaparte seemed unstoppable in his conquest of Europe. In 1798 he had taken Switzerland, northern Italy and Malta, and in 1804 declared war on Spain and had himself proclaimed an emperor. Byron and Hobhouse were thus not able to travel through France or Italy, so they decided to follow in the steps of the British army who were supporting the Portugese and Spanish insurgents against the French invaders in the Iberian peninsula.

The aim of the two young men was to seek adventure, first by vicarious experience of the Peninsular war. Then they would strike east, into the Ottoman Empire, little known by Westerners, their destination being Turkey itself and also the outlying provinces which today constitute Greece and Albania, where their only British fellow travellers would be the occasional diplomat or military attaché. The Orient had long functioned for British artists as an imaginary realm of luxury, violence and sensuality (see Criticism, pp. 111–14). Byron and Hobhouse intended to find material for travel writing, in subjective poetry and antiquarian prose respectively. Byron’s poetry would play a pivotal role in transforming the experience of the aristocratic Grand Tour into an exotic excursion into the cultural Other (Buzard 1993: 114–28) and would be instrumental in popularising travel amongst the middle classes later in the century.

Athens was Byron’s and Hobhouse’s ultimate destination. For both men were interested in Philhellenism, the idea of Western nineteenth-century intellectuals that the republican ideals of classical Greece could be recuperated by helping the Christian inhabitants of that part of the Ottoman Empire approximating to ‘Hellas’ to rebel against their Turkish masters and form a new nation-state. Byron would soon discover that the present ‘Romaic’ (Eastern Orthodox Christians) population of the region had no knowledge of the civilisation of the classical Greeks and certainly no more understanding of the modern concept of a nation-state than their city-state ancestors had done.

But first the friends would sample Orientalism nearer home in the Moorish influence on the Iberian peninsula, for they had taken a last-minute opportunity to depart from Britain on the Lisbon packet. Spain inspired Byron, as would Venice later, as a place where Christian and Islamic culture collided. Byron had been drawn to exotic places through his extensive reading of travel books and he was not the only one. Spain was to become mythologised by other poets such as Robert Southey, Walter Scott and Walter Savage Landor at this time. Spain became the focus of Romantic writing because ‘Since the first explorations of the Mediterranean in remote times, this land was identified with the extreme Western limits of the known world, the Finis Terrae, the end of the organised cosmos and a place where order and disorder mixed’ (Saglia 1996: 45). British readers were particularly fascinate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and referencing
• Introduction
• 1: Life and contexts
• 2: Works
• 3: Criticism
• 4: Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index