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The Publishing of Byron's Don Juan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Hugh J. Luke Jr
Hugh J. Luke Jr*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Extract

On 8 December 1824 Robert Southey sent to the editor of the Courier a long letter containing a final, post-mortem installment in his feud with Lord Byron. Reacting to some allusions to himself in Medwin's recently published Conversations of Lord Byron, Southey characteristically joined truculent self-defense with bitter and abusive attack:

It was because Lord Byron had brought a stigma upon English literature [Southey explained] that I accused him; because he had perverted great talents to the worst purposes; because he had set up for pander-general to the youth of Great Britain as long as his writings should endure; because he had committed a high crime and misdemeanour against society, by sending forth a work in which mockery was mingled with horrors, filth with impiety, profligacy with sedition and slander. . . .

Here I dismiss the subject. It might have been thought that Lord Byron had attained the last degree of disgrace when his head was set up for a sign at one of those preparatory schools for the brothel and the gallows, where obscenity, sedition, and blasphemy are retailed in drams for the vulgar. There remained one further shame,-there remained this exposure of his private conversations, which has compelled his lordship's friends ... to compare his oral declarations with his written words.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 3 , June 1965 , pp. 199 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 Quoted in The Works of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero (London, 1898–1901), vi, 398–399. Hereafter cited as L&J.

2 Lord Byron's Correspondence, ed. John Murray (London, 1922), ii, 90, letter of 11 November 1818. Hereafter cited as LBC.

3 LBC, ii, 104–105; letter of 6 March 1819.

4 L&J, iv, 282 n.; letter of 19 March 1819.

5 L&J, iv, 283.

6 Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame (London, 1924), p. 28.

7 Hobhouse papers, quoted in Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography (New York, 1957), ii, 804; letter of 21 July 1819.

8 Correspondence and Diaries (London, 1885), i, 145; quoted in Willis W. Pratt, “A Survey of Commentary on Don Juan,” in Byron's Don Juan: A Variorum Edition, ed. Truman G. Steffan and Willis W. Pratt (Austin, Texas, 1957), iv, 294–295.

9 See “Murray v. Dugdale,” Examiner, 27 July 1823. I have not yet been able to find a copy of Dugdale's edition of Beppo, which is recorded neither by Coleridge nor by Wise.

10 This pamphlet is described by Chew, pp. 32–33 and n. Hone also published in 1819 his Don Juan: Canto the Third, in which Juan is brought to London and turned into a radical publisher.

11 See C. H. Timperley, A Dictionary of Printers and Printing (London, 1839), entry dated 4 December 1833.

12 Listed in Albert C. Cohn, A Bibliographical Catalogue of the Printed Works Illustrated by George Cruikshank (London, 1914).

13 T. J. Wise, A Bibliography of Lord Byron (London, 1932), ii, 4.

14 L&J, iv, 380; Byron to Murray, 4 December 1819. Byron was, of course, remembering Shelley's experience with Eldon.

15 L&J, iv, 380 n.

16 “The Cases of Walcot vs. Walker …,” Quarterly Review, April 1822. According to Hill Shine and Helen Chadwick Shine, The Quarterly Review under Gifford (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1949), p. 79, the article was written either by Southey or by Nassau Senior.

17 Pratt, pp. 293–294.

18 For a full survey of these reviews, see Pratt, pp. 292–298.

19 Quoted in Pratt, p. 297.

20 Chew, pp. 33–34 n.

21 Chew records The Dorchester Guide, but not the other pamphlets here listed.

22 Misquoted from Canto i, 113, ll. 2 and 8.

23 I have seen no radical pamphlet which actually claims Byron as a leader. I have, however, seen advertisements of a radical pamphlet entitled Jack the Giant Queller; or, Prince Juan, with a model of a stamp for the Suppression of Political Pamphlets (advertised as published by Grove and Co. in The Queen in the Moon, London, 1820; advertised as published by Roach and Company in The Political Queen that Jack Loves, London, 1820. It strikes me as distinctly possible that “Prince Juan” may refer to Byron.

24 ELH, xi (June 1944), 135–153.

25 See the Society's Address to the Public … Setting forth with a List of the Members, the Utility and Necessity of Such an Institution, and its Claim to Public Support (London, 1803). Johnson gives the generally accepted date of 1818 for Bowdler's Family Shakespeare, using this date as evidence for his argument that the moral tone of England had changed significantly since Byron had left. Both the CBEL and the Catalogue of the British Museum, however, list the first edition of The Family Shakespeare (four volumes, twenty plays) as 1807, nine years before Byron's departure in 1816.

26 R. Coupland, Wilberforce, a Narrative (Oxford, 1923), p. 55.

27 L&J, v, 471; letter of 3 November 1821.

28 LBC, ii, 206; letter of 28 November 1821.

29 LBC, ii, 231: Byron to Kinnaird, 18 September 1822.

30 L&J, iv, 475; Byron to Murray, undated, probably November 1821.

31 See Marchand, iii, 930 and n.

32 See L&J, vi, 14–15 n.: and Chew, pp. 80 ff.

33 Samuel Smiles, Memoir and Correspondence of the late John Murray (London, 1891), i, 428.

34 L&J, vi, 49; letter of 13 April 1822.

35 Murray MSS, letter of 29 October 1822; quoted in Marchand, iii, 1040.

36 L&J, vi, 138; letter of 9 November 1822.

37 Marchand, iii, 1048.

38 LBC, ii, 115; letter of 26 June 1819.

39 LBC, ii, 210.

40 L&J, vi, 30–31; letter of 4 March 1822.

41 On 28 November Byron wrote Kinnaird to ask: “Does R[idgeway] publish the four or six [Cantos of Don Juan]?” (LBC, ii, 233). Ridgeway's name is filled in by the editor, John Murray.

42 L&J, vi, 149; letter of 19 December 1822.

43 Examiner, 20 July 1823. The Examiner of the preceding week (13 July, Sunday) announces the publication of Cantos vi–viii of Don Juan “On Tuesday next.”

44 Examiner, 20 July 1823.

45 Cyril Pearl, The Girl with the Swansdown Seat (New York, 1955), p. 239.

46 Examiner, 27 July 1823.

47 Examiner, 10 August 1823.

48 Examiner, 13 July 1823.

49 Cf. Charles Cuthbert Southey, The Life and Correspondence of the late Robert Soulhey (London, 1850), v, 18–19.

50 See Richard Altick, The Cowden Clarkes (London, 1948), pp. 52 ff.

51 One question relating to Byron bibliography which I have not been able to answer must be at least mentioned here. In 1828, there appeared a two-volume octavo edition of Don Juan, printed and published by Thomas Davison, Whitefriars. Davison, under whose solitary name the earliest volumes of Don Juan had appeared, was printing for Murray at least as late as 1831 (the 1832 Works of Byron were printed by A. Spottiswoode). Murray, of course, did not at this time own the copyright to the later Cantos of Don Juan. It seems hardly probable that John Murray himself could have been responsible for a piratical edition of Cantos vi–xvi of Don Juan; it would appear more probable that Davison had decided to strike out for himself. One point of evidence in favor of the latter supposition would be the fact that on the third edition of The Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1832 by Edward Lumley, there appears the imprint of Davison, Simmons, and Company, Whitefriars. If the two Davisons are the same, then Thomas Davison is clearly connected with one violation of copyright.