<i>Byron: The Image of the Poet</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Byron: The Image of the Poet Alan Rawes Byron: The Image of the Poet. Edited by Christine Kenyon Jones. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Pp. 129. ISBN 9780874139976. £40.50. Byron as celebrity has become a popular scholarly topic recently, but, as the editor of Byron: The Image of the Poet points out in her introduction, this is the 'first collection of essays to be published' on the 'visual aspects of Byron and Byronism' and their role in the creation of Byron as a celebrity. The book originated in the equally ground-breaking and highly successful 2003 conference on the topic at the National Portrait Gallery. And it is a book that physically does justice to its subject matter: large, generously laid out on the page and containing 22 colour plates and 21 black-and-white illustrations, this is a very handsome publication. It reproduces and discusses a very 'wide range of visual manifestations of Byron': from portraits drawn from life to '"authorised" paintings and busts whose production Byron did his best to control during his lifetime'; from nineteenth-century 'caricatures, informal sketches and engravings' to 'film portrayals'; from frontispieces to Masonic jewels, medals and other memorabilia. The essays contained in it are full of insights into the 'trajectory from Byron to Byronism' that saw the transformation of George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron of Rochdale, into a 'mythic persona'. A number consider Byron's own role in the creation of the visual aspects of that persona, and his attempts to control, with varying degrees of (temporary) success, 'the creation or promulgation of his own visual image' become a central theme of the collection as a whole. Equally, these essays are interested in how 'visual Byronism' embarked 'on a distinct life of its own, increasingly independent of its roots in Byron's real life and ad vivum portraits'; in how Byron's 'mythic persona' was 'a creation not just of Byron himself but also of many other hands'. The collection usefully describes, but also reflects upon, the details of this history. It explicitly asks questions about the value of its products. Key, perhaps, is the issue of whether 'pictures […] of Byron lead more people to read him, or […] in some way replace him and his work', as the editor puts it in the introduction. The stated aim here is not to attempt a definitive answer to such questions so much as open them up for critical debate, and the benefit of approaching these questions through a collection of essays is, as the editor says, that the format allows 'different voices to be heard' and 'varying viewpoints to be taken'. The viewpoints collected here are certainly various, and this is one of the volume's strengths. [End Page 173] In the collection's opening chapter, 'Lord Byron's Image', Germaine Greer focuses on the profile of Byron by Richard Westall – the image of Byron that 'would dominate the published iconography of Byron to his death and beyond'. Greer describes Westall as 'the creator of the Byronic stereotype', but goes on to explore some of the ways in which this stereotype 'was woven out of disparate but connected iconographic strands' drawn from a range of long-standing artistic conventions: the 'Apollonian' 'profile portrait' invented/used by Alexander the Great for 'coins, seals, and medals', the 'venerable tradition of the portrait of the artist as a young man' and 'the stereotypes of Hamlet and Milton's Satan'. As a result, Greer concludes, 'Byron portraits have as little documentary value as they do pictorial' – indeed the stereotype they promulgate 'has served permanently to distort our understanding of Byron's humanity'. Annette Peach's view of the value of portraits of Byron is rather different. In '"Famous in my time": Publicization of Portraits of Byron during His Lifetime', Peach focuses on 'Byron's intense desire to maintain control over the execution and dissemination of his image', which, according to her, was 'a visual expression […] of the creative exploration and representation of the self that lies at the heart of much of his poetry'. Concentrating on the 'official' portraits of Byron taken from life (by Sanders, Westall and Phillips), discussing what 'Byron brought to...