Murray's Letters to Byron

This is a stupendous feat of scholarship. Andrew Nicholson has taken 171 letters from the publisher John Murray to his favourite poet Lord Byron and annotated them in such a copious and meticulous way that a whole world of literary activity in the early nineteenth century is illuminated. Information which the more casual reader had previously found in Leslie Marchand's twelve-volume edition of Byron's letters and journals is here hugely amplified and, in many instances, corrected. There is in this book more than some will feel they need to know, but for admirers of Byron Nicholson's notes are a treasure trove. The best way to read the letters which the notes elucidate, is in conjunction with those from Byron to which they correspond, in so far as that is possible (even in the life of a writer as richly documented as almost any other in the history of English literature, there are the inevitable gaps). Byron's letters to Murray from abroad, Nicholson boldly claims in his preface, are 'unquestionably the best he ever wrote', and this because he is in them 'most himself' (p. xix). Quite when such a complex be in gas Byron was 'most himself' is a contentious issue, and the use of 'unquestionably' in a value judgement will in evitably incite the more perverse of Nicholson's readers to think of other people to whom Byron also wrote very well: Lady Melbourne perhaps, Tom Moore, or his closest friend John Cam Hobhouse. Yet his letters to Murray are indeed hard to beat.

The important proviso in Nicholson's claim is 'from abroad'. Until the period of his catastrophic marriage, Byron's letters to Murray are predominantly concerned with business matters, but, after his wife had left him and he had gone into self-imposed exile in Italy, they become much more expansive. This is partly because he knew that they would be shown or read to a number of friends, relations, or influential literary figures who dropped into Murray's rooms in Albemarle Street. Not all those who saw them were impressed. In May 1819, for example, Byron had written a lively letter from Venice in which he described his affair with a young girl called Angelina and how she had asked him whether he might not somehow dispose of his wife. He says how struck he had been by Angelina's significant silence after he had explained the difficulties and rhetorically enquired: 'you would not have me poison her?'¹ Murray showed this letter to Tom Moore who, as Nicholson's notes indicate, was morally indignant. His main complaint was against Byron's characteristic lack of discretion – although his deformed foot had made him exceptionally self-conscious, there is a paradoxical element in his behaviour which verges on exhibitionism (especially in relation to his sexual exploits) – but another source of Moore's disapproval is snobbery. He is outraged that Byron should have told the story of Angelina 'to him (Murray, the bookseller – a person so out of his caste & to whom he writes formally beginning"Dear Sir")' (p. 278). Byron had a strong sense of rank but he enjoyed relaxed relations with his social inferiors. When according to Leigh Hunt in an article which appeared in The Tatler in January 1831, he teasingly and affectionately said of Moore that 'Tommy loves a lord' he was identifying in his friend the insecurity of someone who wanted to forget that his father had been a grocer and as much a tradesman therefore as Murray.

Byron's letters are always absorbing, whereas those of Murray are of historical rather than literary interest. For a modern reader, their most immediately striking feature is likely to be their deferential tone. 'My dear Lord – & Master', Murray addresses Byron at one point, and at another he signs off by calling himself his lordship's 'grateful & faithful humble servant' (pp. 56, 122). Between his greetings and farewells he tries to turn...