Lord Byron's 'Don Juan'

November 20, 2018November 20, 2018

England in 1819–20

A section of the preface to my Annotated Cantos I & II (with audio narration) planned for the bi-centenary of Don Juan in 2019.

The first two cantos of Don Juan were published in July, 1819, at the start of an 18-month period of political upheaval that led, eventually, to constitutional reform in Britain.

In some ways, these two years marked the end of the Regency society that once lionised Byron, but that he had fled three years earlier. Now, popular outrage erupted at the repressive and corrupt Liverpool government and at the adulterous, undignified Prince Regent (soon to be George IV) who sought a hypocritical bill of “Pains and Penalties” from Parliament to deny his estranged wife Caroline a crown.

A satyrical print published by the radical printer (pornographer and pirate of *Don Juan*), William Benbow, in December 1820. It shows a gouty George IV, horned and with wings which are spread to protect his supporters holding a bottle labeled Peoples Tears, squatting with his mistress Lady Conyngham (“Care-away Cunningham”). In the background on the left the cavalry who charged at Peterloo, at centre-top Britannia hides her face in shame, and on the right, beneath gathering storm-clouds “The People”.

Labor unrest in the industrial Midlands and north of England, unemployment among former soldiers, and deepening rural poverty raised alarming prospects of revolt and even revolution in England. The old “jacobin” Jeremy Bentham waged a popular campaign against waste and corruption in government and for universal (male) suffrage. The radical publisher William Cobbett — whose twopenny Political Register had a circulation of 40,000 when he fled to the United States in 1817 — returned in 1819 to begin his rural rides campaign in which he condoned machine breaking and hay-rick burning. The general outcry in the British press and at many popular meetings against the “Peterloo Massacre” had frightened the Cabinet into over-reaction, suppressing public meetings and civil rights.

So nervous were the authorities — and so sensitive to criticism — that in mid-December 1819, even the “reactionary chauvinist” Cam Hobhouse was arrested on the order of Parliament for publishing a brochure that the Commons declared a breech of parliamentary privilege and spent ten weeks in Newgate prison. Still, his release from jail was a “get into Parliament” card since the sentence all but guaranteed his success at the next ballot for the seat of Westminster.

A satire (George Cruikshank) on the defeat of Hobhouse by Lamb at the Westminster Election. The Rump, or remnant of Reformers, is represented by the hind-quarters of a cart-horse, with its hoofs in the air, carried on a knacker's cart, the front of which is formed by a guillotine. The procession is headed by Mister John Ketch, Esqr., the hangman. — A satire (George Cruikshank) on the defeat of Hobhouse by Lamb at the Westminster Election. The Rump, or remnant of Reformers, is represented by the hind-quarters of a cart-horse, with its hoofs in the air, carried on a knacker’s cart, the front of which is formed by a guillotine. The procession is headed by Mister John Ketch, Esqr., the hangman. [**Click for a larger version**]

Fears — or, for some, hopes — that government institutions were under attack were apparently confirmed when, in February, 1820, the Bow Street Runners arrested thirteen so-called “Cato Street Conspirators” at a small stables in central London. They were plotting to blow up the Liverpool Cabinet at a dinner meeting in Grosvenor Square, take over the Royal Exchange and empty the coffers of the Bank of England into the hands of the poor.

But the services of the Liverpool government had, in fact, known of the plot for months. A government spy had joined, and even became deputy-leader of, the group. Although the Court disallowed the spy’s testimony in their trial, the testimony of two of the conspirators against the others sent five of them to a gruesome and well-attended public execution for treason. Their posthumous beheading was roundly booed. The serially-adulterous Duke of Wellington mentioned to one of his girlfriends an unlikely report that Hobhouse — in jail when the plot was discovered — had been offered the leadership of the country by the conspirators, should their plot have succeeded, and had accepted.¹

Then the affair of Queen Caroline rivetted public attention for four months from her retun to England in July 1820 — seeking coronation as Queen when the Prince Regent assumed his father’s crown — through the failure, in Parliament in November, of King George IV’s attempt to divorce her on the grounds of adultery. Despite plausible evidence of Caroline’s affair with her Italian ‘Secretary’, many in both the middle and working classes were shocked by the King’s hypocrisy and ‘ungentlemanly’ behaviour to his wife.² Letters, pamphlets, cartoons, public demonstrations mocking the King and participants in the Parliamentary drama demonstrated overwhelming disapproval of, and embarrassment at, the King’s extravagant, selfish and dissolute behaviour. Middle-class women, too, formed large public associations that issued “Loyal Addresses” supporting the Queen and received replies from her confirming her sense of injury to her role as a mother and wife.³

The British middle class did not sustain its support for the Queen after the Government allowed the prosecution to lapse: her affairs, too, were an embarrassment. By good fortune or ‘genius’ the British assimilated the turmoil without any fundamental rifts in society and went about the necessary political reforms.⁴ Still, the attachment to “family values” of domesticity and propriety that lay behind the outcry over the Caroline affair was sustained into the Victorian age that followed.

In the 1820s the expanding middle-class of a relatively wealthy Britain sent their children to grammar schools that were now broadening their curriculum away from classic literature toward more mundane and commercially useful studies with the support and promotion of reform-minded luminaries such as J.S.Mill, Francis Place and Jeremy Bentham. Thomas Arnold (Matthew’s father) began a program to lift the moral tone and educational standards of the public schools, too, with the aim of producing “Christian Gentleman” such as the squeaky, earnest “Tom Brown”.

The new “proprietors” disapproved of the raucous, liberal, even libertine manners and tastes of the late 18^th century and the early Regency, exemplified by some of the authors whom Byron cited in his defence of his alleged ‘excesses’. The decade of the 1820s saw the emergence of what we now think of as Victorian taste: overt propriety in language and behaviour; respect for commerce; sentimental taste for uplifting or at least morally-didactic art and literature, and; pious adherence to established institutions such as the Monarchy and (except for the troublesome Irish) the Church.

November 14, 2018November 20, 2018

Matthew Arnold on Byron

The young Matthew Arnold. A touch ‘byronian’?

Another section of the preface to my Annotated Cantos I & II (with audio narration) planned for the bi-centenary of Don Juan in 2019

The popularity of Byron’s poetry even today owes much to an influential 1881 edition of selected poems edited by Matthew Arnold, poet and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

Almost six decades after Byron’s death, Arnold rescued his reputation from the stuffy disapproval of mid-Victorian taste, praising the powerful, sincere personality that his works reveal and placing him at the forefront of the romantic poets of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Still, Arnold’s preface to his edition — which never once mentions Don Juan — faults Byron for a lack of emotional insight and “seriousness”.

Arnold declared that Byron had not been properly appreciated by the Victorian public: his “puissant personality… inevitably shattered [itself] to pieces against the huge, black, cloud-topped, interminable precipice of British Philistinism”.

Still, he thought Byron “was eminent only by his genius, only by his inborn force and fire; he had not the intellectual equipment of a supreme modern poet”. His main fault, Arnold argued (quoting Goethe) is that Byron “is quite too much in the dark” about himself, and “the moment he begins to reflect, he is a child”. He does not, Arnold says, have the moral intelligence to “lead us from the past to the future”. In this, Byron is inferior to Wordsworth who

… has an insight into permanent sources of joy and consolation for mankind which Byron has not ; his poetry gives us more which we may rest upon than Byron’s, more — which we can rest upon now, and which men may rest upon always.

Arnold decided that he would be improving Byron’s fame to make only selections from “the mass of poetry he poured forth”. He included 15 brief passages from Don Juan to which he gave suggestive abstract titles.

He explained that this editorial approach reflected his treatment of Wordsworth in an earlier volume and because “he too gains, I think, by being so presented”. He dismissed the contrary argument put by Swinburne that Byron “can only be judged or appreciated in the mass the greatest of his works was his whole work taken together”.

I question whether by reading everything which he gives us we are so likely to acquire an admiring sense even of his variety and abundance, as by reading what he gives us at his happier moments.

But it does not follow — as Arnold implies — that Byron should be read only in selection. After all, if literature were reduced to the “Cliff Notes” versions there would be little point in having the “Notes” at all. Alfred Austin — a journalist, critic and unhappy “Poet Laureate” who was a contemporary of Arnold — mocked the idea:

Mr. Arnold has done Byron injustice by making selections from his works, and asserting that selections are better than the whole of the works from which they are selected. You might as well select from a mountain. (From “Wordsworth and Byron” in the Quarterly Review, Vol 154, 1882)

Still, Arnold’s choice prevailed: his approach, backed by a new “convenient” edition arbitrated the future for Byron’s fame. Although the volume of academic Byroniana has swelled journals and library stacks around the world, his greatest work has never really recovered the popularity it had when it first appeared or the readership it deserves. Don Juan became inacessibly long and mostly unread.

November 5, 2018November 20, 2018

The Comet and the Bomb

[This is a draft of the first parts of an introduction to the Annotated Cantos I & II that I will publish in the next few months — before the 200^th anniversary of their first publication — accompanied by a reading of both Cantos. Your comments and suggestions are welcome]

“Nothing so difficult as a beginning” Don Juan, III, 1

The Comet

On 1 July, 1819 a comet brighter than all but a handful of stars — more visible in the early decades of the Nineteeth Century, before electric, or even widespread gas street illumination — appeared in the skies of Europe and North America. John Keats, among others, reported seeing it. The Morning Post gushed (14 July, 1819)

“… All the stars emitted their brightest lustre, the Comet moved with superior glory among them all, ‘apparent queen’ with its tiara of light.”.

There was no place for superstition in a century when — or in a country where — science, technology and art took some of their greatest leaps. Still, any fears that the Comet’s appearance might herald trouble in the state or momentous events would have been entirely justified. In the years 1819 and 1820, the United Kingdom narrowly skirted social disaster and barely avoided avoided a constitutional one — certainly rebellion, perhaps revolution. Ironically, too, an “apparent queen”, more earthy than celestial, held a starring role in the drama.

On the same page as its report of the Comet, the Post carried news of the unpopular Prince Regent’s speech at the close of the Parliamentary session. It was filled with Crown and Government menace aimed at popular unrest and the — mostly bourgeois — demand for enfranchisement, legal reform and tax relief.

His Royal Highness has naturally observed with great concern the efforts which have been lately made in some of the manufacturing districts to take advantage of local distress to create a spirit of disaffection to the institutions and Government of the country. Anxious to promote the welfare and prosperity of all classes of his Majesty’s subjects… his Royal Highness assures us of his wise, judicious , and manly determination, to employ for that purpose the power entrusted to him by law. He relies at the same time on the patriotism of Members, and has no doubt that one their return to their respective counties they will zealously coöperate with the Magistracy in defeating “the machinations of those whose projects, if successful, would only aggravate the evils they profess to remedy, and who, under the pretence of Reform, have really no other object but the subversion of our happy Constitution.” (The Morning Post, 12 July, 1819)

Unrest was broad and, in some places, ran deep. The Kingdom had seen explosive population growth, faster than anywhere in Europe: numbers doubled to 17 million in the first fifty years of the century with a peak growth rate in the decade to 1821 of 16 percent. It must have strained every private resource. Two fifths of the population was under fifteen years of age: mostly dependent and in need of education, nutrition, clothing, housing and care. Poor harvests and distribution disrupted by the long war led to serious food shortages in some places; madwe worse by policy error and bad luck. There had been a fall in seasonal temperatures made worse by volcanic explosions on the other side of the globe: 1816 was known as the “year without a summer” across Europe. Corrupt policies such as the Corn Laws that prohibited imports of price-competitive grain made the food supply worse.

Twenty years of war had wreaked a dreaful toll on UK families: the estimated death toll of 210,000 soldiers and sailors was comparable to the losses of The Great War in 1914–18. Then, the rapid demobilisation of the armed-forces — the largest in the UK’s history up to that point — contributed to widespread unemployment, family disruption and outbreaks of epidemic disease. The wars also left England with unprecedented tax levels (23 per cent of GDP) and a huge national debt. The Tory government was compelled by Parliament to abolish Pitt’s income tax that had supported the fighting and Castlereagh’s generous cash handouts to reactionary European allies. But that only pushed direct taxes higher, hitting hardest those on the lowest incomes.

Gillarays cartoon of an inebriated George, Prince Regent

“The Prince Regent” (George Cruickshank) — drunken and dissolute

The “spirit of disaffection” to which the Prince euphemistically referred had been evident in the riots of the so-called “Luddites” — mill workers whose grievances related to poor wages and poor management rather than to new technology — six of whom had been hanged in June 1816 (Byron’s only noteable speech in Parliament was a rather purple defense of the ‘machine breakers’). The repression halted the Luddites but fomented a wider movement that the radical William Cobbett would exploit in his ‘rural rides’.

Then in November and December of 1816 there were two public meetings at Spa Fields in London to work-up a petition to the Prince Regent for universal male suffrage and secret ballots. Some of the speakers at the second meeting led the crowd on a march to the Royal Exchange where leaders were arrested and charged with Treason. They were acquitted when the governments’ informer among the leaders of the march turned out to be a government agent. Still, Parliament reacted by suspending Habeas Corpus — a legal freedom protecting against arbitrary arrest — and banning meetings of more than 50 people for a year.

Still the industrial poor would not shut-up. In 1817, a “March of the Blanketeers” from Manchester to London saw scores of legally-small groups set out bearing a blanket on their back to demand the Prince Regent grant them relief from poverty wages. In June that same year there was a ‘rising’ of textile workers in Pentrich, near Notingham where. Once again, a government agent was identified as a provocateur. The industrial and piece-workers of Ireland, known by their mark as ‘Ribboneers’ were also organizing marches and protests. In this combustible climate, the Prince’s obtuse threats against constitutional reform were incendiary.

Just weeks after his speech, the Prince’s threats were given murderous effect at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester. On August 16, 1819, the Magistrates whom the Regent had ordered to his front line, foolishly sent an amateur cavalry of yeomen, used for home defense and public order, to arrest a popular speaker at a Reform meeting. In their charge, the yomen killed eleven and caused general panic. The “Peterloo Massacre” — a mocking reference to the bloody defeat of Napoleon — turned protest into near revolt in the North and vigorous protest in the South from the reform-minded middle class as well as the working class.

Lord Liverpool’s Tory government, assailed by both the radical and main-stream press for the bungling repression of the Manchester magistrates, reacted with alarm to the alleged ‘riots’ of constitutional reformers and disaffected workers. Castlereagh, on behalf of the government, secured the passage of the quasi-tyrannical “Six Acts” whose preamble declared that “every meeting for radical reform is an overt act of treasonable conspiracy against the King and his government”. Among other outrages to liberty, the laws banned “seditious” public meetings, “blasphemous and seditious libels” and increased the taxes on printed materials, so that any printed pamphet priced at less than 6 pence would be taxed an additional 4 pence.

The Bomb

It might seem this was not the best time for the most prestigious of Tory publishers, John Murray, to release a poem with almost as much visibility as the Comet that, in the view of contemporary readers, mocked the moral pretensions of the Regency Establishment — both Government and Church.

Yet that was what Murray chose to do — taking a barely-calculable risk — by publishing Cantos I & II of Byron’s Don Juan in mid-July, 1819. He portrayed it, accurately, as the publishing equivalent of crossing the Rubicon or, maybe, lobbing an artillery shell into Westminster. On the day after it appeared on booksellers’ shelves he wrote to his exiled author:

“La Sort est jetté – Don Juan was published yesterday, and having fired the Bomb – here I am out of the way of its explosion – its publication has excited a very great degree of interest – public <opinion ha> expectation having risen up like the surrounding boats on the Thames when a first rate is struck from its Stocks” (Murray to Byron, July 16, 1819. ‘La Sort est jetté’ [correctly, ‘le sort en est jetté’] means ‘the die is cast’, as in a gambling game. According to one of Caesar’s companions this is roughly what he said, quoting the Greek playwright Menander, when he crossed the Rubicon river into Italy in 49 BCE. In both cases it refers to an action whose outcome is ‘up-in-the-air’. By a ‘first rate.. struck from its stocks’ Murray mean the launch of a capital ship).

Well of course public expectation had risen up… Murray had deliberately stirred it. His caution related to the impact of some parts of the poem on his author’s reputation (Murray’s capital, too). But anonymous publication was hiding Byron and his publishing business “in the open”. Byron’s authorship would be an open secret: he had told Byron in March that there were “the greatest expectations” about Don Juan. Indeed, Murray had been prompting these expectation for at least two weeks before the book’s appearance with a series of promiment and mysterious advertisements in newspapers such as the Morning Post and The London Times. Rather like the teasing press announcements we see today from technology companies in advance of their “Keynote” presentations of new gadgets, Murray’s publicity said not much, but plenty. Byron’s friend from university days, Cam Hobhouse, described the campaign in a letter to Byron on the day Don Juan it appeared.

“It was announced thus – Don Juan.. to morrow. There’s a way for you!! To morrow The Comet. to morrow! Mr Murray managed so well that Mazeppa was taken for Don Juan and greadily bought up like “that abominable book the scandalous magazine”. But Don Juan tomorrow, undeceived those who thought they had got their pennyworth to day –“ (Hobhouse to Byron on the morning of publication, 15 July, 1819)

Here, for example, is the top of the front page of The Morning Post of Monday 12 July, 1819.

“On Thursday, DON JUAN. — Sold by all Booksellers”

Exploiting this clever campaign of 19^th Century viral advertising, Murray issued 1500 copies of Cantos I and II “anonymously” on 15 July, 1819 in a large (Quarto sized: about 12 inches by 10 inches), relatively expensive volume without the name of the publisher or the author.

In the heated polticial context of mid-1819, the anonymity of the book was itself a draw:

“This will make our wiseacres think that there is poison for King Queen & Dauphin in every page and will irritate public pruriency to a complete priapism” (Hobhouse to Byron, 15 July, 1819)

Murray was canny enough to see that the risk of scandal (or worse) could be turned to his own commercial advantage. The repressive Castlereagh laws on “blasphemous and seditious libel” were still months off. Before the Manchester ‘riots’, the legal framework was not yet pitched against publication. Whatever he felt about the impropriety of some stanzas or lines — whatever his ‘court’ of readers and Byron’s London friends said about the ‘unpublishable’ and lamentable ‘infelicities’ — Murray knew there was every chance Byron’s new work would sell.

Don Juan was, for the most part, just the sort of thing he had asked Byron to produce a year earlier:

“May I hope that yr Lordship will favour me with some work to open my Campaign in November with have you not another lively tale like Beppo – or will you not give me some prose in three Volumes – all the adventures that you have undergone, seen, heard of or imagined with your reflections on life & Manners” (Murrray to Byron 7 July 1818)

So Hobhouse is probably not wrong to suggest (above, letter of 15 July) — perhaps he knew — that Murray engineered a commercial sleight of hand when he issued Byron’s Mazeppa and an Ode on Venice two weeks earlier on 1 July, taking advantage of the anticipation for Don Juan.

March 25, 2018November 20, 2018

An audio recording of Canto IX of Byron’s Don Juan

Here’s a recording — about 2-years old — of Canto IX of Don Juan.

The recording (MP3) is in three parts. It’s best to read along with the text of the poem if you can because the verse is quite complex. Also please use headphones. You’ll find the quality much better.

[There is 5–10 seconds of silence at the head of each recording]

Verses 1–21

An attack on the Duke of Wellington for being a Tory and a leech; too vain to know the true impact his victories had on European freedom
An apostrophe (“Death laughs..”) to death —- the subject is never far from the surface of Don Juan
A meandering philosophical rumination on “being” that is short and witty enough to hold its place in the poem
An abrupt transition to…

2. Verses 21–42

A brief glimpse of Juan en-route to St Petersburg whose distant prospect leads to…
An aside on autocracy, demagoguery and the abuse of power that ends when Byron seems to remember himself and returns briefly to…
Juan on the snowy road with Leila. Shortly afterwards, in the midst of a rhetorical figure about Fame, Byron pretends to have lost the thread of his argument and bequeathes it to posterity… which results in…
A speculation about the future and how the Georgian era (and George IV) will appear when reduced to being the subject of a future archeology.
Then, once more, Byron pulls himself up and determines to restart the narrative. He cuts straightway to the court of the Empress Catherine where Juan is to present general Suvorov’s dispatches from the successful siege of Ismail.

3. Verses 43–85

Juan’s appearance at Court
Catherine’s court, courtiers, her appearance, bloodiness and promiscuity
Juan’s presentation to the Queen and her infatuation with him
A series of asides on lust and power and an apostrophe, to the vagina
Juan’s flattered but ‘gentlemanly’ acquiescence in an ‘assignment’ — in Catherine’s boudoir — likely to make him wealthy and powerful at Court
A closing scene in which Juan is taken in hand by a woman who “checks-out” the Queen’s prospective lovers.

I hope you enjoy the reading. Comments are welcome.

January 24, 2018January 25, 2018

Don Juan annotated — a work in progress

For some time I have been working, in desultory fashion, on an annotated version of Don Juan. You can download the current version from that link. Would you kindly take a look and tell me whether I’m on the right track?

I am hardly the first person to have attempted this. Perhaps the most famous — and most accomplished — is the eminent science-journalist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. He published a wonderful volume of an annotated Don Juan, illustrated by the fashionable NY illustrator Milton Glaser in 1972. I’m the delighted owner of a copy dedicated by Glaser to his own publisher.

Still, the greatest of the annotated texts of Don Juan, from a Byronist’s viewpoint, is that by the late, great Dr Peter Cochran. These are magnificent (not illustrated) texts of each Canto that Cochran carefully compiled from a variety of manuscript and published sources to re-create Byron’s own version of the poem — rather than the version “amended” by his contemporary and later editors at John Murray’s and elsewhere. Cochran’s text doesn’t shy away from Bryon’s eccentric punctuation or crudities (“mild-ities” today). It includes missing verses, and marginal annotations on the drafts and “fair copies” where relevant. Best of all, Cochran has added footnotes that draw on his own unparalleled Byron scholarship, his deep knowledge of Shakespeare and his broad research in the literature familiar to someone such as Byron who had absorbed an 18^th century classical education.

I owe a great deal to Peter Cochran’s version of Don Juan. But this draft text is my own attempt to make something a little lighter than the Cochran version, a little less careful than Asimov (who tends to slide over the difficult or naughty) and still look good on the page.

The PDF document attached here contains only Cantos I — IV (without the Dedication — I half-excuse myself on the basis that I have already produced a free, illustrated, audio-book of the Dedication and Canto I). Cantos I & III are fully annotated. Canto IV has only a few notes at the start and Canto II… well, nothing really except the verse.

I’d be very grateful if you’d look this over and let me know your opinion of it — so far.

May 1, 2017January 8, 2018