The Suppression of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: An Unpublished Letter from Lord Holland to Samuel Rogers

Abstract

This article faithfully reproduces a letter from Lord Holland to Samuel Rogers, including deletions, hyphenated words, underlines, and paragraphs, to evidence how Samuel Rogers interceded in the suppression of a fifth edition of Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Rogers’s knowledge of the publishing market, its publishing houses and successful authors, made him one of the most formidable and important of Byron’s acquaintances and contemporaries in the 1810s. This article demonstrates the important role of Rogers as an individual whose political negotiations and literary advice impacted the literary landscape of the Romantic period. The decision to suppress the fifth edition of English Bards also shows how Byron navigated literary and political opinion, as well as the role of sociability in the production and genetics of literary text. Professional authorship in the Romantic period was performed within this context of social networks.