Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt (transparently entitled ‘Childe Burun’s Pilgrimage’ in its first draft) could be called the most original English long poem of its age – especially as Wordsworth’s autobiographical The Prelude remained unpublished until 1850. But topographical poems had appeared long before it was published. Wordsworth himself started his poetic career with items like ‘An Evening Walk’, set in the Lake District, and Descriptive Sketches, set in the Alps, and Byron had read Waller Rodwell Wright’s Horae Ionicae (‘Greek Hours’, 1809) before setting off on his travels. The form Byron chose, too – the stanza first used in English by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1596) – had remained in use since the great Elizabethan’s day, most effectively by James Beattie (The Minstrel, 1774) and James Thomson (The Castle of Indolence, 1748). It was what Byron did with these traditions that ‘combined to make the world stark mad about Childe Harold and Byron’, as his contemporary Samuel Rogers put it.

Readers of Byron’s poem normally confront it in its entirety, and that is how I shall treat it here. But it should be kept in mind that Childe Harold was begun in October 1809 and completed in March 1818. It dominated the first half of Byron’s poetic career just as Don Juan (July 1818–May 1823) dominated the second. Being intermittent projects for eight and five years, respectively, the two poems incorporate a good deal of change over their length, and are punctuated by other works of very different kinds (see Table 2). Four years elapsed between the publication of Cantos I and II of Childe Harold in 1812 and Canto III in 1816: years dominated by the ‘Eastern Tales’ discussed in the following chapter. But Byron clearly saw both Childe Harold and Don Juan as ongoing wholes, built upon earlier instalments, and the account offered here attempts to honour that intention.