Byron, Clough, and the Grounding of Victorian Poetry

Abstract

In Scene VI of Dipsychus, the Spirit wonders, as people on holiday often do, what he should do next: What now? The Lido shall it be? That none may say we didn't see The ground which Byron used to ride on, And do I don't know what beside on. (VI. 1–4)1 When Byron was living in Venice or nearby, for two years from 1817 to 1819, he had already, as he frequently complained, become one of the objects that English visitors to Venice liked to inspect. But he had only himself to blame, because it was Byron, even more powerfully than Scott, who had established the fashion for literary tourism. The thousands of British visitors who took a boat on Lake Leman or a guided tour of the dungeons of the castle of Chillon did so to honour Rousseau and the Swiss patriot Bonnivard, but also and more directly as witnesses to the fame of the poet of Childe Harold and The Prisoner of Chillon. It is no wonder that they were drawn in such numbers to the Lido when the poet himself rode on it, and continued to visit it when it summoned into presence not the poet himself but, perhaps still more potently, his memory. ‘Murray's faithful guide / Informs us’ (Dipsychus, V. 190–1) that the ‘shore of the Littorale, towards the Adriatic’ which ‘constitutes the Lido,’ is ‘now associated with the name of Byron, as the spot where he used to take his rides, and where he designed to have been buried.’2 There is then a double appropriateness in Clough's reference to Byron. Byron himself was, both in his own lifetime and after it, one of the prime tourist sites of Venice, and it was Byron who, more than any other poet, had set the fashion for tourist poetry of the kind that Clough himself wrote,3 not just in Dipsychus, but in The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich in which an Oxford reading party spends the long vacation in the Scottish Highlands, and in Amours de Voyage, in which an Oxford intellectual visits Rome in the Spring of 1849. Clough is, of course, a very different poet from Byron, but I want to begin by suggesting that one clue to their differences may be found in the different ways in which they thought about tourism and tourist poetry.