Picturing Byron’s Italy and Italians: Finden’s Illustrations to Byron’s Life and Works

Abstract

William and Edward Finden successfully marketed Lord Byron’s life and literary works in sleek, well-illustrated packages, including Landscape and Portrait Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron (3 vols., 1833–1834), with a text by collaborator William Brockedon. The Findens published around the same time their Landscape Illustrations of the Bible (1836) and a periodical called The Oriental Annual, or Scenes in India (1834–1840). The latter work promotes British chauvinistic attitudes to the Middle East, to southern Europe in general, and to Italy in particular. Thus, it is unsurprising that Landscape and Portrait Illustrations of the Life of Byron employs Byron as a vehicle to promote an idea of Italy in which, as Joseph Luzzi has said, the reader can imagine the country as a repository of a great civilization, one that would be better-off without the inconvenience of contemporary Italians themselves. Many writers, including Goethe, Staël, and Foscolo, but also Shelley and Byron, participated “in constructing their common European heritage” by creating this “Romantic” myth about Italy (Luzzi 54), and my essay grapples with this charge against Byron. In some ways his work was twisted by Finden and Brockedon, who elided Byron’s strong engagement with the politics and daily life of Italy while exaggerating the superfeminine aspects of his women protagonists.