by Byron
Childe Harold derives from the eighteenth-century topographical poem, but so transformed that Scott could greet it as ‘certainly the most original poem which we have had this many a day’ (quoted in Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, Vol. 1, p. 214). The Spenserian form, as the Preface observes, citing James Beattie, author of The Minstrel (1771–4), licensed flexibility of tone and a structure with ‘no pretension to regularity’. In praising Byron in the Quarterly Review (March 1812) for conveying ‘a good deal of curious information’ about Greece, George Ellis pointed to the topical appeal of the work. English interest in the unfamiliar eastern Mediterranean was high, fed by books of travels and the strategic importance of the region. The contrast Byron draws in the second canto between Greece’s heroic past and its condition under Turkish rule, including his attack on Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin who, while serving as envoy to the Porte (the Ottoman Empire), removed from Athens the sculptures of the Parthenon (II.91–135), spurred the philhellenic movement that led to the Greek War of Independence (1821–9) in which Byron died, becoming a Greek national hero.
The mock-Spenserianisms of the opening stanzas imply a distance between Byron and his ‘fictitious personage’, as the Preface describes Harold; but Harold was ‘Childe Burun’ in the manuscripts and to contemporaries the effect of the poem was daringly personal: Scott ascribed its success to ‘the novelty of an author speaking in his own person’ (Quartely Review, April 1818). In the context formed by Burke’s invocation of the language of chivalry to defend the ancien régime in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the satiric and melancholic reduction of the chivalric ‘romaunt’ in the first canto – reiterated in the Addition to the Preface (for the fourth edition) – shocked; the Antijacobin Review (1812) denounced as ‘the rant of democracy in its wildest form’ Byron’s treatment of the victories of Talavera (July 1809; I.405–58) and Albuera (May 1811; I.459-67), and his mockery of the Convention of Cintra (30 August 1808; I.288-314), by which the French defeated at Vimiero were convoyed home with their booty. Byron’s anti-war sentiments vividly expressed the Whig position and simultaneously outraged the Tories. The balance of tones in Childe Harold was altered as Byron revised the poem on his return to England: satirical passages were excised in response to the objections of friends and of his publisher, John Murray, and additions reflected the deaths enumerated in his note to I.927, those of his Harrow friend John Wingfield (14 May 1811), of his mother (31 July 1811), of his Cambridge friend Charles Skinner Matthews (3 August 1811) and (not named) of John Edleston (May 1811, although Byron did not learn of it until October): see II.73–81, 891-908, and the notes to ‘The Cornelian’ and ‘To Thyrza’. ‘To Ianthe’, addressed to Lady Charlotte Harley, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Lady Oxford (Byron enjoyed a liaison with the latter in 1812–14), was added to the seventh edition of the poem, in 1814. The counterpoint provided by the notes – worldly, scholarly, elegiac, indignant – forms an integral part of the work’s effect. Childe Harold was published 10 March 1812 in an expensive edition of 500 quarto copies and sold out in three days, making the author, as he later commented, famous overnight. It went through four editions by the end of the year, and reached a tenth in 1815.
Epigraph: Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron, Le Cosmopolite, ou le Citoyen du Monde (1753):
The universe is a kind of book of which one has read only the first page when one has seen only one’s own country. I have leafed through a large enough number, which I have found equally bad. This examination was not at all fruitless for me. I hated my country. All the impertinences of the different peoples among whom I have lived have reconciled me to her. If I had not drawn any other benefit from my travels than that, I would regret neither the expense nor the fatigue.
Criticism: on Byron’s travels, see William A. Borst, Lord Byron’s First Pilgrimage and Gordon Kent Thomas, Lord Byron’s Iberian Pilgrimage; on the Greek materials, see William St Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles and That Greece Might Still be Free (on the War of Independence); English Romantic Hellenism 1700–1824, edited by Timothy Webb, provides a useful collection of primary documents. Cecil Y. Lang speculates on the role of Ali Pacha in the inception of the poem (‘Narcissus Jilted’), and William St Clair studies its reception (‘The Impact of Byron’s Writings’). Stuart Curran (Poetic Form, Chapter 6) and Marlon Ross (‘Scott’s Chivalric Pose’) illuminate Byron’s employment of the genre of romance. For general criticism: M.K. Joseph, Byron the Poet, Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, and Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust.
An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill
Published anonymously in the Morning Chronicle, 2 March 1812; collected by E.H. Coleridge in Works (1898–1904).
On 27 February 1812 Byron made his maiden speech in the House of Lords, attacking the Tory ministry who had responded to the Luddite Riots in Nottingham with a bill imposing the death penalty for destruction of the weaving frames recently installed in the local mills. The proximity of Newstead Abbey to Nottingham gave Byron the standing of a personally concerned magnate.
Lines to a Lady Weeping
Written, and published anonymously in the Morning Chronicle, in March 1812; republished under Byron’s name with The Corsair (1814).
When increased authority was granted to the Prince Regent in early 1812 the Whigs assumed that as a reward for their support he would bring them into power. Instead he proposed a coalition with their Tory enemies; when the outraged Whigs refused, the Prince denounced them at a banquet at Carlton House in a speech that provoked his daughter, Princess Charlotte, to tears. By acknowledging the verses as his in 1814 Byron generated a furor in the Tory press – ‘the 8 lines… have I believe given birth to as many volumes’ (BLJ, Vol. 4, p. 82) – that contributed to the unprecedented sales of The Corsair volume: see note to that poem.
Criticism: Peter J. Manning, ‘Tales and Politics’, in Reading Romantics.
THE WALTZ: An Apostrophic Hymn
Written October 1812; printed privately and anonymously in 1813, and in a pirated edition in 1821.
The epigraph is from the Aeneid 1.498–9, describing Dido’s arrival at the temple. When the waltz was introduced in England from Germany in the eighteenth century, it was controversial, deemed voluptuous and indecorous. The enthusiasm of the Prince Regent (of the German House of Hanover) made it a vogue, but to English chauvinism, as well as by some Continental standards, it symptomized everything wanton and vulgar ‘imported from the Rhine’ (l.29). Byron’s disapproval was aggravated by his lameness, which kept him from dancing. Contemplating marriage to Annabella Milbanke, he inquired of her aunt, Lady Melbourne, ‘Does Annabella waltz?’ adding, ‘it is… a very essential point with me’ (BLJ, Vol. 2, p. 218). Because Byron’s criticism of waltzing was fuelled by its association with the Regent and extended into a general satire on the royal family and their influence, he decided on anonymous publication. Even with this precaution, his publisher, John Murray, declined the option, and the poem came out under a different imprint. When it was criticized, Byron was concerned to maintain his anonymity and urged Murray’s silence (BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 41).
Remember Thee! Remember Thee!
Written 1813(?); published in Thomas Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).
After Byron broke off his affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, she called one day at his apartment when he was out, and, ‘finding Vathek [William Beckford’s popular Arabian novel of 1786] on the table, she wrote in the first page, “Remember me!” ’ Byron took up the echo of the ghost in Hamlet (I.v.91—III): ‘Yes! I had cause to remember her; and in the irritability of the moment, wrote under the two words these two stanzas’ (Thomas Medwin, p. 218).
THE GIA O UR: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale
Written September 1812-March 1813; published June 1813 as a poem of 684 lines, and subsequently in longer versions.
‘Giaour’ (with a soft G and rhymed with ‘power’ (11. 457–8)) is Arabic for ‘Infide’, a non-Muslim
– in this tale, an aristocratic Venetian. This is the first in a wildly successful series in a genre that Byron called the ‘Eastern tale’ (BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 157), and its title character is one of the first delineations, after Childe Harold, of the ‘Byronic hero’. The Satirist gave the poem a nasty review (1 July 1813), but Jeffrey praised it in the Edinburgh Review (July 1813), and sales nearly matched those of Childe Harold I-II in the previous year. By the end of summer 1813, The Giaour was in its fifth edition and went through nine more by 1815. While the ‘Fragment’ form indicated in its subtitle is a deliberate narrative device, the illusion of the poem’s basis in ‘disjointed fragments’ of reports (Advertisement) was sustained as Byron added increments to each edition, implying a fuller recovery of the matter. By the seventh edition (December 1813), he had nearly doubled the length of the original text. Lines 1131-257 first appeared in the fifth edition, the proofs of which Byron returned to Murray, commenting, ‘I have but with some difficulty not added any more to this snake of a poem – which has been lengthening its rattles every month – it is now fearfully long – being more than a Canto & a half of C[hilde] H[arold]’ (BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 100).
The Dedication honours a friendship with Samuel Rogers and the influence of his Voy age of Columbus (1810), also a fragment form. The Advertisement sets the poem ‘at the time the Seven Islands were possessed by the Republic of Venice’ – shortly after 1779 (CPW, Vol. 3, p. 415); Greece’s subjection then is meant to evoke its subjection by the Ottomans in 1813, a relevance underscored in the opening lament (11. 1–167) on the ‘lust and rapine [that] wildly reign/To darken o’er the fair domain’ (l1. 60-61). Byron presents the story of ‘the Turk’ Hassan, his favourite haremite Leila, and her lover the Giaour, as an assemblage of several voices possessed of different knowledges and interests, incorporated with the poet’s own meditations. Here is a rough scheme: 11. 1–167, the poet meditating on the lost past; 11. 168–79, the immediate scene; 11. 80–287, the Giaour’s murder of Hassan; 11. 288–351, the subsequent history; 11. 352–86, a boatman’s encounter with Hassan and Leila’s corpse; 11. 387–438, the poet’s meditations; 11. 439–71, an account of Leila’s escape, told by one of Hassan’s countrymen; 11. 472–518, a rapture about Leila from the male Turkish perspective; 11. 519–674, an anonymous Turkish report of the Giaour’s revenge on Hassan; 11. 675–88, the Giaour’s voice (for the first time); 11. 689–785, a Turkish narrator’s tale of the Giaour’s brutal murder of Hassan and his account of Hassan’s mother’s grief; 11. 786–97, a fisherman’s encounter with the Giaour, some years later, now a Caloyer (a monk); 11. 798–830, the voice of a fellow monk; 11. 832–82, a general narrative; 11. 883–915, a monk’s voice; 11. 916–70, the general narrator. Lines 971–1328 are the Giaour’s confession, with a final six lines of general narration.
The core tale derived some of its sensation from its reputed basis in Byron’s affair with a young Turkish woman in Athens, which he recounted, much later, to Thomas Medwin (Conversations of Lord Byron, pp. 86–7). Even so, a footnote in the 1832–4 Works (Vol. 9, p. 145) laboured to dispel the rumour that Byron had been ‘the lover of this female slave’: she was ‘not… an object of his Lordship’s attachment, but of that of his Turkish servant’, it insisted, and Byron’s part was only to prevent her execution – the sentence by the Turkish Governor for adultery, to be carried out (as the Advertisement puts it) ‘in the Mussulman manner’, by her being sewn into a sack and ‘thrown… into the sea’. ‘To describe the feelings of that situation were impossible — it is icy even to recollect them, ‘Byron wrote in his journal (5 December 1813; BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 230). Yet his tale is more divided: while it stresses tyranny by making Leila a harem slave and leaving her unrescued from the death sentence, it also forges a psychological sympathy between the male antagonists. Byron told Murray that he had ‘thrown… in’ the last lines ‘to soften the ferocity of our infidel – & for a dying man have given him a good deal to say for himself’ (BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 100). As in Childe Harold and subsequent Eastern tales, Byron’s notes are part of his authorial performance, giving a patina of authenticity and cultural familiarity as well as conveying a modern, detached, anthropological reading of the East of recent history.
Criticism: Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust, on poetic form and narrative performance; Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, on narrative form; Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, on the fragment form; Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions, on the doubling of the male characters; Marilyn Butler, ‘John Bull’s Other Kingdom’, on Orientalism; Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines, on patriarchal tyranny; and Daniel P. Watkins, Social Relations in Byron ’s Eastern Tales, on ideological contradictions in a social system of politicized violence.
THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS: A Turkish Tale
Written November 1813, in less than two weeks; dedicated to Byron’s mentor in the House of Lords, the Whig liberal Lord Holland, and published 2 December, selling even more briskly than The Giaour: 6,000 copies the first month, 125,000 by early 1814, five editions in 1813, five more in 1814, and an eleventh by the end of 1815.
Byron described this Eastern tale as ‘something of the Giaour cast – but not so sombre though rather more villainous’ (BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 157). Writing his first tale with a heroine and even thinking of naming the poem for her (‘Zuleika’; BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 205), he said that he wanted to ‘preserve her purity without impairing the ardour of her attachment’ (BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 199). A more private motive, he tells Lady Melbourne, was ‘to dispel reflection during inaction’ (BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 157) – or to find an outlet for erotic impasse, for Zuleika is created in the context of two inhibited passions, Byron’s infatuation with the married Lady Frances Webster and his passion for his half-sister, Augusta (he first made Selim and Zuleika brother and sister, but social taboo ‘induced [him] to alter their consanguinity & confine them to cousinship’; Vol. 3, p. 199). It is the incestuous passion to which Byron was most likely referring when he wrote in his journal that he was ‘indebted to the tale’ because ‘it wrung my thoughts from reality to imagination – from selfish regrets to vivid recollections’ (BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 230). Even without public knowledge of this frisson, Zuleika proved controversial in the reviews, especially in her erotic effusion to Selim in I. XIII. The British Critic (January 1814) found her language ‘foreign’ to any notion of a ‘poetical heroine’; the Antijacobin Review (March 1814) thought it ‘indecent even in the mouth of a lover’ and her forthrightness ‘not very decorous nor yet very natural’ (it also included The Corsair’s Medora and Gulnare in the complaint). This passion was a sticking-point even in otherwise favourable reviews in liberal journals. Zuleika ‘by no means conveys the most elevated notions of delicacy’, wrote Drakard’s Paper (later the Champion), accusing Byron of using ‘fine writing’ to ‘obtain mastery over a story which is in itself positively objectionable. So far from sharing Zuleika’s passion… our feelings revolt from its contemplation’ (December 1813); the Monthly Museum (February 1814) felt compelled to remark that some of her expressions were ‘indelicate… conveying a sense of emotions not wholly compatible with the purity of the virgin character’.
Criticism: Edgar Allan Poe on metrics (reprinted in BCH); Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions, on oedipal configurations; Daniel P. Watkins, Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales, on social structure; and Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines, on the character of Zuleika.
THE CORSAIR: A Tale
Written late 1813; published 1 February 1814, bound with a few other poems, including the already notorious ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’. On 3 February, Murray reported to Byron that the ‘sensation’ in sales was ‘unprecedented’ (Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, Vol. 1 pp. 223–4). On the day of publication, it sold 10,000 copies, went through five editions in the same month, six more (25,000 copies) by the end of the next, and sold out an eighth edition by the end of the year; a ninth appeared in 1815 and a tenth in 1818.
The epigraphs appeare
d in Italian. The general one, from Tasso, may be translated as ‘His thoughts cannot sleep within him.’ The Cantos’ epigraphs are all from the episode of Dante’s encounter with Francesca of Rimini, in Inferno, Canto V. For Byron’s own later translations of these lines, see ‘Francesca of Rimini’: his epigraph for Canto I (Inferno V.121-3) corresponds to 11. 25–7; for Canto II (Inferno V.120) to 1. 24; for Canto III (Inferno V.105) to 1. 9. The description of Conrad, the Corsair, in Canto I, stanzas VIII-XII (11. 171–308) emerged as a canonical portrait of the Byronic hero: a dark, mysterious, brooding outlaw, whose ‘one virtue’ midst his ‘thousand crimes’ is his devotion to his wife and, in general, an ethic of chivalry with regard to women. As in other Eastern tales, the projection of tyranny, especially sexual tyranny over enslaved women, as a feature of an ‘Eastern’ society and the corresponding narrative of liberation by an enemy of this system reflect early nineteenth-century ‘Orientalism’ (that is, the implied cultural superiority of West to East). Yet this ideological structure is complicated by the other sensational figure in the poem, the Pacha’s harem favourite, Gulnare, whose rebellion unsettles Western as well as Eastern orthodoxies of gender. She is first a damsel-in-distress rescued by Conrad; but when he is defeated and imprisoned for execution by the Pacha, she emerges as a determined murderer of this oppressor and liberator of the Corsair. Byron’s ambivalence about female violence (however this violence might be politically justified) is reflected in the tale’s structural pairing of Gulnare in antithesis to Conrad’s passive, patient, devoted wife, Medora.