Don Juan

Abstract

Byron, during his years in London, became cognizant of the mores of fashionable conversation, which he later practiced when visiting salons in Coppet, Florence, Milan, Rome, and Venice. Analysis of the contemporary salon society in which he spent time, and where he gained familiarity with the era’s prominent social, cultural, and political personalities, offers insights into the development of the poet’s narrative voice. Critics observe that by 1818, the style of the Byronic narrator had changed from the acerbic satire of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and the melancholy Sturm und Drang subjectivity of Childe Harold to the posh urbanity first seen in Beppo and reaching its apotheosis in Don Juan. That narrative identity comes, as critics have noted, from Byron’s reading of British writers like John Hookham Frere and Italian authors like Giovanni Battista Casti. The conversazioni that Byron began attending in 1816, however, also contributed to the evolution of the Byronic narrator. These included salons hosted in Coppet by Madame de Stael; in Florence by Countess Albany, the widow of the pretender “Bonnie Prince Charlie” and, more significant for Byron, the lover of neoclassical dramatist Vittorio Alfieri; and in Venice by Isabella Teotochi-Albrizzi and Marina Benzoni. Salons offered Byron opportunities to hone his conversational aesthetic and to cultivate his witty, breezy narrative voice.