Byronmania – Regency Fiction Writers

The portrait of Byron is dated to 1813 by Thomas Phillips, and used via Wikimedia Commons

On March 10, 1812 John Murray published George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. Murray printed 500 quarto copies, which sold out in three days, costing 30 shillings each (that’s 1£ 10 shillings, or in the modern world about 56£, and quarto refers to printing four pages on each side of a sheet of paper, front and back, and folding the sheet twice, each time folding against the long side. Eight pages are thus printed on one sheet of paper. The person who bought the book would have it bound—either clapboard, cloth or leather—and would need to cut the pages. Or could pay 50 shillings for a bound copy.) Byron did not care for this format.

In Byron: Life and Legend Fiona MacCarthy writes, “He had disapproved of John Murray’s decision to publish Childe Harold in a large format quarto edition, calling it ‘a cursed unsaleable size’.”

Due to demand, Murray immediately came out with an octavo edition of 3,000 copies at 12 shilling (obviously, octavo refers to a book on which 16 pages are printed, and folded three times to produce eight leaves). In less than six months sales of the poem had reached 4,500 copies, and Byron noted, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” While a nice quote, that was not quite true.

At the age of 10, Byron had come into his title in 1798 as the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, and heir to Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. In November 1806, he distributed his first book of poetry, Fugitive Pieces, printed at his expense. He printed 100 copies of a revised edition in January 1807 as Poems on Various Occasions, and then published another collection of poems in June, Hours of Idleness. It was rather brutally critiqued in the ‘Edinburgh Review’, and after Byron took his seat in the House of Lords in March 1809—he had turned twenty-one in January—he published 1,000 copies of the satirical poem English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers as revenge. This work was well-known, and Byron had already attracted the interest and admiration of those in the Whig party for his first speech in the House of Lords, made in February, 1812, when he spoke against the death penalty for anyone who broke loom frames—he felt he was speaking up for the Luddites in Nottinghamshire. But Childe Harold made Byron into something of a Regency “superstar.”

Byron wrote Childe Harold during his travels, which had taken him from Lisbon to Greece and on to Athens and covered from 1809 to 1811. It has been noted that the poem read something like a travelogue through the Mediterranean, and Byron himself said, “If I am a poet,…the air of Greece has made me one.”

In the spring and summer of 1812, “Bryonmania” took hold. While such a word as “Byronmania” sounds modern, it was actually coined by Annabella Milbank in 1812, long before she became Lady Byron.

March, 1812, also saw Byron launch into an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, who had been given an advanced copy of Childe Harold and wrote to Bryon on March 9, “Childe Harold I have read your Book & cannot refrain from telling you that I think it & that all those whom I live with & whose opinions are far more worth having–think it beautiful…As this is the first letter I ever wrote without my name & could not well put it, will you promise to burn it immediately & never to mention it? If you take the trouble you may very easily find out who it is, but I shall think less well of Child(e) Harold if he tries—though the greatest wish I have is one day to see him & be acquainted with him.”

On March 25, Lord Byron went to Melbourne House at the invitation of Lady Caroline Lamb and also met Anne Isabella Milbanke. The ladies were also known respectively as Caro and Annabella. Morning waltzing practices were quite the rage, but the dance would not be accepted into Almack’s for another two years. Byron, with his club foot, could not excel at the dance and hated it. He would later write of that morning, “The first time of my seeing Miss Milbanke was at Lady ****’s. It was a fatal day; and I remember, that in going up stairs I stumbled, and remarked to Moore, who accompanied me, that it was a bad omen. I ought to have taken the warning. On entering the room, I observed a young lady more simply dressed than the rest of the assembly sitting alone on a sofa. I took her for a female companion…”

Annabella was also not impressed with Byron, and wrote in her diary, “…I went to a morning party at Lady Caroline Lamb’s, where my curiosity was much gratified by seeing Lord Byron, the object at present of universal attention. Lady C. has of course seized on him, notwithstanding the reluctance he manifests to be shackled by her… I did not seek an introduction to him, for all the women were absurdly courting him, and trying to deserve the lash of his Satire.”

Byron would start an affair with the married Lady Caro, which would last until August. Byron broke off the affair, Caro’s husband William Lamb took her off to Ireland, and when she returned in early 1813 and when Byron made it clear he would not take up with her again, she tried to slash her wrists with a broken wine glass at a ball. She had never been all that stable and would go on to create even more scandals, and then sought revenge by writing and publishing Glenarvon in 1816, which satirized Byron and others, including Lady Jersey (which ended with Caro barred from Almack’s and socially scorned). Byron would wed Annabella Milbanke in 1815—it was not a good match. After settling his debts by selling Newstead Abbey, Byron left England again in April, 1816. Byron, in a fashion, had really become his own poetic hero:

And now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart,
And from his fellow bacchanals would flee;
‘Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start,
But Pride congeal’d the drop within his e’e:
Apart he stalk’d in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolved to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;
With pleasure drugg’d he almost long’d for woe,
And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below.