Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Dedication
- Introduction: Reading from the Margins
- 1 Contesting the Jupien Effect: Annotation in the Eighteenth Century
- 2 The Author in the Margins: Annotation as Site of Conflict
- 3 Margins and Marginality: Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806)
- 4 The Imperial Collection: Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer: A Metrical Romance (1801)
- 5 The Margins of the Nation: Robert Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and Walter Scott's Waverley (1814)
- 6 Byron's Errantry: Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse's Annotation for Cantos I, II and IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1811–16)
- Conclusion: Romantic Marginality and Beyond
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
6 - Byron's Errantry: Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse's Annotation for Cantos I, II and IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1811–16)
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Dedication
- Introduction: Reading from the Margins
- 1 Contesting the Jupien Effect: Annotation in the Eighteenth Century
- 2 The Author in the Margins: Annotation as Site of Conflict
- 3 Margins and Marginality: Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806)
- 4 The Imperial Collection: Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer: A Metrical Romance (1801)
- 5 The Margins of the Nation: Robert Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and Walter Scott's Waverley (1814)
- 6 Byron's Errantry: Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse's Annotation for Cantos I, II and IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1811–16)
- Conclusion: Romantic Marginality and Beyond
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Introduction: ‘[N]ote Or Text /I Never Know the Word which will Come Next’: Lord Byron's Annotation
Lord Byron was an extremely prolific annotator of his own works. In his debut collection, Hours of Idleness (1807), Byron provides footnotes for poems such as ‘On Leaving Newstead Abbey’, ‘To Woman’ and ‘Oscar of Alva: A Tale’, citing sources, translating obscure terms and placing the poems within their personal or historical context. A footnote, in part, sparked his next composition. In a hostile review, Henry Brougham took issue with Byron's translation of ‘[t]he Pibroch’ as ‘[t]he Bagpipe’ in an annotation to the Highland song ‘Lachin Y Gair’, observing that, in spite of Byron's purported Scottish ancestry, ‘the poet had not learnt that pibroach is not bagpipe, any more than duet means a fiddle’. Byron responded with the extended verse satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) – an annotated assault on Brougham and his Whig social circle that lashed out at an additional cast of public personalities, from Robert Southey to the Italian theatrical duo ‘Naldi and Catalini’ (Giuseppe Naldi and Angelica Catalini). Byron's scattergun annotative attacks recall The Pursuits, earning English Bards comparisons to the ‘Dunciad’ and the ‘Baviad’. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, Byron was a keen admirer of Mathias, writing to the former satirist in 1812 to express his wish that Mathias would forego his self-imposed exile in Italy and write another work equivalent to The Pursuits: ‘[I] hope that some national Pursuit will enable us to claim you entirely our own’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Romantic MarginalityNation and Empire on the Borders of the Page, pp. 117 - 138Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014