Systems of Literary Lionism

Abstract

The publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage on 10 March 1812 notoriously sparked a sensation. Even before the poem was officially offered to the public, advance copies stirred excitement about the dashing young noble freshly returned from his exotic travels.¹ As Byron’s friend Thomas Moore recalled (or re-imagined) the scene from a vantage point almost two decades later, Byron’s effect on British audiences had been immediately “electric”: “young Byron stood forth alone, unanswered by either praise or promise—the representative of an ancient house, whose name, long lost in the gloomy solitudes of Newstead, seemed to have just awakened from the sleep of half a century in his person.”² Despite the campy, B-movie Gothicism, Moore is astute in observing that this figure exotically out of time had arrived perfectly on time to take advantage of the modern “taste for strong excitement” in a public captivated and fatigued by Napoleon. After the first edition of 500 copies of Childe Harold sold out in a mere three days, fan letters began pouring in from readers who had fallen hard for the writer whose own sensibility they imagined they recognized in the fashionably melancholic Harold. Byron found himself the darling of Whig high society, “the only topic almost of conversation—the men jealous of him, the women of each other,” as the Duchess of Devonshire informed her son overseas.³