Byron's Letters & Journals: A New Selection

edited by Richard Lansdown

Oxford University Press, 2015

Editor Richard Lansdown, in his hefty new book of selections from the letters and journals of Lord Byron, makes no secret of his work's antecedents. The extracts here have been extracted from the 12-volume complete edition edited by Leslie Marchand between 1973 and 1982, and the present volume is constantly looking over its shoulder at Marchand's own Selected Letters and Journals from 1982. The key advantage Lansdown's volume has is one of amplitude: you get more Byron here, and more Byron is always better than less Byron (as a critic once wrote, “the letters, even more than Don Juan, are the beginning, middle, and end of Lord Byron”).

Byron kept many journals in his life, the five most famous ones being a London journal from 1813, an Alps one from 1816, a Ravenna one from 1821, one from Ravenna and Pisa in 1821, and one at Cephalonia in 1823, and he wrote a great heap of letters, and about the combined charge of these rafts of prose, Lansdown is clearly and proudly partisan:

The great monuments of English Romantic prose are Jane Austen's novels, Hazlitt's essays, Keat's letters, Coleridge's notebooks, and De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Byron's letters and journals match these and go further, to provide, taken as a whole, one of the three great informal autobiographies in English, alongside Samuel Pepys's diary and James Boswell's journal.

His edition of this “protean display” is masterfully done and copiously, generously footnoted, although sometimes his evident pleasure in relaying these glittering bits of writing temps him to forget that not everybody's up to speed on all things Byron in quite the way he is. Take for example a postscript Byron includes in an 1817 letter to his publisher John Murray, needling the poor man for his well-intentioned failures on the author's part:

There are few English here – but several of my acquaintance – amongst others, the Marquis of Lansdowne with whom I dine tomorrow – I met the Jerseys on the road to Foigno – all well – Oh – I forgot – the Italians have printed Chillon & a piracy a pretty little edition prettier than yours and published as I found to my great astonishment on arriving here & what is odd is, that the English is quite correctly printed – why they did it or who did it I know not – but so it is – I suppose for the English people. I will send you a copy.

A gimlet-eyed parting shot, yes, but offered here, oddly, without any annotation.Other letters are far more self-explanatory; we get a very young Byron challenging a note's recipient to a duel over offended honor; we have the famous 1817 letter to Thomas Moore with a dashed-off poem that will be anthologized until the end of human civilization; and Lansdown includes an 1812 “letter” to Lady Caroline Lamb, included by her in her dreadful novel Glenarvon (“Byron read the book and made no comment concerning the letter's authenticity,” Lansdown somewhat complacently comments, “so we may assume it is genuine”):

I am no longer your lover; and since you oblige me to confess it, by this truly unfeminine persecution, - learn, that I am attached to another; whose name it would of course be dishonourable to mention. I shall ever remember with gratitude the many instances I have received of the predilection you have shewn in my favour. I shall ever continue your friend, if your ladyship will permit me to so style myself; and, as a first proof of my regard, I offer you this advice, correct your vanity, which is ridiculous; exert your absurd caprices upon others; and leave me in peace.

“Among Byron's journals there is a famous empty chair,” Lansdown winningly comments, “the memoirs he wrote in Venice in 1819 (and later supplemented), relating to his marriage, which were destroyed in his publisher's fireplace some months after his death in Greece in April 1824.” Admirers of Lord Byron's verse (far fewer in number than they should be, since the fetish of agonized, watery blank verse has so firmly taken root and flourished that great poets like Pope, Longfellow, and yes, Byron currently languish on lower tiers than they ever occupied in their careers) might be able to content themselves with the man's body of work, but gawkers at the gaudy spectacle of his life itself are always pained by mention of that destroyed memoir – and always hopeful that one of the many copies of it made while Murray was circulating it come to light one of these days. And in the meantime, those gawkers have a plenitude of Byron biographies to choose from – so it's perhaps fitting that Lansdown gives the last word of his splendid volume to the same o'erhanging shadow who got the first word:

Byron had the misfortune to attract more than his fair share of dysfunctional and humourless admirers, from outright liars like Leigh Hunt, John Trelawny, and Lady Blessington, through self-interested fabricators like Caroline Lamb, Claire Clairmont, and Lady Byron, to devoted friends like Hobhouse and ambivalent ones like Mary Shelley. No wonder, perhaps, that the people he loved most, Augusta Leigh and Teresa Guiccioli, were ones who made him laugh; and that the superficial Thomas Moore meant more to Byron than the conventional and earnest Hobhouse thought he should have done. Something of a similar competitive psychological desire to know Byron best (proprietorially speaking) and judge him most searchingly (moralistically speaking) has tainted biographies of him from Moore's day to our own. Leslie Marchand's ability to resist both those temptations makes his 1957 biography of the poet still the best that has been published; perhaps it will not be improved upon.

He doesn't extend this same benediction to Marchand's edition of the letters and journals, but then, he wouldn't be likely to, would he?