Joy Unconfined! Lord Byron's Grand Tour Re-Toured (review)

It is rare to find a book that relies as heavily as this one does on your own research; but, although Ian Strathcarron gives my online edition of Hobhouse's diary a fulsome credit on pages 254-55, he relies on other sources provided by me that go unmentioned: and he doesn't spell my name correctly.

Perhaps modelling his book on Stephen Minta's On a Voiceless Shore (1997), Strathcarron interleaves a retelling of Byron's first Mediterranean voyage with a telling of his own (and his wife's) 2008 reconstruction and reliving of the same, in their ketch, the Vasco da Gama. Equipped with satellite telephones, printouts from Google Earth, and other devices that would have made Byron's trip more easy but no less memorable, they trace his footsteps, meeting people with whom we are all familiar: on Malta, Peter Vassallo and 'his equally brainy wife'; in Athens, that 'very fine fellow' Andreas Makridis; in Messolonghi, Rosa Florou, who is described as 'this little bundle of Greek energy'. Although he visits Tirana, and knows of Afrim Karagjozi, he records no meeting with him.

This is an immensely readable and entertaining book, and I recommend it highly: but it is not an academic book. Perhaps that is why it is so readable and entertaining – but the book's non-academic way with evidence lessens its reliability. To restrict oneself just to the Prologue: I would like to know how Strathcarron knows that Byron's 1809 luggage contained 'two army beds and four camp beds'. He buys '3 Patent Bedsteads Compleat' on 13 July 1813, for a journey he does not make, but there are no records of his 1809 purchases. I find no evidence that Hobhouse nearly dropped out of the tour, but was redeemed by more Byronic borrowing, and as for 'Hanson somehow from someone topped it up' ('it' refers to Byron's pre-tour borrowing from Scrope Davies), it was not Hanson who 'topped it up' but Byron himself, borrowing from – and not indemnifying – his aunt, the Misses Parkyns, Mrs Massingberd and, with fatal results, his own mother.

Such minor sleights of hand with ascertainable fact occur throughout the book. I am surprised, for instance, that Lord Strathcarron does not mention the huge difference between Byron and your run-of-the-mill peer. Byron owned his Nottinghamshire property outright (normally one held it in trust), and could thus sell it, which, in the end, he did. Before doing so, however, he used the property as collateral for loans. Few writers, aristocratic or otherwise, make much of this perhaps embarrassing fact.

Elsewhere, Byron the nobleman is chidden for his arrogance:

If he had earned his peerage, or even paid or whored for it, one might understand this grandstanding, but the fact that he won it in a hereditary lottery he didn't even know he had entered should have attracted more modesty, less self-importance.

Yet, curiously, some of Byron's more blatant instances of 'grandstanding' are omitted from Stratchcarron's account. For example, the reason why Byron did not at first go ashore at Malta was because the shore-batteries refused to honour him with a salute before he went to the audience with the Sultan on 10 July 1810. The poet refused a similar trip to the Caimacan on 28 May because the ambassador would take precedence over him.

On his own tour, Strathcarron seems to have a downloaded and printed-out copy of Hobhouse's diary always at hand, and investigates every detail in it. Is this hotel still there? – No. Is this theatre still there? – Yes! And in he goes to see it close up. By the end of the book, there are few things recorded by Hobhouse in his diary, letters and book, or by Byron in his letters and verse, that Strathcarron has not re-examined, often with new ideas based on fresh research. We read with distress that Donna...