Scotch Reviewers Research Articles

The Suppression of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: An Unpublished Letter from Lord Holland to Samuel Rogers

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.

Paper Slips: Album, Archiving, Accident

Paper Slips: Album, Archiving, Accident Deidre Lynch (bio) … a quilt of patchwork consists of various miscellaneous pieces of different hues and qualities, but jointly combining to make a pleasing and useful whole … in the formation of the Album there is much wider scope for the Mind—a more intellectual occupation; whilst it keeps up a constant and rational excitement during its progress, it becomes a repository for the most endearing sentiments of friendship and affection. —John Britton, “An Album,” prose paragraph written into the Mrs. Anna Birkbeck Album, ca. 1841 A sort of drive compels us to take the Book apart, to make it into a piece of lace. —Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel The moment the eponymous narrator of “the adventures of an Album” launches its first-person memoir it is already on the defensive. Appearing in 1831 in the annual The Comic Offering; or Ladies’ Mélange of Literary Mirth, this tale has lines from Lord Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers for its epigraph: “’Tis pleasant sure to see oneself in print, / A book’s a book although there’s nothing in’t.” The first words this narrator addresses to its readers involve this “impertinent” couplet: “half a hundred persons of my acquaintance” will doubtless recall it, the narrator predicts, when they learn that a “poor Album (with no ideas of my own, and depending for existence on the genius of others)” intends to write its own memoirs: “But this threadbare quotation is totally inapplicable to me: for although I am a Book, yet it is unjust to say ‘there’s nothing in it’, when so many of my pages are filled with charming poetry and unrivalled paintings.”1 [End Page 87] In fact, the storyline that follows, in which this voluble book recounts its passage from human hand to human hand and tracks how those once-blank pages got filled, confirms there might be reasons for the derision the Album expects. Doubts about the Album’s claims to “charm” or “genius” set in just after the adventures begin, when the Album, passing from its mistress’ hands, ends up being passed to a certain bel esprit in her circle. This second woman pretends to supply an original poem to fill up the Album’s opening page but instead plagiarizes from, of all people, Lord Byron. (The knowing album detects the deception, but its mistress, busy exulting over the fact that she has succeeded in documenting her social connection to the Byron-copyist, does not.) Circulating once again after this page has been filled, the Album arrives in the household of a certain Miss Susan Slattern. There its silk bindings are spotted with grease, and the pages between the covers fare no better, though two obtain a clever picture and a poem. Our adventuresome but accident-prone protagonist wends its way next to the home of a married couple who are thought to be very much in love, and there the Album acquires from the husband “an allegorical design of two doves, and two hearts, and two cupids, and two altars, and two torches, and Hymen and Time, and all the other paraphernalia of valentine notoriety,” while the wife contributes a similarly uxorious poem.2 During this same phase of its life, however, the Album is also susceptible to being used as a missile and hurled across the room during one of the quarrels that occur behind the public façade of marital bliss. Additional episodes of disillusionment follow as the book-protagonist’s once-pristine pages are incrementally filled in. By now many real equivalents of this fictional album have found their way from nineteenth-century drawing rooms to their final resting place in archives and special collection libraries. Between about 1790 and 1850, and before they were superseded by related book forms like the photograph album and (in America) the high school year book, these volumes were assembled in great numbers and in multiple locations, from South Carolina to Quebec City to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Carbonear, Newfoundland, to Glasgow to Manchester. Some snippet of Byronic poetry, the sample I have explored indicates, gets inscribed onto the leaves of about every...

Shelley’s Hidden Blade: Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things

Shelley’s lost Poetical Essay (1811), now that it can be read at last, justifies hopes that it would prove an important addition to the canon. Although not a masterpiece, in content and style it shows a rapid advance over the earlier ‘Ambition, power, and avarice’ in Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810), and is the bridge between Shelley’s early poetry and Queen Mab. In addition to the influence of Godwin, Erasmus Darwin, and Southey, that of Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers may be seen. Essay hovers between the satiric and the visionary, between provocation and circumspection. Shelley’s sense of the radical poet’s mission emerges as he attacks, with varying degrees of explicitness, Christianity, the monarchy, imperialism, and the Peninsula War.

The Byron Journal at Forty

In 1967, Robert Gleckner devoted two chapters in his still impressive Byron and the Ruins of Paradise to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I-II. This was a bold thing to do. Byron's poetry at that time, apart from what were pigeonholed as 'the satires' (Beppo, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement), was almost universally patronised. Andrew Rutherford, an intelligent man and one of the time's foremost Byronists, could take for granted in a 1988 article in The Byron Journal that 'so much of Byron's poetry is downright bad or mediocre'.1 Gleckner noted that it 'is not only fashionable but critically correct to dismiss the first two cantos [of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage] almost as if they never existed'.2In 2012 in London, a symposium was held mainly on 'Byron in 1812' to commemorate the bicentenary of the poem's publication. Some very distinguished Byron critics (and these are now sufficiently numerous to be no longer a protected species) took Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I-II very seriously indeed. Times have changed. Another anniversary in 2012 might help to explain this change. Forty years ago, The Byron Journal was founded by Elma Dangerfield and Dennis Walwin Jones. It was initiated in 1972 but the first issue was on Byron's birthday, 22 January 1973. Almost unbelievably, 22 January was to be the date of Elma Dangerfield's death in 2006.It would be wrong to over-estimate the rise in Byron's reputation over this period, he is still barely taught in schools and under-taught in universities. The public at large remain convinced that Lord Byron is a Rupert Everett look-alike with a limp. It would smack of hubris, too, to explain his increased critical stature simply by the foundation of the journal but there has certainly been a change and The Byron Journal has certainly both mirrored and assisted this.The history of academic journals is an interesting and complicated one. I am no expert on the matter but it seems that they may be said to have originated with the Journal des Scavans (later Savants) in 1665, followed three months later by The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The former lasted until the French Revolution. The latter was not a regular publication but became one in 1800. Their purpose was to promote the public exchange of scientific ideas. Earlier in the seventeenth century, even Robert Boyle - 'the father of modern chemistry' - was still a believer in alchemy and it may be hazarded that anyone who thought that they had discovered a method of creating gold would not rush into print with the secret. The Royal Society gradually changed all that. Science was a public domain and knowledge a public good.Interestingly, when the Journal des Savants was refounded in 1816, it changed from being primarily a scientific journal into a literary one. The early nineteenth century was the birthplace of the academic literary journal though the contributors to and main readers of the Edinburgh (1802) and Quarterly Review were not academics. Earlier famous journals in the eighteenth century, such as The Spectator and The Tatler, sometimes featured extracts from new works but they were not journals of literary criticism. The new journals in Byron's time contained articles on many subjects, had a clear political bias, but devoted much space to the criticism of new literary books and introduced a new and powerful phenomenon - 'the reviewer'. Byron's title English Bards and Scotch Reviewers relies on the new usage, where a 'reviewer' is primarily someone who writes in a literary journal.3If we jump to the literary scene a century later, we find a diverse pattern. Academic literary journals have arrived such as the American Modern Language Review (1905) and the British Review of English Studies (1925). The Times newspaper has initiated The Times Literary Supplement (1902) with anonymous scholarly reviews. On the other hand, there are many journals that carry literary reviews which are not written or intended for an academic readership. …

Goodbye to Edward G. (Ted) Jones, MD, DPhil, 1939‐2011

Goodbye to Edward G. (Ted) Jones, MD, DPhil, 1939‐2011

Lord Byron, Copyright and the Demons of the Law

On nine separate occasions between 1816 and 1828, legal proceedings were begun or, at least, contemplated for the purpose either of prohibiting or recovering monetary compensation for the sale of an unauthorized edition of a published work or works that had been written by Byron. On seven of those occasions, a specific published work of Byron’s was involved: Hours of Idleness; English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; Beppo; Don Juan, Cantos I and II; Cain; and Don Juan, Cantos VI to VIII. On the remaining two of those occasions, numerous published works of Byron’s were involved. The paper discusses all nine of those occasions. On a further six occasions between 1816 and 1826, legal proceedings were begun that involved in some other way Byron’s literary output (or claimed literary output). On three of those occasions, a specific published work of Byron’s was involved: Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice; Cain; and The Vision of Judgement. On one of those occasions, poems deliberately falsely attributed to Byron were involved. On one of those occasions, unpublished letters written by Byron were involved. On one of those occasions, illustrations of Byron's works were involved. The paper discusses all six of those occasions too. The paper includes and discusses four satirical prints showing respectively: Byron; John Cam Hobhouse; Lord Chancellor Eldon; and William Benbow, which prints had been created by leading satirical printmakers of Byron’s day.

Byron's Marginalia to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

This article examines the handwritten notes Byron scribbled in 1816 in a copy of the fourth edition of his 1809 poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers . It argues that these notes shed new light on both Byron's composition practice and the complex interplay the poet creates between fixed and unstable versions of his authorial identity. It also claims that the notes highlight the need for scholars to establish a more sensitive understanding of Romantic-period textual practices.

Byron in Baghdad

Forgive me, Lord, for all that is to come. Humility isn't easy. I am a product of my age, and your rima's not for me. Rhyme Royale's too much too. (I sought constraint before. The work remains, as yet, unknown to most, though findable on the Net.) We post-Postmodernist Americans like meals pre-cooked, in someone else's pans, swallowing a lot; but since we're not chewers, I'll honor English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. (The name hangs from my lips as from a dog's, the deadest thing dug up, but my tail wags....) We've been sound-bit, and couplets might well suit these epitaphic days of ab and glute.

Flyting in the Declaration of Independence and The Vision of Judgment

Though they both lived through the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and the birth of a new form of English verse, Thomas Jefferson and Lord Byron took little notice of one another. Not much has been written about their relationship, for academic disciplines, departments of literature and political science, conspire to keep them apart. In part, this is justified. In his correspondence and poetry, Byron mentions Jefferson only once, though Jefferson presided over a country that clearly interested him. 'He must have meant to quiz the three presidents or at least two - Jefferson & Madison', Byron wrote of Washington Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York. 'One of them had a wooden leg like Peter Stuyvesant.'1 This fragment of a letter to John Murray, possibly written in 1821, is hardly a promising observation by Byron: it was Governor Morris, not Jefferson or Madison, who used a wooden leg. Unlike Thomas Moore, who wrote about Jefferson and the United States disparagingly, however, Byron admired the country that had produced George Washington, Daniel Boone and Washington Irving. 'Whenever an American requests to see me - (which is not unfrequently) I comply', Byron wrote. '1stly. Because I respect a people who acquired their freedom by firmness without excess - and 2dly. Because these transatlantic visits few and far make me feel as if talking with Posterity from the other side of the Styx.'2 Jefferson had one of the most wide-ranging book collections in the United States, numbering roughly 6,487, but not a single volume by Byron. Jefferson's lack of interest in Byron between 1800 and 1808 is somewhat understandable, for Fugitive Pieces (1806), Hours of Idleness (1807) and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) were not widely quoted in American newspapers during the years when Jefferson, as America's third president, clipped verse from the papers for his poetry scrapbooks. But Jefferson also ignored Byron after the poet awoke to find himself famous with the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Apparently, Byron's fame had not reached Monticello. Jefferson, like Byron, preferred poets such as Moore, Campbell and Rogers (not to mention Scott and Burns) to Wordsworth and Coleridge.3 For his poetry scrapbooks, compiled between 1801 and 1809, for example, Jefferson clipped Thomas Moore's 'Song', 'Rondeau', 'Stanzas', 'A Ballad', 'Love and Reason', 'The Lake of the Dismal Swamp', 'translations' from Anacreon and selections from his Irish Melodies. With the exception of John Wolcot (Peter Pindar), who has seventeen entries, Moore is the poet most often represented in Jefferson's poetry scrapbooks, with over ten poems. Jefferson also clipped Rogers' 'A Sketch of the Alps at Day-Break' and 'Farewell' and Campbell's 'To The Evening Star', 'To Caroline', 'Hohen Linden' and 'Exile of Erin'. Though they agreed about Moore, Campbell, Rogers and Scott, they disagreed about Robert Southey. Jefferson admired Southey's shorter poems, clipping no fewer than six of them: 'Oak of Our Fathers', 'Hymn to Content', 'The Death of W. Wallace', 'The Old Man's Comforts' and 'The Widow'.4 The possibility of a literary reckoning between Byron and Jefferson is brought tantalisingly close by the 24-year-old Thomas Moore's visit to Washington DC in 1803. According to one account, Moore was 'the first British traveler to mention Jefferson in print'.5 Moore stayed with the British Ambassador, Anthony Merry, who felt slighted by the republican President when Jefferson failed to greet him in full diplomatic dress.6 'The Merry's have been treated with the most pointed incivility by the present democratic president', Thomas Moore dutifully reported to his mother.7 Moore was received 'in the same homely costume, comprising slippers and Connemara stockings in which Mr. Merry had been received by him, much to that formal Minister's horror'.8 After staying with Merry and his wife, Moore then visited the Federalist editor of the Port Folio, Joseph Dennie (later jailed for sedition), who further poisoned his mind against Jefferson. …

Reading Idiocy: Wordsworth's "The Idiot Boy"

Wordsworth loved writing and re-reading Idiot Boy: wrote the poem with delight and pleasure, and whenever I read it I read it with pleasure (ed. Hill, 52). I shall investigate this exceeding delight and pleasure in the light of three contexts--the Enlightenment understanding of idiocy, Platonic philosophy and Robert Southey--insofar as three pose a challenge to the psychoanalytic assumption that Wordsworth, in loving this poem, was regressing to a frustrated desire for his dead mother. (1) Among other things, this reading overlooks how the simple silhouette of the figure assumed to be Ann Wordsworth tends, as objects always do in Wordsworth, to shimmer and fade until she falls away into a generalized figuration of the mother--a recurrent figure in the Lyrical Ballads. (2) Yet she too disappears as the figure vanishes into the great spiritual mother Nature deeply interfused into all things and impel [ling] / All thinking things, objects of thought (Tintern Abbey 97, 101-3). My threefold re-contextualization of the poem will show that neither nor nature, is that simple. What did the poet love when he loved Idiot Boy? The figurative fertility of the figure exceeds a reductive interpretation of the poem as a projection of Wordsworth's desire for his dead mother. Yet if Wordsworth's love for Idiot Boy remains irrecoverable by psychoanalytic cliches, how is this emotion to be understood? Since the eponymous protagonist of the poem vicariously incarnates this love, the boy is worth questioning insofar as he provides a vivid contrast to the less idiotic (read: more socially adaptable) youths in other Wordsworth poems. Byron's dismissal of the poem in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is a helpful guide on how not to read the poem: Thus when he tells the tale of Betty Foy, The mother of 'an Boy'; A moon-struck silly lad who lost his way, And, like his bard, confounded night with day, So close on each pathetic part he dwells, And each adventure so tells, That who view the 'idiot in his glory', Conceive the Bard the of the (247-254). Byron argues that the at the heart of the poem is not, as the reader expects, the boy, but his idiot mother, which becomes even more offensive when he identifies the real hero of the or idiot in his glory as Wordsworth himself. Byron makes this leap because he cannot [c]onceive with certainty the object of Wordsworth's love. Like Keats, Byron is uncomfortable with Wordsworth's espousal of mother-love and reduces it to the earlier poet's love for his own ego. From this reading, it is a small step to the orthodox Oedipal truism that self-love is indistinguishable from an obsessive mother-love. (3) I want to question both this assumption that Wordsworth, in narrating the tale of Betty Foy and her son, is merely sublimely tell[ing] the story of a wordsworthian or egotistical sublime (Keats; 1. 387) and the Freudian corollary that an egotistic self-love leads, once the mother is absent, dead or buried, to the construction of mother Nature as a compensation for this loss. Neither maternity, nor nature was so simple, comforting or reassuring, as Julie Kipp explains in Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (2003): pathologizing of women's bodies and the demonizing of represented mothers as fearful monsters governed by instincts and psychical processes that seemed unthinking [i.e., idiotic, natural or], animal-like, and even potentially pathological (54, 52; my emphasis). Wordsworth counters, I argue, anti-maternal sentiment by his expressed sympathy for both mother and son. Wordsworth expresses, in other words, more maternal than his mis-readers. By maternal I mean that he sympathizes with mothers who suffer social stigmatization as too motherly or pathologically and that he remains open to the sympathetically feminine side of himself through an embrace of the excessive mother-love Betty Foy displays for her wayward child. …

'A magic voice and verse': Byron's Approaches to the Ode, 1814–16

The Romantic ode steeps itself in the turbulent waters of the mind's and heart's debates with themselves. These debates can take many forms, as Paul H. Fry indicates when contrasting Keats's odes with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's: Keats's odes, writes Fry, are 'not secretly ambivalent but candidly two-faced, or even many-faced'.1 Byron, too, thrives on the 'candidly two-faced', or even the manipulatively dissembling, and some of his finest shorter poems deserve to be associated with Romantic odes more commonly than is usually allowed by critics: in part, perhaps, because of Byron's jeer in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers at Coleridge's fondness for 'turgid ode, and tumid stanza' (196). The poems by Byron discussed in the present essay often wish to give themselves freedom from, even as they draw on, conventions associated with the ode, and thus form intriguing examples of an individual talent's creative way with tradition. 1816 was an annus mirabilis in Byron's career, the year he met Shelley, and, as significantly, learned, via Shelley, to admire Wordsworth's poetic power. It is also a year when a blend of artistic control with difficult and goading feeling issues, for Byron, in poems that have something of the force of the ode. Wordsworth wrote in a note to 'Tintern Abbey' in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads: 'I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode; but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and in the impassioned music of the versification would be found the principal requisites of that species of composition'.2 The comment intrigues; it shows a leading Romantic poet framing a poem in loose but intense relationship with a traditional form. In a comparable way, Byron derives imaginative nourishment from the example of the ode. If odes invoke, summon, plead, exhort and put us under a spell, so too does the Incantation from the first act of Manfred. The Incantation, first published as a separate piece in Byron's 1816 collection, The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems, contains 'impassioned music' and 'transitions', transitions possessing the quality of 'defensive paradox' of which Byron speaks in '[Epistle to Augusta]' (3). 'Defensive paradox' implies a fightback, organised under the standard of deftly sinuous language, against the slings and arrows of misfortune, and it nerves the poems discussed in this essay. On the first publication of the Incantation, Byron claimed that it was 'a Chorus in an unfinished Witch drama, which was begun some years ago',3 a claim that suggests the Incantation's genesis in the genre of choral ode. In the context of Manfred, it is spoken to Manfred by an unknown voice, but it also can be read as a poem spoken by Byron to his wife. The Incantation, like the work as a whole, thrives on a sense that the fictive cloaks the real. A two-way discharge of emotional poison is appropriate for a poem that is full of doublings. So, in the fourth stanza, Byron writes: And a magic voice and verse Hath baptized thee with a curse; And a spirit of the air Hath begirt thee with a snare; In the wind there is a voice Shall forbid thee to rejoice; And to thee shall Night deny All the quiet of her sky; And the day shall have a sun Which shall make thee wish it done. (I, i, 222-31) Here, the words are joined asunder; associations are married and divorced in the same breath. The 'magic voice and verse' may belong to the past tense: they have 'baptized thee with a curse'. But they are also reawakened by or even summoned up during the Incantation until they materialise as the 'voice and verse' which we are now hearing and reading.4 The mesmeric rhythm ensures that the reader will concede the potency of Byron's art. Yet the 'verse' turns immediately into the 'curse' to which it cedes supremacy in the embrace of rhyme. Any sacrament of the word is interfused with the diabolic. Intimacy and loathing writhe round one another; love and hate fuse. …

Edinburgh Is A Talking Town

Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, the Scottish middle class assiduously cultivated the ability to engage in “polite conversation”: conversation distinguished by reciprocity rather than self-display, deference rather than competition. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, Scots, especially the younger ones, began to idealize boldness and eloquence in conversation. This transformation is reflected prominently in the periodical-writing of the period. From the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802, periodical-writing began to assume a deliberately eloquent and assertive style. There is evidence, in fact, that many of the reviews and essays written by the “Scotch reviewers” of this era had begun as conversations – that is, actual conversations in coffeehouses and clubs – and had been transferred to paper. The notion of reviews and essays as displays of eloquence became so common, indeed, that Blackwood's Magazine, begun in 1817, deliberately defined itself against the Edinburgh as a printed manifestation of the new competitive Scottish conversation.

William Thomas Fitzgerald's Moment of Fame

It was once believed that Byron's publication of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was provoked by a scathing review of his book, Hours of Idleness, by Lord Brougham in the January 1808 issue of The Edinburgh Review. However, in October 1807 Byron already had 380 lines of a satire to be titled British Bards and, by the time the review appeared, 520 lines had been set in type and printed in quarto sheets by Ridge of Newark.1 After the review, Byron set out to rewrite and expand his satire, which he published anonymously in March 1809. It was such a success that Byron published the second edition under his own name, with an added Preface and nearly 400 new lines. Ninetysix of the new lines were at the beginning, starting with: Still must I hear? - shall hoarse *FITZGERALD bawl His croaking couplets in a tavern hall, And I not sing, lest, haply, Scotch Reviews Should dub me scribbler, and denounce my Muse? (1-4) He then went on to identify the target of this attack in a footnote: Mr. Fitzgerald, facetiously termed by COBBETT the 'Small Beer Poet', inflicts his annual tribute of verse on the 'Literary Fund'; not content with writing, he spouts in person after the company have imbibed a reasonable quantity of bad port, to enable them to sustain the operation.2 William Thomas Fitzgerald (c.1759-1829) considered himself an unofficial poet laureate whose annual Literary Fund recitations were reported in the newspapers. He was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office by day, but also an author of patriotic effusions and other miscellany. He owes his fame to the first line in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and Byron's parody of him in Rejected Addresses. In his Works of Lord Byron, Thomas Moore added the following to Byron's footnote: (For a long period of thirty-two years, this harmless poetaster was an attendant at the anniversary dinners of the Literary Fund, and constantly honoured the occasion with an ode, which he himself recited with the most comical dignity and emphasis - Of all his numerous loyal effusions only a single line has survived its author: -)3 We now know that Moore was somewhat pessimistic, as a compilation of Fitzgerald's writings appeared as recently as 1979.4 But what was Fitzgerald's reaction to his sudden fame, when singled out by Byron for dubious attention? The contemporary poet and Byron's earliest agent, R. C. Dallas, transcribed the following humorous exchange on the blank leaf of the fifth edition of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: Written on a copy of English Bards at the 'Alfred' by W. T. Fitzgerald, Esq. -5 I find Lord Byron scorns my Muse, Our fates are ill agreed; The Verse is safe, I can't abuse Those lines, I never read. Signed W. T. F. Byron answered on the same page: 'What's writ on me', cries Fitz, 'I never read!' What's writ by thee, dear Fitz, none will, indeed. The case stands simply thus, then, honest Fitz, Thou and thine enemies are fairly quits; Or rather would be, if for time to come, They luckily were 'deaf', or thou wert dumb; But to their pens while scribblers add their tongues. The Waiters only can escape their lungs.6 There is no indication of when this exchange took place, but claiming never to have read 'those lines' was probably somewhat disingenuous on Fitzgerald's part. Fitzgerald owned a copy of the second edition of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers in which he had inked a little hand next to his name and attached a manuscript copy of a different response to Byron on the blank page vii - opposite the first line of the poem. That same little hand is drawn on the top of the attached manuscript, indicating that it was in his hand and suggesting that it was probably written early in 1812, shortly after the publication of the first part of Childe Harold: If this attack upon Mr. …

Chasms in Connections: Byron Ending (in) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 1 and 2

Chasms in Connections: Byron Ending (in) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 1 and 2 Paul Elledge Two years and twelve days after departing England for his continental tour, Lord Byron landed at Sheerness on 14 July 1811 bearing the manuscript about to rocket him into international fame. 1 It tracks the months of recurrent dislocation intrinsic to a pilgrimage that enacted the chronic discontinuity of the poet’s affinitive history. Just over one-hundred lines into the new poem, a valedictory lyric by the voyaging pilgrim sings a simulated indifference to his desertion of family and friends, and foresees as his destination the desolated terrain to which in fact its author returned. 2 This essay explores Byron’s response to the devastation he in disembarking met, principally as textualized in stanzas added to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 1 and 2 in August and October 1811. But these supplements, partially driven by the deaths of the friends they covertly honor — John Wingfield in 1 and John Edleston in 2 — also materialize the poet’s apprehensions about reengaging a readership after his recklessly undiscriminating English Bards and Scotch Reviewers had jarred and piqued the British literary establishment in 1809. The stanzas in question encrypt anxieties aroused by gaps in Byron’s personal landscape and inflamed by the imminence of a gap between poet and manuscript — by the rift created with his abandonment of the Childe to an uncertain audience. My subject, broadly, is Byron ending: suffering, evading, disguising, denying, performing, and surviving terminations; ending relationships, poems, relationships with poems and their audiences; designing structures to accommodate and facilitate the dissociative imperative that determines so much of his verse as it disabled so many of his connections. More particularly, I look at the complementary coincidence of fateful human with necessary authorial separation in Byron’s elaborated conclusions to his cantos, whereby he converts a psychic deficiency into a textual strength that ministers to the anxieties it inscribes. Among these, ruptures not of his making actuate a Pilgrimage discourse that nevertheless exploits them in the vexatious task of textual termination. [End Page 121] I Two testimonial stanzas (1.91–92) precede the deceptively conventional parting address to Byron’s readership that formally concludes canto 1 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. 3 The collective circumstances inspiring them realized, with horribly concentrated impact, the vision of decimation ending Harold’s “Good Night” song (CH, 1.118197), for they resonate with the grief that staggered Byron as he learned, in Jobean succession, of the deaths of five intimates between July and October 1811, while preparing his new poem for the press. Mrs. Byron died on 1 August at Newstead Abbey, before reunion with her son who had lingered in London from mid-July. News of the deaths of two schoolmates, Hargreaves Hanson, second son of Byron’s solicitor, at 23, and John Wingfield, at 20, “among my juniors and favourites [at Harrow], whom I spoilt by indulgences” (M, 21), reached Byron in late July. Charles Skinner Matthews, the poet’s high-spirited Cambridge companion, strangled among underwater weeds in the River Cam on 3 August. And by 10 October, Byron knew that his beloved Cambridge chorister John Edleston was dead of consumption. On 7 August he wrote in (an uncannily proleptic Frankensteinian) anguish to Scrope Berdmore Davis: Some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house: one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? My dear Scrope, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me, I want a friend. Matthews’s last letter was written on Friday, — on Saturday he was not.... Come to me, Scrope, I am almost desolate — left almost alone in the world.” 4 And on the 10th to John Cam Hobhouse: My dwelling, you already know, is the House of Mourning, & I am really so much bewildered with the different shocks I have sustained, that I can hardly reduce myself to reason by the most frivolous occupations. My poor J. Wingfield, my Mother, & and your best friend, (surely not the worst of mine) C [harles] S [kinner] M [atthews] have disappeared in one little month...

Naturalism and William Paley

MARK FRANCIS? I This article is an attempt to establish William Paley’s work as the source of higher political wisdom in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Paley’s works were texts at Cambridge University for more than half a century, and he was an author who was required reading at universities in the British ‘outback’ when they were established-Durham University and Sydney University until the middle of the nineteenth century and at the University of Manitoba even in the century’s closing decades. Paley is an English political thinker who needs to be retrieved from the flood of secondary literature on Scottish philosophers and economists. Why late eighteenthand nineteenthcentury English political theorists such as Paley have been ignored while comparatively unimportant Scottish ones have been commemorated is of interest in the same way that Byron thought English bards and Scotch reviewers were of interest. We have been too easily enticed by the strictures of the Edinburgh Review which was so seemingly modern and so open to continental influences. In addition, England in the early nineteenth century was chiefly known for its economics, and following the well-known dramatic dictum of not crowding the centre stage, English political theory was pushed out of it.’ William Paley’s The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy was the most widely used text-book on morals and political philosophy in England from 1785 until the middle of the nineteenth century. It is now one of the least understood historical texts. This obscurity is partly due to the twin foci of modern English historiography upon political philosophy as a debate engaging sixteenthand seventeenth-century minds and upon moral sense philosophy as occupying eighteenth-century ones. In comparison, the nineteenth century, especially the early part of it, is regarded as a non-reflective historical period filled with reform activities of a practical kind and with the spread of methodism and evangelical thought.2 In addition to this quite indefensible periodisation, writers who do not fall into century-long divisions, or whose thought bridges such divisions, are neglected. Paley, like the poets Cowper and Crabbe, is regarded as falling into a void between the eighteenth century and Victorian England. What critical literature there is on Paley usually reflects on the fact that he did not fit a large historical patterning. First, though he taught from Locke, he was uninterested in applying the great seventeenth-century devices of rights, social

Scotch Reviewers: "The Edinburgh Review," 1802-1815

Scotch Reviewers: "The Edinburgh Review," 1802-1815

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this articleGREAT BRITAINR. H. Tawney Business and Politics under James IChristopher Hill. Economic Problems of the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament.L. Margaret Midgley (Ed.). A History of the County of Stafford.R. A. McKinley (Ed.). A History of the County of Leicester.John LE Patourel (Ed.). Documents Relating to the Manor and Borough of Leeds, 1066‐1400.Acts of the Privy Council of England, July 1628 to April 1629.Margaret Walker (Ed.). Warwick County Records: Hearth Tax Returns, Vol. I. Hemlingford Hundred: Tamworth and Atherstone Divisions.D. C. Coleman. The British Paper Industry 1495‐1860.William Woodruff. The Rise of the British Rubber Industry During the Nineteenth Century.John Clive. Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802‐1815.A. R. Schoyen. The Chartist Challenge. A Portrait of George Julian Harney.Walter E. Houghton. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830‐1870.T. F. T. Plucknett. Early English Legal Literature.R. J. Mitchell and M. D. R. Leys. A History of London Life.Kathleen MajorT. Woodrooffe. The Enterprise of England.W. B. Stephens. A Study of Industrial and Commercial Development, 1625‐1688.H. Cecil Pawson. Robert Bakewell, Pioneer Livestock Breeder.G. Rattray Taylor. The Angel‐Makers.WALTER HAGENBUCH. Social Economics.ITALYRoberto S. Lopez. La prima crisi della Banca di GenovaGiuseppe La Mantia. Codice diplomatic dei Re Aragonesi di Sicilia. Vol. II, edited by A. De Stefano and F. Giunta. Series I, vol. XXIV of‘Documenti per servire alia Storia di Sicilia’.Renato ZanoheriUgo TucciUNITED STATES OF AMERICALev E. Dobriansky. Veblenism: A New Critique.Bernard Rosenberg. The Values of Veblen.Arthur Nussbaum. A History of the Dollar.Marvin Meyers. The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief.Walter D. Wyman and Clifton B. KroeberFred A. Shannon. American Farmers’Movements.E. S. Lee and Others. Population Redistribution and Economic Growth: United States, 1870‐1950. Vol. I. Methodological Considerations and Reference Tables.Milton Handler. Antitrust in Perspective: The Complementary Roles of Rule and Discretion.Kenneth O. Bjork. West of the Great Divide: Norwegian Migration to the Pacific Coast, 1847‐1893.John H. Krenkel. Illinois Internal Improvement 1818‐1848.Milton Derber and Edwin Young. Labor and the New Deal.Robert David Enterbero. The Changing Competitive Position of Department Stores in the United States by Merchandise Lines.Raymond G. Miller. Killowatts at Work: A History of the Detroit Edison Company.David Loth. Swope of G.E.‐The Story of Gerard Swope and General Electric in American Business.Kendall Birr. Pioneering in Industrial Research. The Story of the General Electric Research Laboratory.Martin Demino Lewis. Lumberman From Flint: The Michigan Career of Henry H. Crapo 1855‐186/t).Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer.‘The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South’, Journal of Political Economy, LXVIUniversity of North CarolinaGENERALLudwig VON Mises. Theory and History.Karl R. Popper. The Poverty of Historicism.Torsten Garrdlund. The Life of Knut Wicksell. Translated from the Swedish by Nancy Adler.John T. Noonan, Jr. The Scholastic Analysis of Usury.Agronomisch‐Historische Bijdragen. Vol. IV.George T. Matthews. The royal general farms in eighteenth‐century France.Stanley J. Stein. Vassouras. A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850‐1900.Stanley J. Stein. The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture: Textile Enterprise in an Underdeveloped Area, 1850‐1950.Richard M. Morse. From Community to Metropolis: A Biography of São Paulo, Brazil.A. W. Currie. The Grand Trunk Railway of Canada.Vernon C. Fowke.The National Policy and the Wheat Economy.A. V. Raman Rao. The Economic Development of Andhra Pradesh, 1766‐1957Jerome B. Cohen. Japan's Postwar Economy.Capital Formation and Economic Growth.

The Unknown Reviewer of Christ Abel: Jeffrey, Hazlitt, Tom Moore

Among the reviews of poetry in the early nineteenth century few have been more celebrated, or more notorious, than the review of Coleridge's Christabel which appeared in the Edinburgh Review for September 1816. The Quarterly on Keats, Mr. Blackwood's young men on the Cockney School, Jeffrey's “This will never do” of the Excursion, and the Edinburgh Review's indirect and unwitting gift to the world of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers—perhaps only these have had greater fame, of sorts. The destroyers of new poets may have had an inkling of the vengeance of posterity, for the authorship of some of these reviews was a mystery exceptionally well preserved even for that age of anonymous criticism. Time, however, and amateur detectives have succeeded in fixing the responsibility for most of them; the review of Christabel is the chief remaining puzzle.

Sir Egerton Brydges on Lord Byron

ONE of the curiosities of literature is the fervent defense of Lord Byron's morality by the very circumspect Sir Egerton Brydges.' Byron's death in I824 was the excuse for the elderly antiquarian to write profusely about his misunderstood hero. Within little more than a year Brydges had written two books on Byron and included a defense of the poet's patriotism in still a third book. By I83 I Brydges had made Byron a central figure in two poems. Finally, in I834, the old man sat down to write his autobiography, and the loving manner in which he introduces and defends Byron shows that he has adopted the youthful poet as his spiritual son. The reasons for this strange partnership are not hard to find when the evidence is examined more closely. I shall attempt, first of all, to show how Brydges defended Byron, and then to analyze the motives behind the defense. The first bond of sympathy began when the young nobleman's verses were ridiculed by the Scotch reviewers. Brydges believed in aristocracy and had done prodigious research on the British peerage. Like Byron he had received rebuffs at the hand of the despised "new" peers, and so it was with intense interest and delight that he noticed the young lord's poetical retorts in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as well as his later acclaim on the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The strange hero worship reached a climax on Byron's death. The spark set off Brydges' smoldering desire to become the poet's public champion, and a rapid succession of writings about Byron came from the garrulous Sir Egerton. In less than three months after Byron's death in Greece on April 19, I824, Brydges had finished his Letters on the Character and Poetical Genius of Lord Byron, which attracted very little attention at the time,2 although it is probably, as Professor Chew calls it, the

Byron's Hours of Idleness and Other than Scotch Reviewers

Byron's Hours of Idleness and Other than Scotch Reviewers