When Tennyson heard the news of
Byron's death, the anniversary of which occurred this month, he went out into
the woods and carved 'Byron is dead' onto a rock. This unconventional and
dramatic gesture was perhaps the most fitting of all monuments made to the
infamously passionate, debauched, charismatic, emotionally conflicted and 'mad,
bad and dangerous to know' (according to his lover Lady Caroline Lamb) leading
figure in the British Romantic movement.
On the 19th April 1824, Byron succumbed to a violent fever while fighting against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, aged just 36. In Greece he was venerated as a hero, and the country's national poet, Dionysios Solomos, wrote To the Death of Lord Byron in his honour. Commemoration of Byron's death among his contemporaries in his native Britain, however, was shockingly lacking. Westminster Abbey refused even to bury his remains due to his 'questionable morality,' as sadly the celebrity and scandalous public image he was so eager to cultivate in the early years of his career had by then overshadowed the genius of his contribution to English literature. Twenty years later, the statue commissioned by his friends was turned down at the Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, the British Museum and the National Gallery. The neglect of the poet's death was so evident that a century later the American cartoonist Robert Ripley drew a picture of Byron's beloved dog Boatswain's grave with the caption 'Lord Byron's dog has a magnificent tomb while Lord Byron himself has none.' In 1907 a correspondent for The New York Times, wrote, 'People are beginning to ask whether this ignoring of Byron is not a thing of which England should be ashamed ... a bust or a tablet might be put in the Poets' Corner and England be relieved of ingratitude toward one of her really great sons.' It was not until 1969, 145 years after Byron's death, that a memorial to him was finally placed in Westminster Abbey.
Given no fitting epitaph due to his intensely controversial private life, Byron work and its legacy have always served as his best memorial. With this in mind Classic Rare Books presents our scarce proof copy of 'The Giaour' in honour of the recent anniversary of his death.
On the 19th April 1824, Byron succumbed to a violent fever while fighting against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, aged just 36. In Greece he was venerated as a hero, and the country's national poet, Dionysios Solomos, wrote To the Death of Lord Byron in his honour. Commemoration of Byron's death among his contemporaries in his native Britain, however, was shockingly lacking. Westminster Abbey refused even to bury his remains due to his 'questionable morality,' as sadly the celebrity and scandalous public image he was so eager to cultivate in the early years of his career had by then overshadowed the genius of his contribution to English literature. Twenty years later, the statue commissioned by his friends was turned down at the Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, the British Museum and the National Gallery. The neglect of the poet's death was so evident that a century later the American cartoonist Robert Ripley drew a picture of Byron's beloved dog Boatswain's grave with the caption 'Lord Byron's dog has a magnificent tomb while Lord Byron himself has none.' In 1907 a correspondent for The New York Times, wrote, 'People are beginning to ask whether this ignoring of Byron is not a thing of which England should be ashamed ... a bust or a tablet might be put in the Poets' Corner and England be relieved of ingratitude toward one of her really great sons.' It was not until 1969, 145 years after Byron's death, that a memorial to him was finally placed in Westminster Abbey.
Given no fitting epitaph due to his intensely controversial private life, Byron work and its legacy have always served as his best memorial. With this in mind Classic Rare Books presents our scarce proof copy of 'The Giaour' in honour of the recent anniversary of his death.
Bound together with 'The Bride of Abydos' (1813), 'Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte' (1814) and 'The Corsair' (1814), this extremely rare copy includes seven interleaved pages of manuscript additions. The book is utterly unique, featuring pencil markings in the text where changes and spelling were later made. The additions in the text are believed to be in the hand of Sir James Bland Lamb (born James Burgess) who was related to Lady Byron.
'The Giaour' was wildly successful on its first publication in June 1813, following Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in establishing Byron as the bright star of contemporary British poetry. Following the first edition of 700 lines, several more versions were published before the end of 1813, each one longer than the last (the final published text would nearly double the first edition's length at 1,300 lines). By 1815, 14 editions had been published, and Byron had written more popular 'Turkish Tales', several of which are bound with our copy of 'The Giaour', including 'The Corsair', which sold 10,000 copies on its first day of publication. The manuscript alterations made in this proof copy were included in the fourth and fifth editions of the work, making the book a symbol of the ever-changing vitality of Byron's poetry and of the poet's roaring runaway success.
'Giaour', or Gâvur in modern Turkish means infidel or non-believer, and the poem centres around a Byronic hero, the giaour of the title, whose lover, Leila, is thrown into the sea and drowned by her master, Hassan, a Turkish custom of which Byron became aware while on the Grand Tour in 1809 and 1810 with his friend John Cam Hobhouse. 'The Giaour' examines the range of emotions experienced by the title character, from the passionate anger and jealousy which leads him to murder Hassan in an act of vengeance, to his eventual remorse and seclusion in a monastery. The first in the series of his Oriental Romances, the narrative juxtaposes Eastern and Western concepts of love, sex and the afterlife through its use of three narrators. More poignantly, it semi-autobiographically reflects his disillusionment with the overnight fame Childe Harold's Pilgrimage brought him, and the self-destructive lust, melancholia and remorse attendant on his illicit love affairs with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and Lady Frances Webster. It also eerily foreshadows the self-imposed exile he would enter a few years later following the breakdown of his marriage in the wake of allegations of sodomy and incest which sullied his reputation even after death.
'The Giaour' may also be credited with the mainstream introduction of the ultimate Byronic hero – the Vampire – into the British literary consciousness. The modern mania for Vampires in literature and on screen may be traced to 'The Giaour', following Byron's acquaintance with the Vampire myths while on the Grand Tour. In the book, the Ottoman narrator predicts that in punishment for his crime, the giaour will be tormented by transforming into a vampire after his death, condemned to kill his loved ones and drink their blood. Byron continued to be associated with the Vampire, the frequent depiction of which as a debauched aristocrat in the mid-Victorian gothic horror novel was largely inspired by Byron's 'The Burial: A Fragment'. Certainly, Byron distinguished the vampire in the popular imagination as the debauched aristocrat as opposed to the rotting corpse of much Vampiric folklore. The popular 1819 novella, The Vampyre, which was based on Byron's 'Fragment' and his mistress Lady Caroline Lamb's unflattering roman-a-clef fantasia, Glenarvon, consolidated his reputation as connected to the occult undead. It was written by his former friend and physician, John Polidori, and the titular central character, Lord Ruthven, was based on his experiences with Byron. Incorrectly attributed to Byron for many years it was even, much to his chagrin, included in later compilations of his work.
Indeed, Byron's obsession with a cursed post mortem existence as a Vampire is possibly the most tragic of his eerie foreshadowings. In the wake of the anniversary of his death, and with the knowledge of his exile from public life for many years following it, Classic Rare Books offers 'The Giaour' as a a monument to his enduring brilliance.
