Byron Society of America
- Byron Society of America
The new home of the Byron Society of America (BSA) Byron Collection at Drew University figured prominently in the life of the society during 2011. In January, the collection was officially introduced at the Drew University Library Gala hosted by Robert Weisbuch, President of the University, and Andrew Scrimgeour, Dean of the University’s Libraries. In February, the BSA’s Board of Directors held their annual meeting at Drew in the Methodist Archive, the Special Collections building where the Byron Collection is now housed and undergoing cataloguing. Following the board meeting, the directors were given a tour of the Special Collections facilities and exhibition space by Christopher Anderson, Methodist librarian and co-ordinator of the university’s special collections.
The media also focused its attention on the Byron Collection in 2011. In late June, the Sundance Channel’s ‘Love/Lust’ series entitled ‘The Undead’ featured a segment on Byron’s influence on the evolution of the vampire legend. The segment contained images from the Byron Collection, as well as images from my own private collection. BSA member Catherine Siemann was interviewed for the episode, as was James V. Hart, the screenwriter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who gave a keynote address at the 2010 International Byron Society Conference in Boston.
In August, the Newark Star Ledger reported that a Drew alumni working in the Morristown National Historic Park Library offered to lend the university a Byron letter housed there when he learned that the Byron Collection had been given to his alma mater. Subsequently, BSA board member and member of the joint BSA/Drew Byron Collection Advisory Group, Doucet Devin Fischer, consulted Leslie Marchand’s Byron’s Letters and Journals and identified the 1822 letter from Byron to Captain John Hay as a forgery. The Star Ledger story was picked up by the Associated Press and thereafter by national and local television and radio news outlets, as well as by major newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The BSA continued its support of the College English Association’s annual conference by sponsoring a panel at the Association’s spring 2011 meeting in St Petersburg, Florida. The panel, ‘Fortune in Romanticism’, featured talks by BSA members Ann Hawkins and Adam Mekler. In the autumn, the BSA hosted a talk given by Benjamin Markovits about writing Childish Loves, the third novel in his Byron trilogy. The talk was held at the Center for Fiction in New York City, where BSA members joined other devotees of literary fiction for an evening of conversation.
An online version of the Houghton Library Exhibition ‘“Let Satire Be My Song”: Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ can now be found on BSA’s website (www.byronsociety.org). The exhibition was curated by BSA board member Peter Accardo, in conjunction with the 36th International Byron Society Conference in Boston. A travel grant to the 37th International Byron Society Conference in Vallodolid, Spain, was awarded by the BSA Travel Grants Committee to Adam McCune, [End Page 208] from the University of Virginia, in order for him to present a paper titled ‘Naming Ianthe: Charlotte Harley and Byron’s Classical Sources’.
Looking ahead, plans are underway for a BSA panel on ‘Lord Byron: Poetry in Manuscript, Poetry in Print’ at the January 2012 MLA Convention in Seattle, Washington, to be moderated by Gary Dyer. And, in 2013, a major conference will be held at Drew University to celebrate the completion of the Byron Collection’s cataloguing.
- French Byron Society
In 2010, the French Byron Society met three times, issued its annual Bulletin and two of its members contributed to the 36th International Byron Society Conference in Boston.
On 23 January, Danièle Sarrat gave a much expanded version of her Messolonghi paper on ‘Alexandre Colin, friend of Delacroix and illustrator of Byron’, while at the General Assembly on 20 March I presented the results of my further enquiries into Byron’s visit to Ali Pasha as seen by the French. Based on the paper I gave in Albania in 2009, and enriched with new discoveries in the French Military Archive and the...
