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  • Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture
  • Tom Mole
Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture. By Ghislaine McDayter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 242. ISBN 9781438425252. $75.00.

Ghislaine McDayter's stimulating book sets out to overturn a variety of assumptions that Byron's modern critics have too often shared with the earliest attacks on his work. Byron's enormous fame, his commercial success and the highly charged emotions he aroused have always been vaguely embarrassing for many commentators – at best a distraction from rigorous engagement with his poetry, at worst a guarantee that he pandered to the debased tastes of an unthinking mass audience. Attempts to minimise this embarrassment have led to a false division between scholars and fans, between thinking and desiring, between reflecting on Byron's poetry and consuming it, between political satire and romantic tales. McDayter traces a long line of critics, from John Morley and Algernon Charles Swinburne to Samuel Chew and William Calvert, who have sought to rescue Byron from his own fans as a prerequisite for studying his poetry. Rather than condescend to Byron's fans, McDayter takes them seriously, producing a sophisticated, theoretically informed and historically detailed account of what Byromania meant in the Romantic period, and how attitudes towards it have persisted in responses to Byron ever since.

McDayter's account of Byromania's cultural significance offers two modifications to current understandings. Firstly, she argues that it was not primarily driven by the publication of poetry volumes, despite the often repeated stories of coaches blocking the street outside Murray's premises and the unprecedented sales of The Corsair. Selling volumes of poetry was obviously important, but McDayter argues that it was periodicals, newspapers and magazines that produced Byromania's biggest impact. The fragmentary style of poems such as The Giaour lent itself to excerpts in magazines, and helped to lock periodicals and poetry volumes into a symbiotic relationship, in which discussion of Byron boosted sales of magazines, which in turn encouraged sales of books.

Secondly, McDayter claims that the real significance of Byromania resides not so much in its creation of a new mass readership, but in the creation of a new mass of potential writers, as Byron's readers produced continuations, pastiches, parodies, imitations and responses of their own. The fan letters in the Murray archive are one of McDayter's sources here, but she does not quote from them very often, or always accurately. Her quotation from a letter from 'Echo', soliciting an assignation with Byron in Green Park, differs significantly from another transcription I have seen: McDayter seems to conflate two documents, prints some lines of Echo's poetry as prose and dates the undated letter to 1814 without citing any evidence.

McDayter follows Marilyn Butler, Daniel Watkins and others in reading Byron's tales as political allegories, taking Leila in The Giaour as a figure for Greece, and the eponymous hero as a political liberator. She understands the poems as a critique of the 'moderate republican position' of many of Byron's associates, which offered to replace a tyrannical regime with a more 'benevolent', but no more democratic, one. This position failed to take account of the violence of political revolution, which McDayter sees as inevitable because it necessarily [End Page 171] repeats the primary violence of establishing political power in the state of nature. The heroes of Byron's tales find themselves caught up in the power structures they claim to oppose, while his heroines are caught in a patriarchal double bind, unable to desire and still remain desirable.

At the centre of McDayter's theory of Byromania are two accounts of hysteria. The first emerged in the eighteenth century as a nascent crowd psychology. (Here McDayter uses recent work by Jon Mee on 'enthusiasm', Adela Pinch on 'feelings' and Mary Poovey on the 'social body'.) Edmund Burke, Phillippe Pinel, Hippolyte Taine and, later, Jean-Martin Charcot theorised hysteria as a susceptibility to emotional excess and a tendency to indulge one's desires. In place of an earlier conception that grounded hysteria in the female body, and specifically the wandering womb, they understood hysteria to be caused by...

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