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’.