Selected Poems (5 page)
1819 | Mazeppa Harold’s Pilgrimage Wordsworth’s ‘Peterloo massacre’ in August; Six Acts passed in December; birth of Queen Victoria. Shelley writes |
1820 | Byron and Allegra live with Teresa and her husband; Byron’s and Teresa’s liaison continues. Byron becomes involved in the Italian Revolution against Austrian rule (the Carbonari movement) through Teresa’s brother. Teresa is officially separated from her husband in July and goes to live with her father; Byron visits frequently. Sends Allegra to live in the country. Working on Death of George III; the Regent becomes George IV. Dissolution of Parliament, Cato Street Conspiracy in England. Queen Caroline tried for adultery; Byron involved in seeking Italian witnesses for her. Royalist reactions throughout Europe; revolution in Spain and Portugal. Murray publishes an eight-volume edition of Byron’s poems (1818–20). Shelley’s |
1821 | Byron begins his journal. The Gambas (Teresa’s family) are expelled from Romagna in July and banished to Pisa; Byron and the Gambas join the Shelleys and others of the ‘Pisan circle’ by November. Allegra is sent to a convent school. Deaths of Napoleon, Queen Caroline and Keats (in Rome, February); Shelley’s Greek War of Liberation (from the Ottoman Empire) begins. |
1822 | Byron publishes Allegra dies of typhus in April; Lady Noel, Annabella’s mother, dies; Byron takes the name ‘Noel Byron’ and shares the estate, nearly doubling his income. Shelley leaves for Lerici in April, drowns in a boating accident in July. Byron, Mary Shelley and the Hunts move to Genoa in September. Friction with the Hunts. Shelley’s |
1823 | The Byron is elected a member of the Greek Committee in London; quarrels with the Hunts and Mary Shelley; meets Countess Blessington; becomes involved in the Revolution and sails for Greece in July, arriving at Missolonghi at the end of the year; agrees to lend the Greek Government £4,000. Mary Shelley’s France and Spain at war. |
1824 | Byron in Greece at Missolonghi, financing the army. Writes verses on thirty-sixth birthday. The Revolution is in disarray. Byron’s health deteriorates, and he dies at Missolonghi in April; his body is taken to England, where he is buried in July, with his ancestors near Newstead, having been refused interment at Westminster Abbey. His memoirs are destroyed. Correspondence of Lord Byron with a Friend |
1825 | Dallas’s |
1826 | Don Juan |
1828 | Leigh Hunt’s |
1830 | Thomas Moore’s |
1831 | Thomas Macaulay’s extensive review of Moore’s |
1832–3 | 3 |
1832–4 | John Murray publishes a seventeen-volume edition of |
FURTHER READING
THE ROMANTIC ERA
Brown, Marshall (ed.),
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
, Vol. 5:
Romanticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Butler, Marilyn,
Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Gaull, Marilyn,
English Romanticism, The Human Context
(Norton, 1988).
Renwick, W. L.,
English Literature: 1789–1815
, and Ian Jack,
English Literature: 1815–1832
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Both in John Buxton and Norman Davis (eds.),
Oxford History of English Literature
.
Wolfson, Susan, and Peter Manning (eds.),
The Romantics and Their Contemporaries,
Vol. 2a of David Damrosch (ed.),
The Longman Anthology of British Literature,
2nd edn (New York: Longman Publishers, 2003, 3rd edition, 2006).
BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS
Blessington, Lady,
Conversations of Lord Byron
(1834), ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). In Genoa, Italy, in 1823, just before he left for Greece.
Eisler, Benita,
Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). Sensationalizing.
Franklin, Caroline,
Byron: A Literary Life
(London: Palgrave, 2000). The forceful personality set amid readers’ reactions, social and historical situations (travel, theatre culture, expatriatism, press censorship and libel trials).
Garrett, Martin,
George Gordon, Lord Byron
, in the British Library Writers’ Lives series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Short, readable narration, beautiful illustrations.
Grosskurth, Phyllis,
Byron: The Flawed Angel
(Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Psychoanalytic.
Hunt, Leigh,
Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries
. (London: Henry Colburn, 1828). By one who knew him for the last ten years of his life – gossipy, biased, controversial.
Lovell, Jr., Ernest J. (ed.),
His Very Self and Voice
:
Collected Conversations of Lord Byron
(New York and London: Macmillan, 1954). A compendium from a range of sources.
MacCarthy, Fiona,
Byron
:
Life and Legend
(London: John Murray, 2002). Some new material; gorgeous plates.
Marchand, Leslie A.,
Byron: A Biography,
3 vols., (New York/ London: Knopf, 1957/John Murray, 1958). Detailed chronology; abridged and revised in one volume as
Byron: A Portrait,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
Medwin, Thomas,
Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with His Lordship at Pisa, in the Years 1821 and 1822
(1824); ed. Ernest, J. Lovell Jr. (Princeton: Princeton: University Press, 1966). The first of this genre.
Moore, Thomas,
Letters and Journals of Lord Byron With Notices of His Life,
2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1830); the first official biography, much reprinted in the nineteenth century. Online at:
Click here
Page, Norman (ed.),
Byron: Interviews and Recollections
(New York: Humanities Press, 1985).
Quennell, Peter,
Byron: The Years of Fame and Byron in Italy
(New York: Viking Press 1935 and 1941)
Trelawny, Edward G.,
Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron
(1858; new edn, 1878), ed. J. E. Morpurgo (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952). A rakish acquaintance.
EDITIONS OF POETRY, LETTERS AND PROSE
Coleridge, Ernest Hartley (ed.),
The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry
, 7 vols. (London: John Murray, 1898–1904); Prothero, Rowland E. (ed.),
The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals
, 6 vols.
(London: John Murray, 1898–1904). Though the transcriptions of the latter have been superseded by Leslie Marchand’s edition, the notes remain invaluable.
McGann, Jerome J. (ed.),
Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works,
7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93). Vol. VI (drama), co-edited with Barry Weller. See also his
Byron
, one-volume selection of poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). A standard edition.
Marchand, Leslie A. (ed.),
Byron’s Letters and Journals
, 12 vols. (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press/John Murray, 1973–82). In one volume, as
Selected Letters and Journals
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). The standard edition for critical and scholarly citation.
Nicholson, Andrew (ed.),
Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). The standard edition.
Page, Frederick (ed.),
Byron: Poetical Works
, revised John Jump, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Complete, one volume; a standard edition.
Reiman, Donald H. (gen. ed.),
Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics
(New York and London: Garland, 1985– ). Photographic plates, transcriptions, notes and introductions: several volumes on Byron’s works. Individual volumes ed. T. A. J. Burnett, Peter Cochran, Cheryl Guiliano, David Erdman and David Worrall, Alice Levine and Jerome McGann, and Andrew Nicholson.
Steffan, T. G., E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt (eds.),
Don Juan
(London: Penguin Classics, 1986; 2004). A standard edition.
