Lalla Rookh and the Afterlife of Allegory

Mr. Moore ought not to have written Lalla Rookh,even for three thousand guineas. …It is not, however, a failure, so much as an evasion

—William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets

To-morrow be with me, as soon as you can, sir,All ready and dress'd for proceeding to spunge on(According to compact) the wit in the dungeon—Pray Phoebus at length our political maliceMay not get us lodgings within the same palace!

—Lord Byron to Thomas Moore, on visiting Leigh Hunt in jail¹

Although the sum Thomas Moore actually received for his poem was in pounds and not guineas, it was still in 1814 the largest sum of money ever promised for a poem, let alone one that was mostly unwritten. Two years prior the celebrated author of The Irish Melodies (1808) had resolved to compose a poem on "some Oriental subject." It was canny decision. As his friend Byron pointed out in a letter of encouragement, orientalist fiction was a popular and lucrative market to which the public flocked. When Byron published his own oriental tale, The Giaour, in 1813, Moore's reaction, as captured in a letter to his friend Mary Godfrey, is at once understandable and puzzling:

Never was anything more unlucky for me than Byron's invasion of this region, which, when I entered it, was as yet untrodden, and whose chief charm consisted in the gloss and novelty of its features; but it will now be over-run with clumsy adventurers, and when I make my appearance, instead of being a leader as I looked to be, I must dwindle into a humble follower—a Byronian … I sometimes doubt whether I shall publish it at all; though at the same time, if I may trust my own judgment, I think I never wrote so well before.²

Moore's fear that Byron's poetry would eclipse his own was not unfounded. Byron's ability to rapidly churn out verse meant that The Giaour was rapidly succeeded by five other so-called "Turkish tales," all written before Moore finally published Laiia Rookh in 1817. But Moore's valid concerns about market saturation were accompanied by his more perplexing assertion of claim jumping. According to his letter, Byron had preempted Moore's invasion of virgin territory, but what unexplored region was this? If Moore was referring to the oriental oriental tale, that ground had been reconnoitered since the early eighteenth century by Galland's Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704) and the numerous Arabian Nights variants that followed. Byron's notes to The Giaour, which reference orientalist fictions by William Beckford, Robert Southey, and Samuel Johnson, evince the thoroughness with which, by the early nineteenth century, the Orient had already been mined for literary riches.

Moore's anxiety is better contextualized in the publication of Byron's third oriental tale, The Corsair (1814), which the poet prefaced with a lengthy, effusive dedication to Moore. In it, Byron notes that:

It is said [ … ] that you are engaged in the composition of a poem whose scene will be laid in the East; none can do those scenes so much justice. The wrongs of your own country, the magnificent and fiery spirit of her sons, the beauty and feeling of her daughters, may there be found… wildness, tenderness, and originality are part of your national claim to oriental descent, to which you have already thus far proved your title more clearly than the most zealous of your country's antiquarians.³

Politics was not new to orientalist fiction. Some of the earliest oriental tales—Giovanni Paolo Marana's Espion Turc (1684), Charles de Secondât de Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721), George Lyttelton's Persian Letters (1735)—were satires that critiqued French and English social and political norms. But what was different about The Giaour, with its opening jeremiad on the failure of Greek independence, and encroached on Moore's own ambitions, is evident in Byron's description of his hopes for Moore's nascent poem: the organic juxtaposition of an orientalist picturesque with a critique of political and social injustices...