This chapter analyses the ways in which Byron’s sense of himself as a writer was gradually, often painfully, informed by the evolving discourse of addiction as it was being medicalised throughout the early nineteenth century and subsequently used to describe a troubling new category of behaviour. For Byron, the act of writing and the emerging sense of his own identity as a poet is formulated not simply through metaphors of addiction, which he himself helped to write into culture, but also through its physical expression. This was much more than a figure of speech – his need to write emerged in painful, bodily manifestations; Byron did not simply write about his writing habit – his habit, in part, wrote him.

When asked to write an overview of contemporary Byron scholarship for this collection, I first turned to my predecessor Maureen M. McLane’s Wordsworth essay for this same series for inspiration. Her essay on “Wordsworth Now” opens with the following compelling statement on the Lake poet: “It is striking that, however much he has been historicized, psychoanalyzed, deconstructed, queered, eco-criticized, eulogized, interred and revived, Wordsworth in many ways remains ‘Wordsworth,’ the elaborately consolidated figure who emerges in the reviews and poetries (his own and others’) of the early nineteenth century.” As eloquent and insightful a piece as McLane’s essay is, it was clearly not going to provide any kind of template for my review of Byron since, whatever else might be said about the mad, bad lord, he was rarely if ever thought to be consistent. As he remarks in Don Juan, it is inconsistency that should be celebrated as nothing less than the “adoration of the real” and “the fine extension of the faculties” (CPW V: 155, ll. 1687, 1690). In short, “mobility” enables us to see and embrace the richness of a life worth living, and it was, arguably, only with a great deal of cajoling that Byron could be relied upon to consistently “remain” anywhere or be anything for a protracted period. Thus if, as McLane suggests, Wordsworth has come to represent a “consolidated” poet of the Romantic movement for us, then Byron stands before us as its most capricious and unconsolidated participant.