Lord Byron at Harrow School: Speaking Out, Talking Back, Acting Up, Bowing Out (review)

Lord Byron at Harrow School: Speaking Out, Talking Back, Acting Up, Bowing Out by Paul Elledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 221. $39.95 cloth.

In Lord Byron at Harrow School, Paul Elledge focuses on Byron's checkered career at Harrow (1801-1805) and his three Speech Day performances there: as King Latinus in Virgil's Aeneid, the villainous Zanga in Edward Young's The Revenge, and King Lear raging against the storm. Byron entered Harrow at the age of thirteen, fatherless, hypersensitive about his lame foot, ill-prepared academically, spoiled by maternal indulgence, with few social connections, and poorer than many of his schoolmates. One of his instructors complained bitterly about the young lord's "Inattention to Business, and his propensity to make others laugh and disregard their Employments as much as himself" (18). During his years at public school, Byron had to contend with antagonistic tutors, the taunts of his fellow pupils (he later claimed that he won all but one of his eight fist fights), torrents of verbal abuse from his mother, and (possibly) sexual advances from his tenant at Newstead Abbey, Lord Henry Grey de Ruthyn. But in spite of his traumatic experiences, he eventually rose to prominence at Harrow, becoming the leader of the student opposition to the new headmaster and distinguishing himself in three dramatic recitations. His Speech Day declamations, which took place on 5 July 1804, 6 June 1805, and 4 July 1805, played an important role in his self-fashioning. As Byron indicates in entry 34 of his Detached Thoughts (written 1821-1822), his "temper and disposition" changed radically during his last year at Harrow.

Elledge suggests in an endnote that his book is a prequel to Jerome Christensen's Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (1993). Whereas Christensen's account of the poet's identity formation commences with the publication of Hours of Idleness (1807), Elledge maintains that Byron's self-invention began several years earlier. His analysis of Byron's Harrow career is informed by recent studies of Romantic theatricality by Judith Pascoe and others. Growing up in a stagestruck culture, the young lord self-consciously developed and refined his theatrical skills, writing dramatic letters to his mother and half-sister, posing moodily in the Harrow churchyard, attending several performances of the thirteen-year-old acting sensation William Henry West Betty ("Master Betty"), and delivering dramatic recitations on Speech Day. These declamations become for Elledge "auditions, [the] inaugural performances of 'Byron'—in the provincial run, so to speak, before his London premiere" (1).

A partial biography like Lord Byron at Harrow School has an important advantage over a full-length biography: its limited scope enables it to examine a part of the subject's life in great detail. Thus Elledge is able to provide us with an exceptionally thorough analysis of Byron's sudden and unexplained break with Lord Grey. A birth-to-death biography is, however, better designed than a narrowly focused one to make generalizations about its subject and to identify patterns in an individual's life. Elledge suggests that we can detect "the seed and shape of the 1820 [1824?] defender of Greece" in the young lord guarding Harrow "against the invasion from Cambridge [by the new Headmaster Dr. George Butler]" (100), but due to the limitations of his study he cannot develop this point. Moreover, he cannot consider the influence of the poet's early theatrical performances on his dramas.

Although Elledge asserts that "Whether Byron's harsh treatment of many women reflects his own misuse by Grey and others, the psychiatrists must determine" (177n.26), his account of the poet's adolescence is clearly "psychobiographical" (14). His approach eschews, however, "the emphasis on infantile experience in Freudian psychology and paradigms derived from it" (3), which would suggest that Byron's personality was already formed by the...