In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Dangerous to Show: Byron and His Portraits by Geoffrey Bond and Christine Kenyon Jones
  • Susan J. Wolfson
DANGEROUS TO SHOW: BYRON AND HIS PORTRAITS. By Geoffrey Bond and Christine Kenyon Jones. London: Unicorn Publishing Group, 2020. Pp. 157. ISBN 9 98-1-912 690-71-8. £25.00.

It’s not that we haven’t had books of and about Byron’s portraits. The man, the poet, was photogenic even before the world had such a word or the technology. Christine Kenyon Jones is a known collaborator in the publications, having edited and introduced Byron: The Image of the Poet (2008), produced with a subvention from her co-author on Dangerous to Show, the ever generous Geoffrey Bond, who also supplies to this latest project images from his own collection of Byroniana (he gave similar assistance to me for an image in my discussion of ‘apparitional Byron’ in Romantic Shades and Shadows, 2018). Dangerous to Show adds to an archive graced by Annette Peach’s elegantly analytical ‘Portraits of Byron’ (2000), John Clubbe’s sumptuous, erudite, expertly researched Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture (2005), and Robert Beevers’ canny study of the interaction of image and myth in The Byronic Image: The Poet Portrayed (2005); there are also numerous essays and chapters on Byron represented in a number of scholarly studies, and general media publications. Dangerous to Show includes a detailed bibliography for those who want to follow up and plunge deeper. I wish to note my own rather substantial chapter with which the authors seem unacquainted, ‘Gazing on Byron’, in Romantic Interactions (2010).

Any book subtitled Byron and His Portraits is bound to risk redundancy, even tautology. Byron is not only paired to his portraits (this ‘and’ is the marriage that lasted) but is scarcely to be desynonimised from them. He ‘sat for’ portraits as if he were portraying himself, he imitated his portraits in his parade through life, and portraits capture this passing parade. In all these turns, Byron stands forth as a tableau vivant of ‘Byron’, striking a pose, performing his portraiture, ever self-aware of his specularity: ‘The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / Th’ observed of all observers’ (III.i.161–62). That’s Ophelia, on the ‘Hamlet’ that was. Byron is often, especially in early portraits, Hamlet redivivus. ‘Lord Byron cuts a figure’, is how Keats put it for distant correspondents in America, the George Keatses, in February 1819, with his own pun on Byron’s victory over being ‘cut’ by society in the wake of the Separation. The very title ‘Dangerous to Show’ is another doubling, one famous comment wed to another. ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know’, said one lover (Caroline Lamb), doubly smitten by the overnight fame of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and its thrilling embodiment in the poet who magnetised the eponym for himself as an A-list celebrity to show off. The other comment is by Lady Byron’s friend, Lady Liddell, futilely cautioning her daughter, ‘He is dangerous to look at’ [End Page 69] (right. . . don’t look), on suddenly, horrifyingly, beholding Byron on the rooftop of St. Peter’s in Rome, in spring 1817 – one year after the even hotter celebrity of Childe Harold Canto III at the end of 1816, a year roiled by the international scandal of that ‘Separation’ and his Lordship’s departure from England.

This dynamic was not just a fascinated female gaze:

Lord Byron’s Countenance ... you see all the character: its keen and rapid genius, its pale intelligence, its profligacy and its bitterness – its original symmetry distorted by the passions, his laugh of mingled merriment and scorn – the forehead clear and open, the brow boldly prominent, the eyes bright and dissimilar, the nose finely cut, and the nostril acutely formed – the mouth well-formed, but wide, and contemptuous even in its smile, falling singularly at the corners, and its vindictive and disdainful expression heightened by the massive firmness of the chin, which springs at once from the centre of the full under-lip – the hair dark and curling, but irregular in its growth; all this presents to you the poet and the man ...

(D.E...

pdf

Share