Acquisitions (91): Lord Byron

Lady Caroline Lamb: Glenarvon (1816)

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Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828)

Lady Caroline Lamb: Glenarvon (1816)
[The Book Exchange, Glen Eden - 27/4/2023]:

Lady Caroline Lamb. Glenarvon. 1816. Ed. Deborah Lutz. Valancourt Classics. Kansas City, Missouri: Valancourt Books, 2007.

Robert Bolt, dir. & writ. Lady Caroline Lamb (1972)

'Mad, bad, and dangerous to know ...'

I wish I could speak enthusiastically about the film Lady Caroline Lamb, which I saw many years ago on TV - shortly after watching a very interesting 'making of' documentary, which concentrated mainly on Robert Bolt's difficulties in transitioning from David Lean's favourite scriptwriter to directing a movie of his own.

Having previewed so many vignettes and set-pieces from it already, I'd expected something a little more arresting than the old-fashioned melodrama Bolt had actually put together. It reminded me quite a bit of Vivien Leigh's antics in Lady Hamilton - aka That Hamilton Woman - (1941), but at least the makers of that Olivier / Leigh star vehicle had the exigencies of wartime propaganda as an excuse.

Casting his wife, Sarah Miles, in the leading role was one problem. She was actually pretty good in Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1970), but given the almost universal panning that film got on its first release, that wasn't exactly a strong recommendation. Richard Chamberlain was definitely miscast as Lord Byron. All in all, what with one thing and another, David Lean it wasn't - let alone a rival to Bolt's classic A Man for All Seasons.

But what about the real Lady Caroline Lamb? I've been reading a lot of Lord Byron's letters and other miscellaneous writings recently, and their famous affair was pretty front and centre in his correspondence for a couple of years after the return from his first grand tour, Childe Harold in hand.

Here, to start with, is a brief bibliography of her published writings:

Lady Caroline Lamb: Glenarvon (1816)

1. Glenarvon (1816)
2. [as Byron] "A New Canto" (1819)
3. Graham Hamilton (1822)
4. Ada Reis (1823)
5. Penruddock (1823)
6. The Works of Lady Caroline Lamb. Ed. Paul Douglass & Leigh Wetherall Dickson (2009)
   1. Glenarvon (1816)
   2. Graham Hamilton (1822) and Poems
   3. Ada Reis, A Tale (1823)
7. The Whole Disgraceful Truth: Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb. Ed. Paul Douglass (2006)

Secondary:


8. Cecil, Lord David. Melbourne: The Young Melbourne and Lord M in One Volume. 1939 & 1954. London: The Reprint Society, 1955.
9. Douglass, Paul. Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography (2004)
10. Fraser, Antonia. Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (2023)

Antonia Fraser: Lady Caroline Lamb (2023)

As you can see, she was not quite the society flibbertigibbet you might have expected. The first novel - the only one most people read - was written off at the time as a kind of Regency version of revenge-porn, but the fact that she went on to write three more, as well as a fairly convincing parody of Byron's serial-poem Don Juan, does show a certain seriousness as a writer.

Mind you, it is the connection to Byron which continues to make her memorable. Her husband, Lord Melbourne, achieved a kind of late fame as Queen Victoria's first - and probably favourite - Prime Minister, the one who gave her the grounding in English parliamentary politics indispensable to a constitutional monarch. He never remarried after Lady Caroline's death in 1828, though the two had separated three years before that. It's been said that she never really recovered from the news of Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824.

Julian Farino, dir.: Byron (2003)

Lady Caroline was portrayed by Irish actress Camilla Power in the two-part BBC drama Byron, alongside Jonny Lee Miller in the title role, and Vanessa Redgrave as her conniving mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne.

Camilla Power (1976- )

Does she make a better job of the role than Sarah Miles? Power did have the advantage of not having had to dress up in blackface, but then (strangely enough) that was not considered offensive by most people at the time of the original film, some fifty years ago now.

Sarah Miles (1941- )

All in all, it's a pity that Byron is still better known for his affairs of the heart than for the poetic revolution for which he was at least partially responsible: the growth of the "egotistical sublime" - as John Keats called it - in Romantic literature. That, and his brief friendship with Percy and Mary Shelley and their entourage during (and after) the famous "haunted summer" of 1816: the summer of Frankenstein.

I discussed some of the screen portrayals of this relationship in the section called "Byron-'n'-Shelley-'n'-Mary-Shelley films" in my blogpost on Movies about Writers a few years ago. I went a little further into the subject in a post on Mary Shelley herself a couple of years later.

It's hard to imagine writers such as Hölderlin, Hugo, Kleist, Lermontov, Musset, Pushkin, Vigny - even Goethe himself - developing in quite the way they did without the example of the fateful Lord Byron. He may have seen himself more as a follower of such eighteenth century satirists as Pope and Swift, but the age persisted in regarding him as something quite new: more sinister and alluring by far - the literary embodiment of Bonapartism.

Leslie Marchand, ed.: Byron's Letters and Journals (1974-1994)

This is not really the main impression given by his letters, though. They're surprisingly genial and approachable. He does a good deal of apologising for unintended slights, and is seen far more often in the role of peacemaker than touchy, "Byronic" aristocrat.

His favourite correspondents seem to be other poets like Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers, as well as cynical old ladies such as Lady Wellesley, Lady Caroline's mother-in-law. There are, of course, a lot of business letters which give one the general impression that he was pretty much always on his uppers, but he seems to contrive to stay cheerful most of the time.

I'd say, in fact, that these occasional writings of his are far more in tune with his late, discursive masterpiece Don Juan than in the more affected mode of Childe Harold and its immediate successors.

W. H. Auden & Louis MacNeice: Letters from Iceland (1937)

Perhaps W. H. Auden says it best, in "Letter to Lord Byron", one of the various epistolary bits and pieces - including an account of a pony trek around Iceland in the company of a group of English schoolgirls - that go to make up his and Louis MacNeice's delightful joint travel book:

Excuse, my lord, the liberty I take
In thus addressing you. I know that you
Will pay the price of authorship and make
The allowances an author has to do.
A poet’s fan-mail will be nothing new.
And then a lord — Good Lord, you must be peppered,
Like Gary Cooper, Coughlin, or Dick Sheppard,

With notes from perfect strangers starting, ‘Sir,
I liked your lyrics, but Childe Harold’s trash,’
‘My daughter writes, should I encourage her?’
Sometimes containing frank demands for cash,
Sometimes sly hints at a platonic pash,
And sometimes, though I think this rather crude,
The correspondent’s photo in the nude.

... So if ostensibly I write to you
To chat about your poetry or mine,
There’s many other reasons: though it’s true
That I have, at the age of twenty-nine
Just read Don Juan and I found it fine.
I read it on the boat to Reykjavik
Except when eating or asleep or sick.

So much for the preamble. This frame-narrative serves mostly as a pretext for discursive (and very amusing) autobiographical reminiscences on Auden's part, but he does provide some analysis of Byron himself as well:

I like your muse because she’s gay and witty,
Because she’s neither prostitute nor frump,
The daughter of a European City,
And country houses long before the slump;
I like her voice that does not make me jump:
And you I find sympatisch, a good townee,
Neither a preacher, ninny, bore, nor Brownie.

A poet, swimmer, peer, and man of action,
- It beats Roy Campbell’s record by a mile -
You offer every possible attraction.
By looking into your poetic style,
And love-life on the chance that both were vile,
Several have earned a decent livelihood,
Whose lives were uncreative but were good.

You’ve had your packet from the critics, though:
They grant you warmth of heart, but at your head
Their moral and aesthetic brickbats throw.
A ‘vulgar genius’ so George Eliot said,
Which doesn’t matter as George Eliot’s dead,
But T. S. Eliot, I am sad to find,
Damns you with: ‘an uninteresting mind’.

A statement which I must say I’m ashamed at;
A poet must be judged by his intention,
And serious thought you never said you aimed at.
I think a serious critic ought to mention
That one verse style was really your invention,
A style whose meaning does not need a spanner,
You are the master of the airy manner.

That's it exactly: the quintessence of the genuine Byronic style (rather than the ersatz, super-serious version which swept the continent after his early, unfortunate demise): "the airy manner":

By all means let us touch our humble caps to
La poésie pure, the epic narrative;
But comedy shall get its round of claps, too.
According to his powers, each may give;
Only on varied diet can we live.
The pious fable and the dirty story
Share in the total literary glory.

There’s every mode of singing robe in stock,
From Shakespeare’s gorgeous fur coat, Spenser’s muff
Or Dryden’s lounge suit to my cotton frock,
And Wordsworth’s Harris tweed with leathern cuff.
Firbank, I think, wore just a just-enough;
I fancy Whitman in a reach-me-down,
But you, like Sherlock, in a dressing-gown.

The poem sweeps to a triumphant close with the following vision of the poet's future state:

I hope this reaches you in your abode,
This letter that’s already far too long,
Just like the Prelude or the Great North Road;
But here I end my conversational song.
I hope you don’t think mail from strangers wrong.
As to its length, I tell myself you’ll need it,
You’ve all eternity in which to read it.

Let's hope that is how it really is for Byron, wrapped in a somewhat louche silk dressing-gown, drinking his morning chocolate, and chuckling over this latest piece of correspondence to reach him in eternity ...

Henry James Richter: Byron and his Muse (1840)

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Thomas Phillips: Lord Byron (1813)

George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron
(1788-1824)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Poetry:


1. Hours of Idleness (1807)
2. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
3. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I & II (1812)
4. The Giaour (1813)
5. The Bride of Abydos (1813)
6. The Corsair (1814)
7. Lara, A Tale (1814)
8. Hebrew Melodies (1815)
9. The Siege of Corinth (1816)
10. Parisina (1816)
11. The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)
12. The Dream (1816)
13. Prometheus (1816)
14. Darkness (1816)
15. Manfred (1817)
16. The Lament of Tasso (1817)
17. Beppo (1818)
18. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos III & IV (1818)
19. Don Juan (1819–1824)
    • Don Juan. Ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, & W. W. Pratt. 1973. Penguin English Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
    • Don Juan. Ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, & W. W. Pratt. Penguin English Poets. 1973. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.
20. Mazeppa (1819)
21. The Prophecy of Dante (1819)
22. Marino Faliero (1820)
23. Sardanapalus (1821)
24. The Two Foscari (1821)
25. Cain (1821)
26. The Vision of Judgment (1821)
27. Heaven and Earth (1821)
28. Werner (1822)
29. The Age of Bronze (1823)
30. The Island (1823)
31. The Deformed Transformed (1824)
32. The Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page. Oxford Standard Authors (1904)
    • The Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page. 1904. Rev. ed. 1945. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
33. The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Jerome J. McGann & Barry Weller. 7 vols. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-1993.
    1. Poems 1807-1812: Hours of Idleness; English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; Hints from Horace. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1980)
       • The Complete Poetical Works. Volume 1. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
    2. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 1812-1818. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1980)
    3. Poems 1813-1816: The Giaour; The Bride Of Abydos; The Corsair; Lara; Hebrew Melodies; The Siege of Corinth. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1981)
    4. Poems 1816-1820: Manfred; Beppo; Mazeppa; Morgante Maggiore. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1986)
    5. Don Juan. 1819-1824. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1986)
    6. Poems & Plays 1821-1822: The Two Foscari; Sardanapalus; Cain: A Mystery; The Deformed Transformed. Ed. Jerome J. McGann & Barry Weller (1991)
    7. Poems 1823-1824: The Age of Bronze; The Island; Appendices & Indexes. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1993)

Prose:


34. Letters and Journals. Ed. Thomas Moore. 2 vols (1830)
35. Selections from Poetry, Letters and Journals. Ed. Peter Quennell. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1949.
36. Byron's Letters and Journals: The Complete and Unexpurgated Text of All the Letters Available in Manuscript and the Full Printed Version of All Others. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. London: John Murray / Harvard University: Belknap Press, 1973-94.
    1. ‘In my hot youth’ - Vol. 1: 1798-1810. 1973. London: John Murray, 1974.
    2. ‘Famous in my time’ - Vol. 2: 1810-1812. 1973. London: John Murray, 1974.
    3. ‘Alas! the love of Women!’ - Vol. 3: 1813-1814. London: John Murray, 1974.
    4. ‘Wedlock’s the devil’ - Vol. 4: 1814-1815. London: John Murray, 1975.
    5. ‘So late into the night’ - Vol. 5: 1816-1817. London: John Murray, 1976.
    6. ‘The flesh is frail’ - Vol. 6: 1818-1819. London: John Murray, 1976.
    7. ‘Between two worlds’ - Vol. 7: 1820. London: John Murray, 1977.
    8. ‘Born for opposition’ - Vol. 8: 1821. London: John Murray, 1978.
    9. ‘In the wind’s eye’ - Vol. 9: 1821-1822. London: John Murray, 1979.
    10. ‘A heart for every fate’ - Vol. 10: 1822-1823. London: John Murray, 1980.
    11. ‘For freedom’s battle’ - Vol. 11: 1823-1824. London: John Murray, 1981.
    12. ‘The Trouble of an Index’ - Vol. 12: Anthology of Memorable Passages and Index to the Eleven Volumes. London: John Murray, 1982.
    13. ‘What comes uppermost’ - Vol. 13: Supplementary Materials. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. London: John Murray / Harvard University: Belknap Press, 1994.
37. Selected Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 1982. London: Picador Classics, 1988.
38. The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Ed. Andrew Nicholson. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Secondary:


39. Longford, Elizabeth. Byron’s Greece. Photographs by Jorge Lewinski. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1975.
40. Longford, Elizabeth. Byron. 1976. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1978.
41. O'Brien, Edna. Byron in Love. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2009.
42. Origo, Iris. The Last Attachment: the Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, as Told in Their Unpublished Letters and Other Family Papers. 1949. The Fontana Library. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1962.
43. Quennell, Peter. Byron: The Years of Fame / Byron in Italy. 1935, 1941. Rev. ed. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1974.

Edna O'Brien: Byron in Love (2009)

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• category - English Poetry (pre-1900): Nineteenth Century

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