Abstract
When Byron’s letters were first published, they gripped the nation: ‘Could settle to nothing’, Henry Crabb Robinson wrote in his journal on 20 October 1832, ‘Lord Byron’s Life had so completely taken possession of me. His letters are at least a psychological phenomenon’; Maria Edgeworth shared her sister’s response in February 1831: ‘I quite agree my dear Honora in all you say and feel about Moore’s life of Lord Byron and about Byron’s own letters. Lord Lansdowne … said … just the same that you do that he could not help liking Lord Byron often in reading his letters’; on 31 December 1831, Benjamin Robert Haydon was also captivated: ‘Read Moore’s 2nd Vol. with such intensity I forgot the last day of the year, a thing I never did before in my life’.
I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the fellowship which allowed me to consult Byron’s manuscripts in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the National Library of Scotland. I am grateful to the librarians in these institutions for their kind help in locating research materials.
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Notes
- 1.
Edith J. Morley, ed., Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, 3 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1967), I, p. 415; Christina Colvin, ed., Maria Edgeworth Letters from England 1813–1844 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 484; Willard Bissell Pope, ed., The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 5 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), III, p. 502.
- 2.
Thomas Moore, ed., The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life, 17 vols (London: John Murray, 1832–33), I, p. ix.
- 3.
For the importance of Byron’s letter to constructions of his biography see Julian North, The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 91.
- 4.
See, for example, ‘And so—Lady B[yron] has been “kind to you” you tell me—’, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1980–94; hereafter BLJ V. p. 91); ‘—So—Mr. Frere is married—(BLJ V. p. 134); ‘—So—Webster is writing again—is there no Bedlam in Scotland?’ (BLJ V. p. 208); ‘—so—there’s for you;—there is always some row or other previously to all our publications’ (BLJ V. p. 240). ‘So’ is how Byron starts his lyric ‘So, we’ll go no more a roving’. The characteristic pause after the ‘so’ is relayed as a comma in Moore’s transcription but is more likely to have been a dash in MS.
- 5.
Jonathan Ellis, ed., Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 12.
- 6.
Andrew Stauffer, ‘How to Analyze a Correspondence: The Example of Byron and Murray’, European Romantic Review 22.3 (2011), pp. 347–55.
- 7.
Stauffer, p. 348.
- 8.
Byron’s doubts about the transmission of letters intensified in Italy when his correspondence was intercepted and opened by the Austrian authorities, leading him to include remarks against ‘the Huns … in my most legible hand’; see BLJ VII. p. 238.
- 9.
Jonathan Gross, ed., Byron’s “Corbeau Blanc”: The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne (Rice: Rice University Press, 1997); Alan Rawes, ‘Byron’s Love Letters’, The Byron Journal 43.1 (2015), pp. 1–14; Timothy Webb, ‘Unshadowing the Rialto: Byron and the Patterns of Life’, Byron Journal 39.1 (2011), pp. 19–33; Anthony Howe, ‘He Describes What He Sees: Byron’s Letters from Italy’, Keats-Shelley Review 31.1 (2017), pp. 66–73; Mary O’Connell, Byron and John Murray: A Poet and his Publisher (Liverpool University Press, 2014); Stauffer, ‘How to Analyze a Correspondence’, pp. 347–55.
- 10.
David Duff draws the term bricolage from the cultural philosophy of Levi-Strauss to discuss the heterogeneous genre of Don Juan (Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 185); more recently, the term has been extended by educational psychologists to describe multi-perspectival, relational, eclectic, provisional approaches to problem-solving.
- 11.
Beinecke Gen MSS 892. Box I Folder 16 f1r.
- 12.
‘And all that’ is much re-used in Don Juan, probably from the character Bayes in George Villiers’s The Rehearsal; see BLJ VII. p. 181, ‘D’ye see’ is used again in a letter to Hodgson of 20 January 1811 (BLJ II. p. 37).
- 13.
William Parry, The Last Days of Lord Byron (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825), pp. 220–21.
- 14.
Beinecke Gen MSS 892. Box I Folder 16 f 2v.
- 15.
University of St Andrews Special Collections. MM Holloway Autograph Collection. Album 2, Literary, ms39022/2 f29. Compare with BLJ II. pp. 77–78 where this comment is redacted by Moore.
- 16.
Beinecke Gen MSS 892 Box 1 Folder 16 2r.
- 17.
For Byron’s fascination with Beckford, see Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I stanzas 22–23 written after he stayed in the villa in Montserrat once rented by Beckford. Byron offered to amend the stanzas to avoid ‘any improper allusion’ in a letter to Dallas 26 September 1811 (BLJ II. p. 107).
- 18.
Byron congratulates him cautiously in a letter of 4 July 1810 (BLJ I. p. 254).
- 19.
Colvin, ed., Maria Edgeworth, Letters from England, p. 339.
- 20.
NLS MS. Ellice Papers 109, 25 June 1809. According to Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) ‘persons guilty of petty larceny are frequently sentenced to be tied to the tail of a cart, and whipped by the common executioner, for a certain distance’.
- 21.
Beinecke Gen MSS 892 Box 1 Folder 16 f1v and f2r.
- 22.
The Book of Common Prayer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, not dated), pp. 202–03.
- 23.
See the toasts to ‘the Corporation’ in Henry Fielding, Pasquin Act 1 (London, 1736), p. 9 and Frederick Reynolds, The Delinquent Act V scene 1 (London, 1805), p. 67.
- 24.
All references to Don Juan are from Jerome J. McGann, ed., Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works Vol. V (Oxford: Claredson Press, 1986).
- 25.
See Letters of the Marquise du Deffand to Walpole (London, 1810), I, p. 117n.
- 26.
Peter W. Graham, ed., Byron’s Bulldog: The Letters of John Cam Hobhouse to Lord Byron (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), p. 291.
- 27.
Beinecke Gen MSS 892 Box 1 Folder 16 f1v.
- 28.
Mrs Oliphant and Mrs G Porter, William Blackwood and His Sons: Annals of a Publishing House, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1783), III, p. 227.
- 29.
Andrew Nicholson, ‘Byron’s Prose’, The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 193.
- 30.
Thomas Moore, ed., The Works of Lord Byron: with his Letters and Journals, and his Life, 17 vols (London: John Murray, 1832–33), III, p. 105.
- 31.
University of St Andrews Special Collections. MM Holloway Autograph Collection. Album 2, Literary, ms39022/2 f29. Compare with BLJ II. pp. 77–78.
- 32.
Edward Mendelson, ed., The Complete Works of W H Auden 1949–1955 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), III, p. 211.
- 33.
Mrs Oliphant, The Literary History of England, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1882), III, p. 20.
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Stabler, J. (2020). ‘Foam is their foundation’: The Poetics of Byron’s Letters. In: Callaghan, M., Howe, A. (eds) Romanticism and the Letter. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_11
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