Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship

Chapter Four: Only “a Little above the Usual Run of Periodical Poesy”: Byron’s Island and the Liberal

Four Only “a Little above the Usual Run of Periodical Poesy” Byron’s Island and the Liberal Byron’s epigraph to Childe Harold famously describes the world as a type of book, in which familiarity with only one country is comparable to having read only one page. The universe is a kind of book of which you have read but one page when you have seen only your own country. I have leafed through a sufficient number to have found them equally bad. This study has not been unprofitable for me. I hated my country. All the peculiarities of the different people among whom I have lived have reconciled me to it. Even if I should have gained no other benefit from my voyages than that one, I should never regret the pains, nor the fatigues.1 In this metaphorical comparison of world to text, Byron’s epigraph anticipates the premise implicit in much late Romantic writing. Like Lamb, Hogg, and Landon, Byron conflates geography and textuality, and indeed seems to foreshadow the connection of global geography to textual form that Byron’s female emulator, Landon, would perfect. But closer reading of the epigraph also reveals a different significance to the metaphor , and one which assumes a political position upon that text. Byron, like de Monbron, the source of the epigraph, “hated [his] own country,” and in claiming that travel “reconciled” him to his home, uses the literary metaphor as a paradigm by which to conceptualize his national subjectivity . This application of the geographical to the literary in Byron’s epigraph reiterates his distinction from his would-be female imitator, whose depoliticized use of Napoleonic history is antithetical to his own, and also distinguishes him from other late Romantic associations of the Only “a Little above the Usual Run of Periodical Poesy” 143 literary with global geography. Where Landon uses geography as a figure for a literary device in her periodical and nonperiodical writing, and like other periodical collaborators uses empire as a parallel for the periodical industry, Byron links geography with textuality precisely because the literary promises an effective model of political response to the changing conditions of the imperial world. His explicitly political response to literature is utterly characteristic of Byron’s conflation of poetry and politics, and by extension raises the question as to how the epigraph, which wonderfully foreshadows so much of Byron’s work, might also prefigure his late involvement with periodicals. Although the Liberal, the journal that Byron cofounded with Shelley and Leigh Hunt, lasted for only four issues, its origins amid the intensifying radicalism of Byron’s late poetry make the publication an intriguing episode in his oeuvre. Both it and the individual works that Byron composed with the Liberal in mind provide a strident assertion of the contemporary power of periodicals and an unusual and important case study with which to conclude this study of late Romantic collaborations with postNapoleonic periodicals. Few studies of the Liberal sufficiently consider the curious fact of the journal’s history as an English periodical largely composed and edited outside of British shores. The short-lived journal, which was formulated while Byron and Shelley were living in self-imposed exile in Italy, was a product of the circle of authors surrounding and corresponding with them while the two were in Pisa, and it was only printed in London upon the authors’ forwarding of manuscripts to John Hunt. Such unusual circumstances of publication are a notable exception among most periodicals in that they reversed the usual trajectory of the form to a nation’s readers. Instead of originating from the metropole and emanating outward in the conventionally centripetal role of periodicals in consolidating national culture, the Liberal began in the periphery and sought entrance in the home country, in a provocative reversal of the territorial coverage by which periodicals are supposed to buttress national culture. Indeed, this spatial alterity embodied in the Liberal as a whole is particularly apparent in The Island, Byron’s last complete narrative poem, and a work that he composed with the Liberal in mind. A fictional revisiting of the notorious 1789 mutiny on the Bounty, in which British sailors on commission for the East India Company revolted in an attempt to return to paradisal Tahiti, The Island is consistent with the Liberal’s progressive 144 Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs ideology in both subject and setting, and not surprisingly...