The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron & Thomas Moore by Jeffery W. Vail (review)

Abstract

why ignore the mouthy poet laureate and the bard of Irish wrongs (mere males)? Modularizationdoes not obviate the problems of selectivity.It highlightsthem. Beckettand Aley's studyof Byron and Newstead, set in comparisonwith Stabler, makeseven more evident the problem of defininga 'Romantic'epoch. This book is concerned with 'something far more deeply interfused'in British social structure than the effervescenceof the marketfor fiction. The subjectis the marketfor land, and the functioning of the landed class as the keystone of conservativecontinuity. Rather than the Romantic epoch being one of 'transition',it is one in which the strictsettlementof property,the improvementof estates, and the duties of landlord to tenant, county, and country, insuredthe statusquo(to returnto Stabler'sunstable phrase).Within that order (and there had been Byrons at Newstead for centuries) both the fifthand the sixthlordsfailed in their duty to their class.They failednot as a result of some sort of radical, revolutionary,Romantic imperative (the kind of halo with which the sixth lord, the poet, is sometimes involved)but from sheer selfish extravagance.Contraryto conventionalbiographicalapologia for the sixth lord, his debts were not the result of his predecessor's indulgence. He inherited an unencumbered (albeitreduced)estate, which the now absentee landlord swallowed up 'by duns, necessities,luxuries,fooleries,jeweleries "whoresand fiddlers"'in his own words (p. 187),and in his wake he left a desperatetail of debtees (the story of the widow Mealey does not make pleasant reading). When Newstead was sold, Wildman (the purchaser)made an excellentjob of improvingthe estate (and establishing the Abbey as a shrine to a noble memory).This story (some of which Doris Langley Moore has told, but which is enlarged here) in some ways reads like a real-life equivalent to CastleRackrent (with Wildman as the improving landlord of Edgeworth's subsequent fiction). Or if, like Stabler, one might leap provocatively between texts, what one sees in this account of Newstead Abbey is somethingof the world which Victorian Thackeraywas to describein his retrospectivevaledictionto Romanticism, Vanity Fair. CARDIFF UNIVERSITY MALCOLMKELSALL The LiteraryRelationshipof LordByron & ThomasMoore. By JEFFERY W. VAIL. Baltimore , MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. xi + 251 pp. S33 ISBN:o-8oI8-6500-x. This is the firstsubstantiveaccount of the interrelationshipof Byron and Moore as friends, political allies, and kindred poets. It begins with Byron's first, tentative, imitations of Moore who was an already established man of letters; traces the extraordinary development of their literary symbiosis as lyricists and writers of oriental romances;then, by way of Moore's poetic portraitsof Byron as the fallen angel Rubi (in TheLovesoftheAngels) and as a modern Harmodius, moves to a culmination in a deeply sympathetic analysis of what is, perhaps, Moore's greatest work, the Letters andJournals ofLordByron, withNotices ofhisLfe. In so doing,Jeffery Vail puts to rest the old fable of the parvenuMoore clinging to the skirtsof aristocracy . On the contrary,it was Moore who was the establishedfigurewhose shadow fell upon Byron's youthful endeavours, who taught him the power of colloquial satire, and who surpassedhim in lyric force. The parting of the ways came, paradoxically ,in the poets' conjunctionin orientalromance. As Byron read LallahRooke he saw reflectedthere those aspectsof his earlierself he now wished to reject.Like Shakespeare'sCaesar, he now upon the ladder turned his back. A greater destiny why ignore the mouthy poet laureate and the bard of Irish wrongs (mere males)? Modularizationdoes not obviate the problems of selectivity.It highlightsthem. Beckettand Aley's studyof Byron and Newstead, set in comparisonwith Stabler, makeseven more evident the problem of defininga 'Romantic'epoch. This book is concerned with 'something far more deeply interfused'in British social structure than the effervescenceof the marketfor fiction. The subjectis the marketfor land, and the functioning of the landed class as the keystone of conservativecontinuity. Rather than the Romantic epoch being one of 'transition',it is one in which the strictsettlementof property,the improvementof estates, and the duties of landlord to tenant, county, and country, insuredthe statusquo(to returnto Stabler'sunstable phrase).Within that order (and there had been Byrons at Newstead for centuries) both the fifthand the sixthlordsfailed in their duty to their class.They failednot as a result of some sort of radical, revolutionary,Romantic imperative (the...