Will the Public Please Step Forward? Libel Law and Public Opinion in Byron’s The Vision of Judgment

ANDREW MCKENDRY Will the Public Please Step Forward? Libel Law and Public Opinion in Byron’s The Vision ofJudgment T he legal repercussions of byron’s the vision of judgment are well known. John Hunt, who had published the poem in the first issue of The Liberal, was tried for libel, found guilty by jury, and sentenced to pay one hundred pounds as well as to enter into securities for five years.’ In many ways, the prosecution was typical of the period. Decided by special jury, the trial involved a pair of witnesses and hinged on a reading of the charged material. But there was a distinctive irony to targeting the work for prosecution: The Vision ofJudgment is a poem about the limitations of judgment, the inadequacy of representation, and the prohibitive heteroge­ neity of public opinion. Considering his low opinion of the English legal system, we might rea­ sonably wonder why Byron retains the judicial framework employed by his satirical target Robert Southey in A Vision ofJudgement—complete with recognizable legal language and protocol—to censure the Laureate and condemn the late king. But whereas Southey employs the framework to legitimize his “judgment” of George ill, the trial Byron stages is deliber­ ately abortive. The arguments are inconclusive, the witnesses fail to pro­ vide any definitive testimony, and the trial ultimately disintegrates, derailed as much by a defective process as by discordant poetry. While this result reflects on the English legal system more broadly, the poem engages with a specific judicial problem, one that was highlighted by the slew oflibel trials that led up to the publication of The Vision', the disconnect between public opinion and courtroom invocations of “the people.” In his Vision, Byron is i. “The King against John Hunt, 1824,” in Reports of State Trials: New Series (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889), 2:104. Subsequent citations to this trial are cited in the text. SiR, 54 (Winter 2015) 525 526 ANDREW MCKENDRY not simply repudiating Southey’s verdict, but reimagining the relationship between the courtroom and the public. By conspicuously failing to repre­ sent public opinion fully in the heavenly trial, The Vision ofJudgment underscores the representational limitations of the judicial process— limitations that had become especially prominent in 1821. Criticism oflibel law was intense when Byron conceived the poem, in part because shifts in the interpretation and prosecution of libel law had fundamentally compro­ mised its application in the courtroom. The gradual implementation of the 1792 Libel Act, which allowed the jury to determine whether or not a work was libellous in nature, made trials increasingly dependent on the in­ vocation of public opinion. But in practice, effectively representing the reading public in the courtroom proved impossible, and libel prosecutions were required to make expansive claims (both implicit and explicit) to speak for the English people—claims that were unavoidably specious and unsubstantiated. In his Vision, Byron deliberately reproduces the central de­ fect of contemporary libel trials, crucially premising the heavenly trial on an abortive invocation of “the people.” A “universal shoal of shades” is called to voice the public attitude against the late king, but conclusively representing the sentiments ofthis motley crowd proves impossible, as nei­ ther Wilkes, Junius, nor Southey can move beyond their own private pri­ orities and concerns. Accentuating the failure of these key witnesses, The Vision ofJudgment foregrounds the disjunction between the individual wit­ ness and the multifarious multitude, demonstrating that public opinion cannot be effectively reduced to “one or two persons.”2 Though Byron’s poem mirrors the English legal system, none of the existing scholarship on The Vision ofJudgment has considered the poem’s ju­ risprudential subtexts. For most of the twentieth century, critics typically situated the poem within a biographical narrative, treating it first and fore­ most as a satirical response to Robert Southey’s A Vision ofJudgement (1821).3 “The best introduction to Byron’s The Vision ofJudgment of 1822,” commentators have regularly suggested, “is the laureate poem which in­ spired it.”4 While this approach helped explain the origins of the poem, it necessarily left the intellectual and historical contexts of The Vision com­ 2. Byron, The Vision ofJudgment, in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical...