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The letters of
Lord Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was an English poet. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest poets of the United Kingdom. Among his best-kno ...
, of which about 3,000 are known, range in date from 1798, when Byron was 10 years old, to 9 April 1824, a few days before he died. They have long received extraordinary critical praise for their wit, spontaneity and sincerity. Many rate Byron as the greatest letter-writer in English literature, and consider his letters comparable or superior to his poems as literary achievements. They have also been called "one of the three great informal autobiographies in English", alongside the diaries of
Samuel Pepys Samuel Pepys ( ; 23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an English writer and Tories (British political party), Tory politician. He served as an official in the Navy Board and Member of Parliament (England), Member of Parliament, but is most r ...
and
James Boswell James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (; 29 October 1740 ( N.S.) – 19 May 1795), was a Scottish biographer, diarist, and lawyer, born in Edinburgh. He is best known for his biography of the English writer Samuel Johnson, '' Life of Samuel ...
. Their literary value is reflected in the huge prices collectors will pay for them; in 2009 a sequence of 15 letters to his friend Francis Hodgson was sold at auction for almost £280,000.


Analysis

Although in his letters Byron adapted his style and stance to his different correspondents, they all share an unstudied, unliterary appearance, an "offhand eloquence", which at its best resembles the talk of a conversationalist of genius. He never wrote to produce an effect. Lord Macaulay, in one of his essays, wrote that Byron's letters "are less affected than those of
Pope The pope is the bishop of Rome and the Head of the Church#Catholic Church, visible head of the worldwide Catholic Church. He is also known as the supreme pontiff, Roman pontiff, or sovereign pontiff. From the 8th century until 1870, the po ...
and Walpole, ndhave more matter in them than those of Cowper"; if literary art was employed it was "that highest art which cannot be distinguished from nature". All are deeply imbued with his volatile and indefinable personality, which, for those who find his personality offensive, can be something of a disadvantage. They are marked by rapid alternations of mood, by common sense, wit, intellect and sincerity, and by a cool and unshakeable scepticism. They fascinate the reader through the huge zest for life they manifest. They share with his poems the characteristics of vigour and movement. "Everything is said without reserve, without attenuation, savagely", wrote André Maurois; they " weepthe reader along in an irresistible onrush". They repeat words as if they were rhymes, and have rhythms that resemble those of the poems apart from being more varied. They share the outlook on life of Byron's more realistic poems, like '' Beppo'', ''
Don Juan Don Juan (), also known as Don Giovanni ( Italian), is a legendary fictional Spanish libertine who devotes his life to seducing women. The original version of the story of Don Juan appears in the 1630 play (''The Trickster of Seville and t ...
'' and '' The Vision of Judgment'', rather than the darkly romantic '' Childe Harold'', '' Manfred'' and '' The Corsair''.


The number of letters

Although Byron's life was cut short at the age of only 36, almost 3000 letters of his are known. There are three main reasons why that number is so large: one is simply the pleasure Byron took in composing them; another is the fact that Byron spent many years in self-imposed exile in Italy and Greece, which made it necessary for him to write to keep in touch with his friends in England; and finally, the sensational success of ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'' when Byron was only 23 turned him into a national and then international celebrity, making his letters valuable relics to be collected rather than thrown away.


Correspondents

Byron's correspondents can be divided up into successive groups. As a boy he wrote to his mother, his half-sister Augusta, and the family lawyer John Hanson. At Southwell there were John Pigot and his sister Elizabeth. Byron's friends at college included Scrope Davies, John Cam Hobhouse and Francis Hodgson. With the publication of ''Childe Harold'' he became known to a new circle, the poets Robert Charles Dallas,
Thomas Moore Thomas Moore (28 May 1779 – 25 February 1852), was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist who was widely regarded as Ireland's "National poet, national bard" during the late Georgian era. The acclaim rested primarily on the popularity of his ''I ...
and Samuel Rogers, along with his banker Douglas Kinnaird and his publisher John Murray. Then there were the women who fell in love with him: Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady Frances Webster, Lady Oxford, and his future wife Annabella Milbancke; also his confidante Lady Melbourne. A new group of friends in Switzerland included the poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley ( ; 4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was an English writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame durin ...
, Shelley's wife Mary and sister-in-law Claire Clairmont. Members of the Shelley circle with whom Byron corresponded included Thomas Medwin, Edward Williams and his common-law wife Jane, Edward John Trelawny, and the poet
Leigh Hunt James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 178428 August 1859), best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet. Hunt co-founded '' The Examiner'', a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles. He was the centre ...
. In Venice there were Byron's lover Teresa Guiccioli, her brother Gamba and husband Count Guiccioli, the British consul Richard Belgrave Hoppner, and Alexander Scott. Finally, Byron's Greek adventure brought him into contact with a new circle: the rebel leader Prince Mavrokordatos, the banker Samuel Barff, and members of the London Philhellenic Committee, including Colonel Leicester Stanhope.


Editions

In 1830, 6 years after his death, about 560 of Byron's letters were published by his friend Thomas Moore under the title ''Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of his Life''. The next edition of the letters and journals appeared in six volumes in 1898-1901, edited by R. E. Prothero as part of a 13-volume ''Works''. Prothero included nearly 1200 letters, conscientiously edited, though like Moore he excised all passages likely to offend 19th-century sensibilities. A collection of about 350 unpublished letters was bequeathed by John Hobhouse's daughter Lady Dorchester to John Murray, who published them as ''Lord Byron’s Correspondence'' in 1922, in two volumes, though yet again in a bowdlerized form. In 1950 Peter Quennell produced a selection of the letters, called ''Byron: A Self-Portrait'', of which 50 letters had not up to that point been published. In 1966 the American literary scholar Leslie A. Marchand, having written a magisterial biography of Byron, began work on editing his letters. The result, ''Byron's Letters and Journals'', appeared in 11 volumes plus an index volume between 1973 and 1982, with a final supplementary volume in 1994. He was assisted in his work by the edition's publisher, John Murray VI, grandson of the earlier editor and great-great-grandson of Byron's own publisher. Marchand's work included about 3000 letters, and it remains the reference edition. The first two volumes won the
Modern Language Association The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "str ...
's James Russell Lowell Prize for 1974, the judges calling it "an outstanding achievement in humane editing". In 1982 he followed this up with a one-volume selection of Byron's letters and journals. In 2015 Richard Lansdown published another selection, which differed from Marchand's in being about twice the size and in attempting to cover Byron's whole life rather than just picking out the best letters. Jeffery Vail called it "engrossing, moving, hilarious, and sometimes heartbreaking", and preferred it to the Marchand selection.


Footnotes


References

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External links


The Prothero edition of Byron's Letters and Journals
at the
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
{{Byron Books published posthumously Correspondences Letters