Death in Don Juan
Don Juan: who needs it, who reads it?
In a previous article I lamented that Byron’s great comic poem Don Juan is not read as widely as it deserves. As the greatest comic poem in the language, Don Juan should have a much wider audience among English-speakers everywhere.
That’s more than a billion people who could be happier, wiser and… yes, wealthier (if you believe Byron):
Love, war, a tempest — surely there’s variety;
Also a seasoning slight of lucubration;
A bird’s-eye view, too, of that wild, Society;
A slight glance thrown on men of every station.
If you have nought else, here’s at least satiety
Both in performance and in preparation;
And though these lines should only line portmanteaus,
Trade will be all the better for these Cantos. [14, XIV]
Still its fans want to know why the poem is ‘lining portmanteaus’ rather than lying dog-eared on the top of ten million bedside tables.
One reason is, probably, “Byron”. He is still a celebrity: the “Byron meme” remains strong almost two hundred years after his death. But his greatest poem, *Don Juan* is just not needed to make it work.
The shorter poems are much better known because of a sort of happy publishing “accident” that reconstructed Byron’s legacy in the late 19th century that lifted his shorter poetry to the top of the Romantic literary canon, at the expense of his greatest poem.
Then the way we consume literature today makes *Don Juan* harder to consume than it used to be. It is already a long poem. But for most modern readers it will seem even longer.
Byron’s un-literary celebrity
Byron’s celebrity is much more modest than it was in his lifetime: for example in his 20s when fasionable London ‘lionised’ him and (finally) tore him to bits. But it is still solid and, these days, it over-shadows his greatest work.
Byron built for himself a striking image with portraits that he commissioned. For example: the George Saunders 1807-09 full-length portrait standing beside a beached-dinghey in a navy-blue suit and loose cravat; some miniatures also by Saunders; the idealised Westall profile that many subsequent portraits imitated (not shown), and; two carefully posed portraits by Thomas Phillips. Although second-rate as portraits — compared, for example, to the busts Thorwaldsen or Bartolini made of him — these romantic-classical images were popular for good reason. They perfectly fit his high-flown pre-1816 verse, his slightly aristocratic disdain (distant gazes off) and his evident beauty.
Saunders 
Phillips I 
Phillips II 
Thorvaldsen
From Left to Right Sanders(1808), Phillip (1813), Phillips (1813–1835), Thorvaldsen (1817)
Then, there’s the great tragic jewel of Byron’s post-mortem celebrity: the youth he feared he’d lost when he turned thirty made eternal by his early death in a popular liberal cause.
These assets have helped sustain the Byron of popular culture but… It’s a reputation now more louche than literary. Byron as a dangerous, unstable lover; Byron as a rake; Byron as vampire; Byron as the servant-victim of vampires; of Byron as a teddy-bear; Byron as a vampire teddy-bear (just kidding). The prominence of this Byronic “meme” makes it possible, even likely, that modern readers will know him by reputation without knowing anything of his poetic achievement or his greatest poem.
Users of the Byron meme don’t need to know *anything* of his poetry to extract all the meaning they need from “Lord Byron”. Alas…
Thomas Arnold’s adverse selection
The “accident” that promoted the popularity of Byron’s shorter poetry above that of his longer poems was an influential 1881 edition of Byron’s “*selected*” poetry edited by Matthew Arnold, poet, critic and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
Arnold’s earnest praise — placing Byron and Wordsworth at the forefront of English Romantic poetry — was a blessing that restored Byron’s reputation; until then under-cut by Victorian prissiness. (I have given a more detailed account of Arnold’s criticism elsewhere
Arnold decided that it would aid Byron’s fame — and, incidentally suit Arnold’s publishing project — to make only selections from “the mass of poetry [Byron] poured forth”. Along with scores of Byron’s shorter verse, most from before 1816, he included just 15 brief passages from Don Juan to which he gave suggestive abstract titles. He explained that this editorial approach reflected his similar treatment of Wordsworth in an earlier.
But Arnold’s selective approach was literary butchery; deeply unfair to Byron whose greast works, unlike Wordsworth, are long poems. Then, no one would suggest that because Dicken’s novels are uneven they could be better appreciated in selection. 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 his new “convenient” edition arbitrated the future for Byron’s fame. Today, Byron’s poetic impact is reduced to eight or ten partly-understood rhymes (“So we’ll go no more a-roving…”, “Remember thee…”, “She walks in beauty…”, “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold…”)
Byron’s long poems are growing longer
Yet things are getting worse, damnit. As we approach the third century of the poem, *Don Juan* is effectively growing even *longer* and, for most people, less accessible.
The struggle for popular attention takes many forms but the most successful productions, now, are visual and aural: short videos and “podcasts”. If this is a sign of a post-literate culture, then it’s a bad omen for the encyclopaedic genius of Byron.
To be fair, the popularity of streaming media also reflects the time and location most people have available for consumption. We choose to read or listen to music (or play games) in the hours we spend on train, or bus, in their car, at the gym etc. for good reason. This “interstital” time has a lower opportunity-cost; if you’re stuck with the commute anyway, it’s a good time for recreation. Video and audio do not demand the degree of focus that text demands, so they are much better suited to these occasions.
Then, long texts — specifically a 20,000-line poem — won’t fit comfortably on the screens of smart-phones that are by far the most common device for digital consumption at those times.
Prose text can ‘reflow’ on screen to fit the available width. But verse must retain its format to keep the length, rythm and rhyme of each line. If the line is too long for the width of the screen, ebook readers won’t help by “wrapping” it.
The lines of Don Juan are formatted by syllables, not by characters. Many lines that are only a standard ten or eleven syllables are inconveniently long for a small screen (the longest is 193 characters). Unless a tiny font is used, the line must be broken to prevent horizontal scrolling, making it harder to read.
Also, a reader cannot ‘scan’ the text of a verse in the way experienced readers scan prose. You can’t skim across the lines picking up key words and phrases. Verse is inherently harder. It takes more effort to navigate the lines and, usually, sub-vocalisation to hear the scansion and rhyme.
Byron’s longer poems are fighting an up-hill battle for the popular acclaim they once had and — more than ever — deserve. In the next post, I’ll suggest some ways to redress the balance and to elevate Don Juan to the summit it deserves.
Don Juan: The Greatest Comic Poem in English
Germaine Greer once observed1 that Don Juan is the greatest comic poem in English. It should be as popular she thought as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in Italy or, for that matter, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in Russia.
True, in my view! Still, if Don Juan enjoyed the popular renown of those “national” poems then every high-school kid would learn to quote it and to read in at least longish excerpts and perhaps return to it as an adult to find things they’d missed the first time around.
Why is Don Juan not like this?
Possibly, the poem is too adult for schools. In a letter to his friend and agent Douglas Kinnaird three months after the publication of Cantos I & II, Byron identified in a boastfully-blokey kind of way what may be the poem’s chief strength:
As to “Don Juan” – confess – confess – you dog – and be candid – that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing – it may be bawdy – but is it not good English? – It may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing? – Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a post-chaise? – in – a hackney coach? – in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? – in a vis a vis? – on a table? – and under it? (Byron to Kinnaird, 26 October 1819)
In fact Cantos I & II have no racy content, but Don Juan is a poem of the world.
For example, the bedroom farce of Canto I is rather modest — at most suggestive — in its detail. But to appreciate the jokes about Inez’s machinations, the hint about Juan’s parentage, the reality of Julia’s foolish self-deception and Juan’s semi-conscious innocence, or; to understand the comic tensions between Julia and Alfonso in the bedroom scenes, or; even to grasp the tone of Byron’s asides about science, marriage, families and infidelity in the poem, readers need some actual worldly experience. Access to Google won’t cut it.
Byron’s intelligence and wit arises from his peerless management of subjects and materials that “everybody knows” because they are mundane and even vulgar.
His revised epigram2 for the first two Cantos — “difficile est proprie communia dicere” — is entirely accurate. The expectations that Don Juan has of its readers — that they will recognise and appreciate Byron’s satyrical willingness to joke about what everyone knows but does not discuss — are a world away from Byron’s own earlier romantic fantasies and from the ‘transcendent’ poetry of Wordsworth, Keats or Coleridge (Shelley is a different case). To be fair, the “Lakers” project, too, was to focus on things that “everybody knows”. But their tame verses expressing “emotion recollected in tranquility” are comprehensible, at some level, to any teenager. Byron’s poetry is for grown-ups.
Still, it’s the antithesis of solemn. The verse has great energy, endlessly clever rhyme, “real” characters and scenes, jokes and ironies that are — except, possibly, for those that don’t meet contemporary standards of ‘correctness’ — as amusing today as they were two centuries ago.
The vulgarities are apt; the sexual innuendo hilarious. Byron’s language is still either current or antique-but-accessible. The satire still shines and most of its targets are still ‘fair game’: the war between men and women; the hypocrisy of church and state; the deceptions of love; the brevity of youth; the bloody waste of war; the vanity of celebrity; the sexual energy of power; the emptiness of political banners; the vulgarity of the middle-class, etc. etc. There is touching romance, inspirational reflection, supercilious cattiness, hard-won wisdom, cannibalism in a small boat, dwarf-tossing, a ghost story and even cross-dressing.
So what’s not to like!?
Even if we admit that Don Juan is not very suitable for the school-room, it is still curious that it is not more read by adults. I’d like to suggest three plausible explanations, each of which contributes something to the poem’s contemporary status:
- That Don Juan is unnecessary to the modern image of Byron;
- That Byron’s literary fame suffered a sort of accident in the late 19th century that lifted his shorter poetry to the top of the Romantic literary canon, at the expense of his greatest poem;
- That the way we consume literature today makes Don Juan harder to consume than it used to be.
I will explore each of these in a little more detail in a following post. In brief, I doubt that there is much remedy for the first of these. I believe the second reason and the third are linked, however, and that there’s a way to ameliorate the problem.
I suggest that better media can rescue the glories of Don Juan (I’ll explain how later). Interest in Byron’s longer verse could be restored – as interest in Jane Austen’s novels was restored – by better presentation of his works in more accessible media.
More next time…
In defence of annotation
There is something rather odd about annotating poetry.
After all, poetry is as close as words come to music. The verse should work upon us not as rational argument — or not just as rational argument — but as melody and rhythm work.
The attraction and interest should be emotional and… well, visceral. The experience should be sort of inexplicable. If you have to explain it then it probably doesn’t work.
Yet here I am preparing an annotated version of Cantos I and II of Byron’s Don Juan to celebrate the 200th anniversary, this July, of their publication.
Why, for goodness’ sake, clutter up the pages of what is already a long poem? If Don Juan is so hard to read that it needs notes then no amount of notes is ever going to help its appeal or restore the fun two centuries later.
And, besides, I’m no literary scholar or Byron expert. There are scores (hundreds?) of learned critics who have resisted any temptation to attach their marginalia to the greatest work of one of the greatest poets and personalities of history. What gives me a license they have not sought for themselves?
These are “good questions”. I mean, they’re annoying questions. I have them myself but I don’t have answers that I find quite satisfying. Still, I go on with the project that has now reached a stage where I can soon release drafts of my notes and the accompanying recordings of my reading of the Cantos.
Here’s what I’ve got as a justification for annotation.
Byron did it
Byron annotated his own poetry beginning with “Hours of Idleness” first published in 1807 when he was barely 20. There are long “essays” attached to some of the Cantos in Childe Harold and he allowed his friend, Cam Hobhouse, to annotate the last, fourth, Canto of the Childe. All of his longer tragedies have notes, especially “Marino Faliero.”
But Byron added very few notes to the first two cantos of Don Juan. He has eleven notes to Canto I of Don Juan that mostly give the source of some classical reference in the poem. Only two notes of the eleven step back from the text to offer some additional information. One is an admission that he has quoted Campbell’s “Gertrude of Wyoming” from memory; the second notes that “Julia” makes a mistake in saying Count O’Reilly took Algiers. Byron offers just four notes on Canto II; mostly citations, none of them more than a dozen words.
There are further scribblings and erasures and signs of debate in the margins of the printers’ proofs of the two cantos where he and Cam Hobhouse (mostly) disputed suggested edits. Byron rejected almost all of them.
“Everyone” does it
There are guides for school and college students explaining how to annotate a poem as if it were a puzzle to which there are solutions. They encourage students to stake down and truss the verse, like Gulliver in Lilliput, by lines and note-bubbles. When they’re not just clamps on an autopsy table, these notes are usually a crib for exams. They identify the “best bits” with copy-and-paste explanations of a supposed-more-than-experienced emotional impact.
Then there are expert guides from scholars like the late Peter Cochran. If you haven’t discovered Cochran’s edition of Don Juan re-transcribed from the Byron manuscripts, you’re missing a wealth of information from Byron’s own sources and from PC’s keen insight into Byrons’ personality, history and foibles. Steffan, Steffan and Pratt’s early-1970s Penguin edition also provides lengthy notes on both text and content. Finally, Isaac Asimov, best known for his science fiction and popular books on science but something of a polymath, also produced an annotated version of the poem in the early 1970s with his own footnotes.
Necessary evils?
Dr Johnson who, as a lexicographer, had a great deal of practice in the art of providing concise, authoritative information, warned in his Preface to Shakespeare that notes are necessary evils, at best.
“Particular passages are cleared by notes,” Johnson conceded, “but the general effect of the work is weakened.”
The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.
Johnson thought that the reader should allow the drama of Shakespeare, in this instance, to move them and while it did so, to plough-on without notes.
Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable, and when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness, and read the commentators.
Of course, this assumes that the reader is able to comprehend the dialog without notes. Fortunately, Byron is much less difficult than Shakespeare. His grammar can be difficult and his free-form punctuation confusing. But the language he uses is still within the range of contemporary english. Most 21st century adults who are native english speakers should be able to comprehend Don Juan with ease, even if they missed some of Byron’s references.
Might they give pleasure?
To the obsessive, certainly. There is a market for the annotation of poetry that owes little, if anything, to the puzzlement of the reader or the desire for scholarship but a great deal to casual curiosity and delight.
For a fan, annotated literature should be a means to recapture and deepen the pleasure of first reading a poem (or prose). It should be like reading a travel book on places you’ve been or pouring through a commentators’ analysis of a football/cricket/baseball/basketball game you saw live. It should be like reading a walk-through for computer-game levels you’ve already conquered, or one of those after-the-event plot updates of, say, Game of Thrones.
You might learn things you didn’t know, sure. But it should also help you to re-live your experience of the poem (place, drama) from the first-time-around.
This is what I would like to do with my annotations of Cantos I and II of Don Juan.
Are there examples I could learn from? Apart from Cochran’s and Asimov’s annotations of Don Juan, I have to admit there are few examples I can point to. The one that springs to mind is — or seems to be — not serious enough to support my case. I mean Martin Gardner’s “Annotated Snark” (now long out of print).
This was probably the first annotated verse I ever read and, as most things by Gardner, brilliant. Lewis Carrol’s poem is deeply un-serious for reasons I suspect Byron would have endorsed: he apparently had no truck with the “deeply serious”, Arnoldian, High-Church of Victorian right-thinking. But as a Don in Dean Henry Liddell’s High Church University he kept that view hidden behind a Lear-like innocent idiocy. I loved Gardner’s annotations that make sense of jokes that Carrol/Dodson preferred to elide.
Avoiding Dr Johnson’s “refrigeration”
There are two means, I think.
First: offer some options. For example, another way to access the poetry while placing the annotated text before the reader.
Second: make sure the annotations don’t obtrude or demand the reader jump to different parts of the page (footnotes) or, worse, to a different part of the document (end-notes).
This post is already too long, so I’ll discuss these options next time.
Bad Lord Byron
Skin in the Game
Byron found his most innovative and brilliant form in the discursive, comic, first-person “performance” of Don Juan. Here and there it roamed the outer limits of satire and of taste, as he knew; his verse turned the knife as it ripped into “cant”. He thought he could rely on his readers’ acceptance of his energetic vulgarities and skeptical jokes because they were true-to-life. When Murray, in March 1819, said that his ‘court’ of advisors “ [deplored] that a Man of your genius will not occupy some Six or Eight years in the composition of a Work & Subject worthy of you – “ Byron shot back:
– is Childe Harold nothing? you have so many “divine” poems, is it nothing to have written a Human one? without any of your worn out machinery.
If readers did not accept his poetry, he haughtily insisted he did not care:
– – As to the Estimation of the English which you talk of, <have> let them calculate what it is worth before they insult me with their insolent condescension. – – I have not written for their pleasure; – if they are pleased – it is that they chose to be so, – I have never flattered their opinions – nor their pride – nor will I. – Neither will I make “Ladies books” “al dilettar le femine e la plebe” – I have written from the fullness of my mind, from passion – from impulse – from many motives – but not for their “sweet voices.” – I know the precise worth of popular applause – for few Scribblers have had more of it – and if I chose to swerve into their paths – I could retain it or resume it – or increase it – but I neither love ye – nor fear ye – and though I buy with ye – and sell with ye – and talk with ye – I will neither eat with ye – drink with ye – nor pray with ye. – – – [Byron to Murray, 6 April 1819; the last sentence echoing Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice]
He did care, of course, deeply; Don Juan is filled with ruminations on fame, literary and otherwise. Exile was escape from the mark of sin: Fame would be his justification. Still, unluckily for Byron, his poem reached the public just at the moment when popular taste was about to become much less tolerant of precisely the sort of Regency “looseness” that Don Juan and Byron’s own reputation represented.
Murray’s pleas to Byron to drop the most “offensive” passages in Cantos I & II are often attributed to his squeamishness and to the parson-powered 1 ‘synod’ (Byron’s term) who advised him, particularly the Editor of the Quarterly Review and other Murray publications, William Gifford.
But Murray’s recommendations deserve more respect as evidence of the publishing environment and not just of his own disposition. After all, he had “skin in the game”. Byron was his most prominent “property”: his own reptuation and profit had been directly linked to Byron’s literary popularity and poetic renown for a decade. Whatever we think — looking back from two centuries later — of the timerousness of his suggested changes to Don Juan, we still should take seriously his claims about Byron’s likely reception in 1819.
A publisher’s relations with a brillant but brittle-tempered celebrity author (one of the first and greatest of this genre), self-exiled to the other end of a two-or-three-week correspondence delay were never likely to be easy. Byron’s correspondence is rapid, un-restrained — often thoughtless or, at best, careless about others’ interests — and impatient. Murry’s replies are late, incomplete and patient to the point of grovelling to His Lordship’s peculiarities. But he had his limits. Publishers must be ready, sometimes, to lead public taste; but not by too far if they want to stay in business. John Murray had the added challenge of launching this new, confronting work from Byron into a uniquely difficult environment.
Although Byron’s attacks on the policies and the personalities of the Liverpool government might have consorted with some radical, Whig and even popular opinion, the “morality” of the poem was more difficult to sell. Literary readers such as Croker and Crabbe were not much disturbed by the events such as the bedroom farce or cannibalism or sex-on-the-sand in the narrative of the first two Cantos of Don Juan. But Murray reasonably feared that his wider market would be less forgiving of Byron’s disdain for Church (if not for religion) and his jokes about sexual misbehavior and references to his own reputation, after 1815, for marital infidelity (and worse).
The upheaval in British politics and society over the years of 1819–1820 saw middle-class values and expectations confronted by the repressive behavior of a Government losing legitimacy and a lazy, profligate, adulterous King. Reaction to the first helped build a platform for reform of the parliamentary ‘constitution’ in the following decade. The second tended to consolidate support for, at first, “feminst” values of respect for marriage and the still subordinate rights of women. A new middle class ‘respectibilty’ installed itself sometime around the 1820s and settled, eventually, into the conservative, prudish, stuffy domesticity that we call ‘Victorian’ taste and that Matthew Arnold would describe, forty years later, as “philistinism”.
The discomfort Murray and his circle expressed with Don Juan from the outset — and his refusal to publish any more after 1822 — reveal more than just “prissy” individual values. Events in England had made it difficult to separate Byron’s satire, “blasphemies” and attacks on the government and the (former) King from a political platform neither he nor Murray endorsed. Moreover, the bourgeois literary market that Murray increasinly served had little tolerance for the kinds of personal license in maters of religion, family or (sexual) behavior that Byron, and members of his class, had indulged a decade earlier.
Don Juan sells despite Murray’s fears
When Cantos I and II of Don Juan were being prepared for the press, it was chiefly Murray’s advisers — especially Gifford — who kept up the lament about “so much beauty, so wantonly & perversely disfigured” by verses such as 129 and 130 of Canto I that make jokes about cow-pox and syphilis and the parody of the Ten Commandments in Stanzas 205–206 of Canto I.
“Every one laments therefore in a tenfold degree the few passages which merely in kindness to your friends it was hoped you would have suffered to be replaced by others in which you would have excited delight only… Do me the favour to make every improvement that you can upon the two first Cantos of Don Juan & let me bring out the new Edition in great force in the winter – In the opinion of the best Critics the larger portion of them surpass all that you have written & the rest is deserving therefore of re-casting or at least of re-consideration” (Murray to Byron, 23 July 1819)
Murray pleaded with Byron to authorise cuts that could be incorporated in the re-issued editions, which he presumably had intended to publish under Byron’s name in his own imprint. But Byron would have none of it:
You are right – Gifford is right – Crabbe is right – Hobhouse is right – you are all right – and I am all wrong – but do pray let me have that pleasure. – Cut me up root and branch; quarter me in the Quarterly – send round my “disjecti membra poetae” like those of the Levite’s Concubine – make me – if you will – a spectacle to men and angels – but don’t ask me to alter for I can’t – I am obstinate and lazy – and there’s the truth. – – – (Byron to Murray, 12 August, 1819)
By late 1819 the fears in Murray’s office about the critical response were begining to sound more plausible. In August, Blackwoods Magazine (known in the industry as “Blackguards..” according to Murray) published an hysterical hatchet-job on the Cantos:
“…in the composition of which there unquestionably a more thorough intense infusion of genius and vice, power and profligacy, than in any which had ever before been written the English or indeed in any modern language… Love, honour, patriotism, religion are mentioned only to be scoffed at and derided as if their sole resting place were or ought to be in the bosoms of fools. It appears in short as if this miserable man having exhausted every species of sensual gratification having drained the cup of sin even to its bitterest dregs, were resolved to shew us that he is no longer a human being even in his frailties but a cool unconcerned fiend, laughing with a detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed…” (Blackwoods Magazine, August 1819)
Taking the actual verse only as a point of departure, the review dreged-up a version of the rumors that had surrounded the Byron separation three years earlier, exaggerated into melodrama:
“…It would not be an easy matter to persuade any Man who has any knowledge of the nature of Woman, that a female such as Lord Byron has himself described his wife to be, would rashly or hastily or lightly separate herself from the love which she had once been inspired for such a man as he is, or was. Had he not heaped insult upon insult and scorn upon scorn — had he not forced the iron of his contempt into her very soul — there is no woman of delicacy and virtue as he admitted Lady Byron to be who would not have hoped all things and suffered all things from one, her love of whom must been inwoven with so many exalting elements of delicious pride and delicious humility. To offend the love of such a woman was wrong but might be forgiven; to desert her unmanly — but he might have and wiped for ever from her eyes the tears of her desertion; but to injure and to desert and then to turn back and wound her widowed privacy with unhallowed strains of cold-blooded mockery — was brutally fiendishly mean.” (Ibid.)
It was only the earliest and most intemperate of many similar criticisms of the close association of poetic beauty (”genius”) and vice in the verse that followed over the next few years in the literary press. From Ravenna, Byron dashed off several pages of injured and somewhat specious rebuttal, assorted with renewed attack on Southey the Lakers, but eventually decided not to respond.
“It really is a mistaken notion…”
Murray tried to jolly Bryon along, noting that the poem sold well owning to its “genius”, despite the crticism
“It really is a mistaken notion that Don Juan has not been well received – the Sale has been lessened by an outrageous outcry against some parts of it but its estimation in point of Genius carries your Lordship higher than ever & its circulation will be every day increasing.” (Murray to Byron on 16 November, 1819)
Although Murray — no doubt to his surprise — eventually won an injunction against the pirates, he did not press it to enforce his copyright over Don Juan. The reason he gave is that he would have to reaveal the name of the author: which hardly seems a dramatic revelation given that Byron’s authorship was an open secret.
The stronger reasons were, no doubt, commercial. Murray admitted that he could still make a tidy profit by bringing out a more affordable quasi-authorized edition, even if he had to throw in a “Glass of Gin” with every purchase. Still, it’s clear he was not keen to release them under his own imprint because he remained uncomfortatble with their content. He refused Byron’s offer to return the money he had paid for the copyright and asked for more Cantos, too (Byron had completed Cantos III and IV in November 1819).
“I admire the poem beyond all measure & am supported in this estimation by every man of judgment in the kingdom – who wish for a few alterations merely to give wings to the rest & so far am I indisposed to receive back the Copy Money – that I would not take double the sum if it were offered to me – the pirate edition is not countenanced by the booksellers & if it were or had any important sale I would sell mine for nothing & give every purchaser a Glass of Gin into the bargain… my process [enforcing the injunction against the radical publishers] was abandoned the moment I found that the authors name must be given up – wch is rather absurd for this puts an end to all anonymous writing – if a rascal chooses to print Waverley for instance – the bookseller <ca> or proprietor can have no redress unless he disclose the name of the Author [ie. Sir Walter Scott]. I have printed Don in 8 vo to match the other Poems & again in a Smaller form – the latter not yet published – of the Octavo I have sold 3000 Copies so you see we have circulation in us – I want nothing so much as a third & fourth Canto which I entreat you to compleat for me as progressive to the remaining Twelve… therefore Moore – I pray you Moore – “it is the universal decision that in beauties Don Juan surpasses all that has preceded it” – Can you keep up to this?” (Murray to Byron 24 Jan 1820)
Two years later, however, Murray’s enthusiasm for Don Juan had evaporated. When in 1821 he finally, reluctantly released Cantos III-V — with many errors in the text — he again included only the printer’s name, refusing the “countenance” of his own name.
Byron was angry about the delay, the errors and the “disparagement”.
“Murray – you are an excellent fellow –a little variable – & somewhat of the opinion of every body you talk with – (particularly the last person you see) but a good fellow for all that – yet nevertheless – I can’t tell you that I think you have acted very gallantly by that persecuted book – which has made it’s way entirely by itself – without the light of your countenance – or any kind of encouragement – critical – or bibliopolar. – You disparaged the last three cantos to me – & kept them back {above} a year – but I have heard from England – that (notwithstanding the errors of the press) they are well thought of -“ (Byron to Murray, 3 November 1821)
Within a year Byron had moved to another publisher.
Early reception of Don Juan
When the first two Cantos of Don Juan appeared on 15 July, 1819, readers immediately guessed — many had anticipated — the the authorship. The next day, the Morning Post carried a brief article sub-titled “Lord Byron’s New Poem of ‘Don Juan’”.
Still, the anonymity of Murray’s publication and the increasing severity of government censorship implied the publisher knew the poem, if not suppressed, might be found blasphemous or possibly seditious and denied copyright. A recent bizarre Court decision on Southey’s pirated “Wat Tyler” (a revolutionary drama from Southey’s radical youth) confirmed that such material would not be protected by the Courts or dignified by copyright. Such offending works were, consequently, liable to widespread distribution in cheap “pirated” editions; precisely the opposite of the Crown’s intention.
Within a week the Radical press had taken notice. William Hone, a well known pamphleteer, rushed out a tract highlighting the blasphemy and immortality of the verse — with examples — while enlisting Byron’s its publication in his own, thus far successful, attacks on censorship.The first complete rip-offs of Don Juan probably appeared (they are undated) within a month or so: the first an edition by Onwhyn, a radical publisher that, at four shillings in Octavo format, was one-eighth the price of Murray’s Quarto edition.1 By October 1819, Murray was obliged to follow suit with an Octavo version at nine shillings and sixpence in order to hold onto the continuing strong market for Byron.
The early critical reaction to the poems — like the fist reactions of Byron’s friends — was marked by enthusiasm and admiration, only moderately qualified by admissions of moral ‘license’. The Morning Post article mentioned above offered a pre-emptive defence of the poem that anticipated with remarkable accuracy the attacks that would follow; setting its readers’ minds at ease while coyly, however, not recommending the purchase of the book:
“The greatest anxiety having been excited with respect to the appearance of this Poem, we shall lay a few stanzas before our readers, merely observing that, whatever its character, report has been completely erroneous respecting it. If it is not (and truth compels us to admit it is not) the most moral production in the world, but more in the “Beppo” style, yet is there nothing of the sort which Scandal with her hundred toungues whispered abroad, and malignity joyfully believed and repeated, contained in it. ’Tis simply a tale and right merrie conceit, flighty, wild, extravagant — immoral too, it must be confessed; but no arrows are levelled at innocent bosoms, no sacred family peace invaded; and they must have a strange self-consciousness who can discover their own portait in any part of it. Thus much, though we cannot advocate the book, truth and justice ordain us to declare…” (The Morning Post, Friday 16 July, 1819)
The conservative ciritc, parliamentarian and Admiralty Secretary, John Wilson Croker — whose mean review in the Quarterly Review of Keats’ Endymion was held by Shelley, at least, to have hastened the poet’s death — wrote to Murray, three days after the first publication
“I am agreeably disappointed at finding ‘Don Juan’ very little offensive. It is by no means worse than ‘Childe Harold,’ which it resembles as comedy does tragedy. There is a prodigious power of versification in it, and a great deal of very good pleasantry. There is also some magnificent poetry, and the shipwreck, though too long, and in parts very disgusting, is on the whole finely described. In short, I think it will not lose him any character as a poet, and, on the score of morality, I confess it seems a more innocent production than ‘Childe Harold’”
Two days after publication, in the conservative Literary Gazette, William Jerdan declared Don Juan to be “an exceedingly clever and entertaining poem,” that was “witty if a little licentious, and delightful if not very moral,”. He concluded that Byron’s “defence of the morality of his work is so good-humoured that we must wish it more sound, and after all forgive him.”
The Examiner, a reform newspaper started by the the brothers John and Leigh Hunt (later publishers of Cantos V-XVI) printed a lengthy review three months after the publication — when the work was already being pirated. Possbily written by Leigh Hunt, it offered high praise and a psychological interpretation of the novel style of the poem.
“Some persons consider this the finest work of Lord Byron, or at least that in which he displays most power. It is at all events the most extraordinary that he has yet published. …The ground-work (if we may so speak of a stile) is the satirical and humorous; but you are sometimes surprised and moved by a touching piece of human nature, and again startled and pained by the sudden transition from loveliness or grandeur to ridicule or the mock-heroic….
It is not difficult to account for this heterogeneous mixture, for the bard has furnished us with the key to his own mind. His early hopes were blighted; and his disappointment vents itself in satirizing absurdities which rouse his indignation… But his genius is not naturally satyrical; he breaks out therefore into those frequent veins of passion and true feeling of which we have just given specimens… and it is to get rid of such painful and “thick coming” recollections that he dashes away and relieves himself by getting into another train of ideas, however incongruous or violently contrasted with the former…
The Examiner defended what had been called “immorality” as an accurate depiction of life rather than models of behvior:
Don Juan is accused of being en a “immoral work” which we cannot at all discover… If stupid and selfish parents will make up matches between persons whom difference of age or disposition disqualifies for mutual affection, they must take the consequences:- but we do not think it fair that a poet should be exclaimed against as a promoter of nuptial infidelity because he tells them what those consequences are…. Which then, we would ask, are the immoral writings — those which, by misrepresentation of the laws of nature, lead to false views of morality and consequent licentiousness, or those, which ridicule and point out the effects of absurd contradiction of human feelings and passions, and help to bring about a reformation of such practises?
The Quarterly Review, published by Murray and edited by the censorious William Gifford remained mute, as did the Whiggish (liberal) Edinburgh Review.
Next: Sales of the Cantos I & II
Publication of Cantos I & II
The path to the first publication of Cantos I & II of Don Juan was unlike that of any of Byron’s earlier verse. It is worth our attention because it reminds us — who now see only its novel tone, brilliant verse, sarcasm and fun — that this new poem had explosive potential during a year of rapid deterioration in the foetid politics of late Regency England. The travails of publication recall the difficult personalities and mixed interests of Byron, his publisher and his London friends. They also explain much about the expectations and ambitions Byron had for his greatest poem as he continued working on it over the next four years.
When they first saw the manuscript of Canto I, Byron’s friends — John Cam Hobhouse, Scrope Davies and John Hookham Frere — had, according to Hobhouse, been struck with admiration for “the Carravaggio talent displayed throughout…”. It’s a good metaphor for the polished, high-contrast, mannered but energetic and earthy voice of the first Canto. Nor did they think, at first, that Murray, whose business had thrived on Byron’s poetry and drama, would object to the robust tone:
“– You shall hear all in a day or two. Murray, I believe, would publish a Fanny Hill or an Age of Reason of your’s – The Hitch will not come thence – so be tranquil –” (Hobhouse to Byron on 29 Dec. 1818 on receipt of Don Juan Canto I manuscript.)
Douglas Kinnaird, a friend and later business manager, was also complimentary and attuned to the poltics of publishing, although ready to ‘clip’:
“… I have read your Poems Don Juan is exquisite – It must be cut for the Syphilis – When we have pounded Murray I will not fail to write by the same Post – Your definition of May is a great truth … I think your Poem is justly bitter & exquisitely humorous – You will have the world on your side – The revolution is coming – Rely on it –” (Kinnaird to Byron, 29 December, 1818)
But within a month Hobhouse and crew — Kinnaird less so — had changed their tune: they now advised strongly against publication. Hobhouse was aprehensive about the original motto of Canto I (“Domestica Facta”) that he took to be a declaration that the poem was, as they convinced themselves, an attack on Annabella and perhaps her mother and advisors. They were all appalled, said Hobhouse, by
“the licentiousness and in some cases downright indecency of many stanzas and of the whole turn of the poem – from the flings at religion – and from the slashing right and left at other worthy writers of the day”.
They were mystified by the swinging attacks on Southey, and Laker Poets in the Dedication which, they said, attributed these minor poets an critical importance they did not (then) enjoy.
What had happened in early 1819 to harden them against publishing the poem that several including Murray thought was Byron’s greatest “in some parts?” It may have been fears about the worsening political climate at the end of 1818 to which the Prince Regent’s speech (above) referred. Kinnaird’s remark that “the revolution is coming…” would have been seen by Byron’s other friends as a chilling, if distant, prospect. Perhaps it was also something closer to home, at least for Hobhouse.
In his January 1819 letter, Hobhouse couched his strong recommendation for “total suppression” in terms that suggest his greatest concern was not Byron’s reputation as a poet but his own polticial carreer:
“I have now gone through the objections which appear <to so> so mixed up with the whole work especially to those who are in the secret of the domestica facta that I know not any any amputation will save it: more particularly as the objectionable parts are in point of wit humour & poetry the very best beyond all doubt of the whole poem – This consideration, therefore, makes me sum up with strenuously advising a total suppression of Don Juan – I shall take advantage of the kind permission you give me to keep back the publication until after the election in February: and this delay will allow time for your answer and decision” (Hobhouse to Byron, 5 January, 1819).
Byron was in no position, from Venice, to deny Hobhouse’s presumption of his “kind permission”. In any case, the proposed delay gave him the opportunity to add some more verses to Canto I and to complete Canto II of Don Juan. By May of 1819, however, he was becoming fed up with the wheedling on from his London friends on the texts. He agreed to making cuts in the Dedication but…
“You sha’n’t make Canticles of my Cantos. The poem will please if it is lively – if it is stupid it will fail but I will have none of your damned cutting & slashing. – If you please you may publish anonymously it will perhaps be better; – but I will battle my way against them all – like a Porcupine.” (Byron to Murray, 6 April 1819 from Venice)
He was restless; feeling uncomfortable about his dissolute life in grubby Venice. He was worried that serventism to a young, barely-married woman — Teresa Guiccioli — was hopeless and a bit déclassé. Never keen on correcting proofs or making fair-copies — which he found boring work — he declined to receive any further proofs of Don Juan after June and pressed Murray to publish.
After receiving the manuscript(s) of Canto II, Murray was able to see the poem at something closer to its proper scale — more than 400 stanzas — and was a little mollified that the naughty and revolting bits were much less prominent than the passages he found “exceedingly good”:
I think you may modify or substitute others for, the lines on Romilly whose death should save him – – the verse in the Shipwreck – LXXXI the Masters Mates disease – I pray you oblitterate as well the suppression of Urine – these Ladies may not read — the Shipwreck is a little too particular & out of proportion to the rest of the picture – but if you do any thing it must be with extreme caution – for it is exceedingly good – & the power with which you alternately make our blood thrill & our Sides Shake is very great – nothing in all poetry is finer than your description of the two females in Canto II – it is nature speaking in the most exquisite poetry – but think of the effects of such seductive poetry? (Murray to Byron, 28 May, 1819)
Byron, despite doubts about the wisdom of the journey, was on the road to Ravenna, where Teresa lay ill, in his high-wheeled Napoleonic coach. From Bologna he sent Murray a rude reply:
It will therefore be idle in him [Hobhouse] or you to wait for any further answers – or returns of proofs from Venice – as I have directed that no English letters be sent after me. – The publication can be proceeded in without, and I am already sick of your remarks – to which I think not the least attention ought to be paid. – – – (Byron to Murray, 7 June 1819).
Murray gave up. In concert with Hobhouse, he dropped the Dedication altogether — Byron had finally agreed to that — and two stanzas of Canto I that Byron had not agreed to drop. The first was stanza 15 on the suicide of Sir Samuel Romily — whose Westminster seat in Parliament Hobhouse was then about to contest; the second — now stanza 131 — on syphilis. He also censored with asterisks two good jokes about the history of “the pox” in stanzas 129 and 130.
The removal of the “Romilly” verse sketched the battle-lines already being drawn between the poet, his friends and his publisher. For Byron, the five lines he inserted on Romilly’s suicide was a savage thrill: the lawmaker’s suicide by cutthroat razor had been an act of Nemesis, he claimed. In context, they fit with the characterization of Inez, but it was nonethless bloody-minded. Byron knew from reliable sources that Romilly had acted in ignorance, not dishonorably, in agreeing at first to advise his wife, Annabella, on their separation. Someone who had more insight into himself and his anger than Byron might have dropped it without, as Byron’s friends said, damaging the poem. Still, if Don Juan was to be issued anonymously, why should his editors/advisors be so particular about these lines? The plausible reason Hobhouse offered to Byron — in a letter written on the day of publication — was that it might hurt Romilly’s family:
“The man has left children whom I know you did not mean to annoy; and though we must both of us think that he has been bepuffed at a terrible rate yet the death of both father and mother has left six poor creatures and three or four of them grown up with little support except their father’s reputation; and whether that reputation be overrated or not, I am convinced that at this moment you would not wish to impair the legacy as far as they are concerned” (Hobhouse to Byron on 15 July, 1819.)
But Hobhouse was not being candid — as Byron must have known. Dropping the stanza attacking Romilly served his interests as an electoral candidate as much as any other. He had failed in his first, February 1819, bid to win Romilly’s Parliamentary seat of Westminster on behalf of ‘radical’ reform. But he had come a creditable second in the ballot and planned to try again. It would look bad for him to be associated — as he would be — with Byron’s attack on the once-distinguished former Member for that constituency. Hobhouse was a radical who — like Byron who decidedly was not — wanted no overturning of the social order that protected Romilly’s name and saved him from a suicide’s unhallowed grave.
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.
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. [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 18th 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 and the “new” dissenters, especially Methodists) the Church.