Abstract
After Childe Harold’s dazzling success, all eyes were on Byron. The upper echelons of Regency society welcomed him into their drawing rooms and showered him with invitations to balls and dinners, not to mention trysts and assignations. Byron now faced the challenge of consolidating his position in the Romantic celebrity culture that he was helping to create, sustaining the attention he had attracted and proving that his fame was more than a flash in the pan. Between them, Byron and Murray needed to turn the remarkable singularity of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage into a sequence providing a reliable income for the publisher and fuel for the poet’s fame.
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Notes
Most recent criticism of Byron’s verse tales has set them in the context of British domestic or imperial politics. See, for example, Daniel P. Watkins, Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987)
Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 13–67
Marilyn Butler, ‘The Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), pp. 78–96
Caroline Franklin, ‘ “Some Samples of the Finest Orientalism”: Byronic Philhellenism and Proto-Zionism at the Time of the Congress of Vienna’, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 221–42. Turning to Byron’s celebrity should not mean turning away from those contexts, but should further illuminate them.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 52.
J. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative’ in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 66–79 (p. 72).
David Seed has analysed some of the effects of the fragment form in ‘ “Disjointed Fragments”: Concealment and Revelation in The Giaour’, The Byron Journal, 18 (1990), 14–27. For an argument that aims to connect the fragment form to issues of gender and imperialism, see Joseph Lew, ‘The Necessary Orientalist? The Giaour and Nineteenth-Century Imperialist Misogyny’, in Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 173–202.
Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 124–5.
George Ellis, ‘Review of Lord Byron’s Giaour, and Bride of Abydos’, Quarterly Review, 10 (January 1814), 331–54 (p. 341)
Francis Jeffrey, ‘Review of Lord Byron’s Giaour’, Edinburgh Review, 21 (July 1813), 299–309 (p. 299).
‘Communication in literature, then, is a process set in motion and regulated, not by a given code, but by a mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment. What is concealed spurs the reader into action, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed; the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light. Whenever the reader bridges the gaps, communication begins.’ Wolfgang Iser, ‘Interaction Between Text and Reader’, in Readers and Reading, ed. Andrew Bennett (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 20–31 (p. 24).
Sales figures from William St Clair, ‘The Impact of Byron’s Writings: An Evaluative Approach’, in Byron: Augustan and Romantic, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 1–25 (p. 9). Details of the title pages are from early editions of The Giaour in the British Library.
Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1957), I, 257–8. Thomas Medwin and John Galt confirmed the rumours, but Hobhouse prudently claimed that ‘the girl whose life lord Byron saved at Athens, was not the object of his lordship’s attachment — but that of his lordship’s Turkish servant’ (ibid., I, 258n).
Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 25.
This aspect of the poem would have had particular resonance in Romantic Britain. The armed forces were expanding rapidly in response to the Napoleonic threat, and large numbers of volunteer militia, distinguished by their fine uniforms, drilled regularly around the country. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1992; 1996), pp. 297–337. Tim Fulford argues that the period witnessed a protracted rethinking of the values of chivalric masculinity elegised by Burke.
Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
John Tosh provides an overview of research in this area. John Tosh, ‘The Old Adam and the New Man: Emerging Themes in the History of English Masculinities, 1750–1850’, in English Masculinities 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 217–38.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990; 1999), xv.
On Byron’s use of classical sources in this transformation and the transformation that follows Selim’s death, see Robert B. Ogle, ‘The Metamorphosis of Selim: Ovidian Myth in The Bride of Abydos II’, Studies in Romanticism, 20, no. 1 (1981), 21–31.
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16, no. 3 (1975), 6–18, reprinted in Feminisms: an Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991; 1997), p. 442.
See H. Warner Allen, Number Three Saint James’s Street: A History of Berry’s the Wine Merchants (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950), p. 87 on the ledgers, pp. 101–4 on Fox, pp. 137–8 on Brummell, p. 149 on Moore and pp. 149–54 on Byron.
For biographical investigations of Byron’s diets, see Jeremy Hugh Baron, ‘Byron’s Appetites, James Joyce’s Gut, and Melba’s Meals and Mésalliances’, British Medical Journal, 315, no. 7123 (1997), 1697–703
Arthur Crisp, ‘Commentary: Ambivalence toward Fatness and Its Origins’, British Medical Journal, 315, no. 7123 (1997), 1703
Jeremy Hugh Baron and Arthur Crisp, ‘Byron’s Eating Disorders’, The Byron Journal, 31 (2003), 91–100
Wilma Paterson, Lord Byron’s Relish: The Regency Cookbook (Glasgow: Dog & Bone, 1990), pp. 131–42.
James Makittrick Adair, An Essay on Diet and Regimen, 2nd ed. (London: James Ridgway, 1812). Baron suggests that the earlier treatise was [William Wadd], Cursory Remarks on Corpulence (London: Printed for J. Callow, Medical bookseller; by J. and W. Smith, 1810).
William Stark, The Works of the late William Stark […] with experiments, dietetical and statical (London, 1788)
Sir John Sinclair, The Code of Health and Longevity, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1807). Both books are listed in the 1816 sale catalogue for Byron’s library, CMP, pp. 231–45.
Criticism on Byron and food includes Christine Kenyon Jones, ‘ “Man Is a Carnivorous Production”: Byron and the Anthropology of Food’, Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, 6 (1998), 41–58
Christine Kenyon Jones, ‘ “I wonder if his appetite was good?” Byron, Food and Culture: East, West, North and South’, in Byron: East and West, ed. Martin Procházka (Prague: Charles University Press, 2000), pp. 249–62
Carol Shiner Wilson, ‘Stuffing the Verdant Goose: Culinary Esthetics in Don Juan’, Mosaic, 24, no. 3–4 (1991), 33–52
Peter W. Graham, ‘The Order and Disorder of Eating in Byron’s Don Juan’, in Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment, ed. Lilian R. Furst and Peter W. Graham (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 113–23
Jane Stabler, ‘Byron’s World of Zest’, in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (Basing-stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 141–60
Tom Mole, ‘ “Nourished by that Abstinence”: Consumption and Control in The Corsair’, Romanticism, 12, no. 1 (2006), 26–34.
By 1810, there had been 16 German, 15 French, 2 American, 2 Russian, 1 Dutch, and 20 English editions. See Ellis Shookman, ‘Pseudo-Science, Social Fad, Literary Wonder: Johann Caspar Lavater and the Art of Physiognomy’, in The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater, ed. Ellis Shookman (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), pp. 1–24 (p. 2). Graeme Tytler provides an analysis of Lavater’s impact, which aims to make us ‘conscious of the historicity of physical character description in English fiction after 1789’.
Graeme Tytler, ‘Lavater and Physiognomy in English Fiction 1790–1832’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 7, no. 3 (1995), 293–310 (p. 307).
William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, 2 vols, The Cornell Wordsworth, gen. ed. Stephen Parrish, ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 12. 161–8.
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© 2007 Tom Mole
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Mole, T. (2007). Scopophilia and Somatic Inscription in Byron’s Verse Tales. In: Byron’s Romantic Celebrity. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288386_4
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