Byron, Lawrence and the Spirit of Place

Abstract

To link Byron and Lawrence — and the Nottingham area — is natural enough, despite the differences that are as startling as the similarities. When Richard Aldington reflects on how odd it is that ‘the peer and the plebeian, coming from the same part of England, should have been alike in suffering the vindictive persecution of their countrymen’,¹ some of the difference (class) and the sameness (persecution) can be seen in one sentence. Perhaps ‘coming from the same part of England’ is pushing it a bit, as Byron was born in London and brought up in Aberdeen, but of course he is as much associated with this area as Lawrence is. Whether his Byronic lordship of Newstead Abbey would be gratified by an extension of this association into a posthumous link with Bert Lawrence the collier’s son is at least debatable; it is pretty certain that Lawrence would not relish the coupling of his name with that of someone he thought of as a bad man: for instance, he complained that Vere Collins, the compiler of Lord Byron in his Letters had been ‘at pains to make out that Byron was a pleasant person, which he was not’.² Lawrence was probably chiefly influenced by Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron which Trelawny himself described as having ‘elevated Shelley and shown Byron as he was’ — that is, ‘weak and ignoble’and an ‘evil genius’.³