Byron’s Literary Afterlife in the Victorian Era

Introduction

n his full-length study of Byron's Victorian reception, Byron and the Victorians, Andrew Elfenbein explores the phenomenon of the poet's vivid afterlife, demonstrating persuasively that although a number of Victorian authors evolved away from a cumbersome Byronic legacy, they did not reject the poet outright. Instead, they gradually abandoned values associated with Byron, and moved towards those associated with mainstream Victorian ideology, with its strict moral code, strong work ethic, belief in personal improvement, and promotion of respectability and domesticity. The following account aims to highlight the most salient examples of Byron’s presence in Victorian public consciousness, in literature and the collective memory.

This presence was manifested variously, in the Victorians' interest in the poet’s controversial lifestyle and literary achievement. His dandyish looks, extraordinary and tumultuous life and rebellious poetry had fascinated his contemporaries, and they continued to have an impact on these later generations. Victorians still read Byron, and some authors even imitated him for their own purposes. Thus his afterlife presence in Victorian culture permeates not only fiction and poetry, but also “fashion, social manners, erotic experience and gender roles” (Elfenbein 8).

From Vogue to Myth

Lithograph by Nathaniel Currier, 1813-1888, published by J.F. Atwill, c.1840. Library of Congress reproduction no. LC-DIG-pga-04926 (no known restrictions on publication).

The vogue for Byron was born during the poet’s lifetime: the poet had made himself the subject of his poetry, becoming a Romantic idol, an unrivalled role model for many poets and writers younger than he was, and ordinary people who were fascinated by the Byronic attitude, that is, the attitude of rebellion against the existing reality. After the vogue came the myth. This was born immediately after his untimely death at Missolonghi, the news of which caused a sensation. William Hazlitt said that Byron “died a martyr to his zeal in the cause of freedom for the last, best hopes of man” (108). The poet William Gill Thompson (1796‒1844), in his poem "Lines on the Death of Lord Byron" (1824), wrote that Byron “on the battlefield expired” (Knowles 123; in fact – as we know – the poet died after a short illness, described by doctors as “rheumatic fever”). Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote in a letter to her husband Thomas Carlyle about the poet’s death: “If they had said the sun or the moon was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful blank in the creation than the words, ‘Byron is dead’!” (Ireland 41).

Such was the reaction that, in London, a barrier had to be built around his coffin to protect it from the crowds of mourners. It was the greatest, but not the last, demonstration of what was called Byromania in Britain. This cultural and commercial phenomenon swept Europe and Americas, and the nineteenth century could be truly called a century of Byromania. In Poland, for example, Byromania broke out with great force after 1820. The first Polish translations of the poet’s poems appeared, most often from French. They were followed by enthusiastic articles in the press.

Then, however, some different opinions surfaced. Thomas Carlyle initially admired Byron just as his wife did, and in the year of his death wrote that his work was “full of fire, true passion and proud aims” (Rutherford 286). He even considered Byron “the noblest spirit in Europe” (Russell 720). But in 1830 he suddenly changed his opinion of the poet, and in Sartor Resartus, his witty attack on dandyism and Byronism, urged others to stop idolising Byron and start reading Goethe: “(C)lose thy Byron, open thy Goethe” (Ch. IX). Now disenchanted with Byron, he wrote to Macvey Napier (1776–1847), the editor of the Edinburgh Review and the Encyclopædia Britannica: "No genuine productive thought was ever revealed by him to mankind; indeed no clear undistorted vision into anything;... but all had a certain falsehood, a brawling, theatrical, insincere character” (qtd. in Ruddick 28). He now regarded Byron as a case of “moral and psychic pathology” (Dramin 273). That opinion was soon shared by a number of Victorian writers who were initially under the spell of the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

In this way, in England, the poet’s own homeland, after a relatively short period of fame and popularity, Byron’s status as a cult figure faded. Paradoxically, after 1830, his work was less appreciated publicly than in continental Europe and America. There, he influenced a wide range of nineteenth-century poets and novelists, including Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) and Alesandro Manzoni (1785-1873) in Italy; Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) in Germany; Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869), Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863) and Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) in France; Almeida Garrett (1799–1854) in Portugal; José Joaquín de Mora (1783‒1864) and José de Espronceda (1808‒1842) in Spain; Dionysios Solomos (1798‒1857) in Greece, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) and Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) in Russia; Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) and Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) in Poland; and Álvares de Azevedo (1831–1852) and Antǒnio de Castro Alves (1847‒1871) in Brazil.

No doubt the different response in England was inevitable. After all, the basis of Byron’s posthumous poetic fame was the creation of one of the most influential literary archetypes – a lonely individualist at odds with the world, with a mysterious and murky past, shrouded in the aura of guilt, vice or crime. Posed as a life-weary cynic and misanthrope full of inner dilemmas, the Byronic hero was at the same time a man capable of passionate outbursts, a tender but unhappy lover, an idoliser of exotic landscapes and other cultures, and above all, a daring rebel fighting against violence and abuses of power that bind the right of people and nations to freedom. This attitude was combined in Byron’s poetic works with a radical criticism of political tyranny, and found a metaphysical expression in dramas that were the apotheosis of the Faustian and Promethean challenge to the forces of nature and God (especially in Cain), which eventually earned him the epithet “leader of the Satanic School of poetry.” In Victorian Britain, however, conservative ideology predominated. Understandably, therefore, the cult of Byron was significantly weakened, and, in its place, anti-Byronism, a reaction against the idolisation of Byron was born.

Although Victorian readers still read the poet’s Eastern poetic tales and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, they were unable to appreciate the greatness of Don Juan. William Makepeace Thackeray, who was particularly disgusted by Byron’s persona, stated sarcastically: "And what a poet Byron would have been had he taken his meals properly, and allowed himself to grow fat … and not have physicked his intellect with wretched opium pills and acrid vinegar, that sent his principles to sleep and turned his feelings sour! If that man had respected his dinner, he never would have written Don Juan (Bostetter 10). Although the Don Juan character frequently appeared in Victorian popular theatres which performed vaudeville, burlesque and extravaganza, no respectable author, with a few exceptions, dared to imitate him in their fictions for the purpose of social satire. As Andrew Elfenbein notes:

The few Victorian writers who imitated Don Juan used its radical aristocratic ethos to license their rebellion against bourgeois norms. For Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, and Wilde, Don Juan was a valuable model for homosexual performativity, especially because it challenged the existence of an essential, private self. Yet for the most part, Don Juan loomed as a road not to be taken. Representative work by Carlyle, Emily Brontë, and Tennyson pretended that it did not exist [46].

However, it is worth mentioning that Byron’s second cousin, Henry James Byron (1834–1884), a brilliant and prolific mid-Victorian playwright, exploited the Don Juan theme onstage in the 1860s and 1870s for popular entertainment. He authored three highly successful burlesques drawing on Byron’s Don Juan and Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Beautiful Haidée (1863), Little Don Giovanni (1865), and Don Juan (1873). Of course, these plays did not contain any social satire in George Gordon’s manner.

Crosscurrents: Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold and Swinburne

Thomas Robert Macquoid's cloth binding for The Illustrated Byron, 1858–60.

Generally, anti-Byronism had less to do with his poetry than his public image, pose and radical liberalism. His poetry exerted a powerful influence on some of the most important Victorian poets, although they were apt to develop ambivalent opinions both about Byron himself and the emblematic Byronic hero.

One such major poet was Tennyson, who admired Byron in his youth: in fact Byron was one of the strongest influences on his early development as a poet. In his boyhood, like many others of his generation, he loved to read Byron’s poetry: "As a boy I was an enormous admirer of Byron so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot read him as I should like to do. I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on a sandstone: “Byron is dead!” (69). Later in life, however, he was quoted as saying: “Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a creator in the higher sense, but a strong personality: he is endlessly clever and is now unduly depreciated (287). Indeed, according to Elfenbein, it was Alfred Tennyson who moved English poetry away from Byron (187).

Another early admirer of Byron, especially of his romantic Hellenism, was Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As a young girl, she was forbidden to read Byron’s scandalous poems. However, upon learning of the death of the beloved poet, at the age of 18 she wrote the poem "Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron." Later, she continued to hold him in esteem. Her poetic novel written in blank verse, Aurora Leigh (1856), is – as she herself admitted – modelled on Don Juan, but being an early feminist, she made the protagonist of her epic work a woman. In the poem “A Vision of Poets” (1844), describing the pantheon of poets, she wrote of Byron with sad appreciation:

And poor proud Byron! Sad as grave
And salt as life; forlornly brave
And quivering with the dart he drave. [245]

Another important Victorian author who grew up under Byron's spell (along with that of Shelley) was Robert Browning, who read Byron’s poems with enthusiasm for the first time in 1824, the year of his death, when he himself was only twelve. He subsequently penned a few “Byronic” poems under the title Incondita. No publisher was willing to print them and, regrettably, the young poet destroyed the manuscript. Later, he assured Elizabeth Barrett a few weeks before their elopement in 1846 that “Lord Byron is altogether in my affection again” (Bloom 105). Interestingly, Isaac Nathan, who encouraged Byron to write Hebrew Melodies (1815), later became young Browning’s music tutor. He may have inspired Browning to read Byron’s poems.

Then there was Matthew Arnold, who admired the strength and sincerity of Byron’s poetry, and acknowledged the extraordinary influence he had on his readers. Although he placed Wordsworth’s poetry above Byron’s, he called them both “a glorious pair, among the English poets of this century” (203). Arnold paid a famous tribute to Byron in his "Memorial Verses, April 1850," published in Fraser's Magazine (June 1850):

When Byron's eyes were shut in death,
We bowed our heads and held our breath.
He taught us little; but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder's roll.
With shivering heart the strife we saw
Of Passion with Eternal Law,
And yet with reverential awe
We watched the fount of fiery life
Which flowed for that Titanic strife … [630]

In 1881, Arnold published Poetry of Byron which contained apart from shorter lyrics selected fragments from all his longer poems and dramas. In the preface to this edition, Arnold noted that despite Byron’s immense popularity, he never received the serious appreciation he deserved. Arnold’s anthology contributed to the revival of interest in the poetry. W. E. Henley, who reviewed Arnold’s selection in the Athenaeum (25 June 1881), commented positively on defences of Byron recently expressed by Swinburne, Symonds, Ruskin, and Arnold.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, too, regretted that Byron had been almost forgotten by the English reading public. But he was also critical about his poetic style. In the Preface to A Selection from the Works of Lord Byron (1866), he wrote:

An imperfect mastery of his materials keeps the best things of Byron some few degrees below an equal rank. One native and incurable defect grew up and strengthened side by side with his noblest qualities: a feeble and faulty sense of metre. No poet of equal or inferior rank ever had so bad an ear. His smoother cadences are often vulgar and facile; his fresher notes are often incomplete and inharmonious. His verse stumbles and jingles, stammers and halts, where there is most need for a swift and even pace of musical sound. [13]

However, despite flaws in Byron’s style, Swinburne also acknowledged

the splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength. Without these no poet can live; but few have ever had so much of them as Byron. His sincerity indeed is difficult to discover and define; but it does in effect lie at the root of all his good works: deformed by pretension and defaced by assumption, masked by folly and veiled by affectation; but perceptible after all, and priceless. [Essays and Studies, 239]

Swinburne held Don Juan in highest esteem, but much of Byron’s earlier work seemed to him “unconsciously dishonest” (Essays and Studies, 242). Interestingly, inspired by Byron’s Venetian tragedy, in 1885, Swinburne rewrote his Marino Faliero and updated the play’s political message.

Byron and Disraeli

In pre-Victorian England, Byron’s influence remained strong not in poetry but in “silver fork” novels of dandy writers, such as Benjamin Disraeli and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Fascinated by the homoerotic aspect of Byron’s personality, his appearance, clothes and hairstyle, Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton even imitated Byron’s lifestyle, his habits of dress and his dandyism, but in their novels, such as Disraeli’s Vivian Gray (1826) and Bulwer Lytton’s Falkland (1827) and Pelham (1828), they tried to cover up the homoerotic behaviour of their Byronic characters by adapting them to the emerging Victorian stance. Like his father, Isaac d’Israeli, Benjamin Disraeli was a keen admirer of Byron. His seventh novel, Venetia (1837), is a disguised fictionalisation of various episodes in the lives of Byron and Shelley, who were treated with esteem by the Whigs and despised by conservative circles. According to Elfenbein, in Venetia Disraeli presents himself as “the moral, political and literary successor to Byron, by manipulating the representation of Byron’s sexuality” (225). In 1820, the seventeenth-year old Bulwer Lytton published a volume of poetry titled Ismael: An Oriental, with Other Poems, which was reminiscent of the Byronic style. In his work England and the English (1833), Bulwer Lytton assessed the merits of Byron’s poetry and stated that both Walter Scott and Byron “represented the mind of their generation” (221). Both Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton manipulated with the Byronic hero, presenting his evolution through a moral regeneration.

Byron and Victorian Women Novelists

Interestingly, Byron’s afterlife presence is particularly reflected in the work of nineteenth-century women writers: Emily Brontë, her sister Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, who remodelled the Byronic hero and heroine to satisfy the expectations of the Victorian reading public.

Heathcliff after Cathy's death in Wuthering Heights, by Clare Leighton. [Click on the image for more information.]

Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (1847) impersonates several traits of a Byronic hero; a mysterious and troubled past, passion, unfulfilled love and violent behaviour. However, he transcends the typical Byronic hero in his vengefulness, and cruelty. Another Byronic character, Mr. Rochester, in Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic romance Jane Eyre is a mysterious and proud arrogant who finds it difficult to adjust to society. However, Brontë rejects Byronic masculinity in favour of a respectable Victorian male, whom Jane can marry. After marriage to Jane, Rochester loses much of his Byronic vein not only because he is crippled, but also because he transforms into a reformed Victorian gentleman. The protagonist of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South (1855), Margaret Hale, one of the strongest female characters in English literature, illustrates the phenomenon of the feminisation of the Byronic hero. Selfless and self-determined, she rejects the stereotypical passive female role of the Victorian era and is guided by her own moral code. Like a Byronic hero, she rebels against the rules of society. She embodies the spirit of a Byronic archetypal hero which is acceptable to middle-class morality. George Eliot’s fiction from Felix Holt (1866) to Daniel Deronda (1876) shows “the evolution of her view of Byron from bemused disdain to a broader, more ambivalent image which acknowledges the complexity and attractive dimensions of his creations and of Byron himself” (Dramin 292). Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch (1871‒1872) has some features of a Byronic character due to his Romantic behaviour and feelings for Dorothea Brooke. In Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), the vain and exotic Harold Transome evokes the Byronic hero like Childe Harold. However, as Anna Gutowska has written, Transome “is meant as an ironic reaction against the Byronic tradition rather than as a straightforward tribute” (84). Specific references to Byron and his works can be also found in Daniel Deronda (1876). According to Edward Dramin, “Daniel Deronda presents Eliot’s […] fullest examination of Byron” (292). Although Byron became repugnant to Eliot in her later years, she still continued to read his poetry and quote it. Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot tried to refashion the Byronic hero into the Carlylean hero in order to satisfy the expectations of Victorian society.

In fact, the Byronic hero and the Carlylean hero represent two distinct archetypes in English literature. For Carlyle the Byronic hero, who impersonated melancholy, solitariness and murky past, was false and immoral. Carlyle deplored Byron’s theatricality, his pose and self-promotion. The Carlylean hero-reformer, as described in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841), casts off the myth of the Byronic hero, and represents an exceptional individual endowed with selflessness, courage and determination, who tries to improve his time thanks to his unique intellect and commitment for general welfare.

Dickens and Byron

Young Charles Dickens, however, having grown up like Disraeli in the period of Regency and reign of George IV, was fascinated by Byron’s dandyism. Like Byron, Dickens quickly became a literary celebrity. At the outset he himself was a dandy and dressed quite flamboyantly, imitating Byron’s and Disraeli’s dress and manner. There is a touch of Byron in Dickens’s love of flamboyant attire, velvet and satin waistcoats, golden chains, tie-pins and rings. Dickens was a frequent visitor at Gore House, Kensington, a home of Lady Blessington, the fashionable author of popular novels and travel writings, who knew Byron. He may have heard her recollections of the poet. As is well known Dickens was particularly influenced by Carlyle’s idea of heroism, but he also read Byron’s poetry during different periods of his life and his opinions about the emblematic Byronic hero changed over time.

An example of a character in Dickens’s early fiction that resembles a Byronic hero is Horatio Sparkins from Sketches by Boz (1834), an aristocratic seducer, narcissistic poseur and idler. Dickens’s own associations of dandyism and Byronism are revealed in the satiric depiction of the title hero in his short story. Horatio Sparkins, according to one young lady, is an attractive young man “like Lord Byron” (Sketches, Ch. 5). However, after a short period of fascination with Byron, under the influence of Carlyle, Dickens began to look on the Byronic character more severely. In David Copperfield (1850), James Steerforth, the Byronic hero is a foil to the title character, who is presented as an earnest and reliable professional, representing middle-class values. Mario Praz has acknowledged Steerforth as a symbol of the Romantic poet in disguise, Byron in particular (127). Similarly, William R. Harvey commented:

Like the typical Byronic character, Steerforth has about him an aristocratic air compounded of his polish, his charm, his worldliness. His snobbish and indifferent attitude toward the lower classes, who lack "sensitivity," while not at odds with the Byronic contempt for the "herd" in general, is probably more reflective of Dickens's own disapproval of such a trait. The same may be true of Steerforth's scorn of work and his wilfulness. [308]

Little Em'ly presented to Steerforth by Harry Furniss. [Click on the image for more information.]

In a letter of 25 November 1840, Dickens wrote: “Leave Byron to his gloomy greatness” (Schlicke, 65). Dickens’s Byronic characters now represent anti-social, misanthropic and vain individuals. “Steerforth is an extraordinarily successful blend of villain and hero” (Harvey 308). The eccentric and smooth-tongued swindler Montague Tigg, alias Tigg Montague, suggests a parodied Byronic hero in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). Sidney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is another pathetic Byronic character, who lacks purpose in life. Dickens transforms a Byronic hero into a misfit who has wasted his life. Likewise, Eugene Wrayburn in Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1865), is a Byronic dandyish gentleman who happily undergoes moral reformation. Harvey writes: “In Wrayburn Dickens again chose to reform his Byronic hero, and before the story ends, many of Eugene’s Byronic qualities are negated” (314). Disappointed with the Byronic hero, Dickens turned to Carlyle, who exerted a profound influence on the thematic content of some of his novels, such as A Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1848), Bleak House (1852-53), and Hard Times (1854).

Byron in the Late Victorian Period

At the end of the Victorian era, Byron was still very much in the literary consciousness. The topic of Byron and Shelley’s relationship with Claire Clairmont, for example, appears in Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers (1888). While in Italy, James learned that Byron’s mistress Claire Clairmont was living in Florence towards the end of her life with her niece Paulina Clairmont and that she allegedly possessed some of Shelley's letters. James was inspired by the story of one Edward Augustus Sislbee (1826–1900), a merchant ship captain and admirer of Shelley. This captain learned that Claire Clairmont lived in Florence with her younger cousin Paula, and that she supposedly kept Shelley’s and Byron’s letters. He rented rooms from her, hoping to gain access to these letters. Unfortunately, the old lady died, and her unmarried cousin agreed to show the letters to the captain on the condition... that he marry her. However, he decided that the price for the letters was too high and quickly left Florence

A positive memory of Byron began to be revived in this later period, thanks, amongst others, to the poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who placed Byron above Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Victorian readers did not understand Byron’s revolutionary pathos. The shadow of the French Revolution still hung over them and they did not want any radical changes. Nevertheless, in the second half of the Victorian era, Byron’s liberal views on social justice were revived in the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris, and in the early twentieth century in the Fabian socialism of George Bernard Shaw. From early childhood Ruskin was influenced by the works of Byron. He recognised the revolutionary power of his poetry and wrote that “with the single exception of Shakespeare, Byron was the greatest poet that ever lived” (Hilton 38).

In these years, Oscar Wilde was Byron's most recognised follower. In many ways Byron served as a model for Wilde both in personal life and in his literary work. It should also be noted that Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde (“Speranza”) was also an ardent admirer of Byron. Both Byron and Wilde were unquestionable celebrities of their times who captured public attention due to their revolutionary views and scandalous behaviour which challenged the mores of the conservative public opinion:

Both challenged the mores of their times, both attacked conservative views while defending the rights of the less fortunate, both were generous to friends and strangers, both were Hellenists and distinguished linguists, both flaunted convention and invited censure, both wrote poetry and drama, both were married fathers whose wives and children were separated from them, both had sexual relations with young men, both left Great Britain in disgrace and both died abroad. Moreover, both men wore masks; they created personae in order chiefly to present themselves to the world, and in some measure to market themselves as well. [Quintus 2]

Wilde even imitated Byron’s look by wearing a cutaway velvet coat, leather boots and a Byronic shirt with and open collar. In De Profundis, Wilde wrote:

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope. [Project Gutenberg]

Like Byron, Wilde was the hero of hedonists. Wilde’s Dorian Gray is an outstanding late Victorian version of the Byronic hero. There is a striking similarity between Byron’s Manfred and Dorian Gray. Like the typical Byronic hero, Dorian is a seductively appealing complex, egotistic character with a murky past and a tendency to indulge in melancholy and self-destruction. However, unlike Manfred, Dorian does not possess a strong sense of guilt or remorse for his actions.

Byronic Tourism

Newstead Abbey, frontispiece to Life of Lord Byron, with His Letters and Journals, by Thomas Moore (London: John Murray, 1854), Vol. VI in the Internet Archive.

Last but not least, mention should be made of a cultural phenomenon known as “Byronic tourism” which attracted a number of Britons and foreigners in the 19th century. Soon after the poet’s death Newstead Abbey, the poet’s ancestral home, and his tomb in nearby Hucknall Torkard Church became tourist attractions, receiving a growing number of visitors. Special guide books were published about Byron’s Grand Tour and his stay on the Continent, and British as well as foreign tourists flocked to see places connected with Byron in Switzerland, Italy, Malta and Greece.

Conclusion

George Gordon Byron and his archetypical Byronic hero have left an indelible mark on Victorian literature and collective memory. The poet and his literary artefact were admired and abhorred, praised and blamed throughout the 19th century in England. In spite of popular adoration, canonical Victorian writers tended to either criticise or reform the Byronic hero. Nevertheless, Byron’s earthly afterlife loomed large in Victorian public consciousness. Fragments of his poems reprinted in anthologies, school manuals and even travel guides gave a renewed currency to his work in line with Victorian tastes.

Links to Related Material

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Created 14 January 2024