Asleep in Italy: Byron and Shelley in 1819

Abstract

It is an oddity that the two English poets who responded most directly to the politics of England in 1819 wrote from abroad. By the autumn of 1819, Shelley had been resident in Italy for eighteen months. Byron had been absent from England for almost half his adult life, and had not set foot on English soil since the spring of 1816. It is a fact that he muses on frequently in his letters, and almost always it prompts in him a mixed emotion. There is a proud consciousness that his residence abroad has equipped him with a wisdom unavailable to his less mobile English friends: ‘L’univers est une espece de livre, dont on n’a lu que le remiere page quand on n’a vu que son pays.’1 But there is also a sad sense that England and its ways have themselves become foreign to him. In the year from 1819 to 1820 both emotions were unusually intense. Byron was actively involved with his Italian friends in the attempt to orchestrate a revolt against the Austrian occupation. His guarded references to his activities in his letters home are inflected by a eady sense of the difference between a nationalist uprising and the ‘miserable squabbles’2 that dominated English politics: ‘Here you may believe there will be cutting of thrapples and something like a civil buffeting’ (7, 76). But in England his friends and school contemporaries were making their mark in the public world. Robert Peel was already a power in the land.