Lord Byron: The Complete Works in 13 Volumes (review)

Byron had an aversion to the vulgar and yet it is hard not to like a relatively cheap, not to say cheerful edition of his complete works costing £129.99. Perhaps cheeky rather than cheerful would be the better epithet – the Cambridge Scholars' website mentions that Byron was 'a thinker as well as a feeler' and indiscreetly alludes to the inclusion of certain scandalous Albanian material elliptically left out of Victorian editions of his writings. But to move from picture postcards to Pater, it is the weight of precious metal taken out that is the edition's strength. From a first-time reader's perspective, the exclusion of half the letters could not be looked upon as a tragedy since to those with no scholarly brief many of those omitted will seem dry and legalistic. This said, the lack of notes means we have been denied many of the editorial observations one might otherwise expect from an edition aimed at the new reader. The text itself, moreover, is a misshapen, Frankenstein's monster culled from the poetry and prose as edited by E. H. Coleridge (poetry) and Prothero (prose), with some juicy transfusion from British Library Manuscript Collections. Because these texts are doubtless familiar to Byronists, I will concentrate upon Peter Cochran's introduction to the edition, as he always brings such a wonderful wealth of information to his Byronic writings.

Cochran provides two pithy prose statements – one for the prose and one for the poetry – and his lucid introductions befit an edition that would seem intended for a lay readership. The untrammelled joy Cochran takes in Byron Studies means he is an excellent teacher, who proselytises on behalf of the ironic mode in Byron but at the expense of the self-dramatic moodiness of Childe Harold and Manfred. Cochran begins his introduction to the letters and journals by quoting Auden's contention that to the blank-slate reader Byron's letters and journals, together with his later long poems in ottava rima, are 'authentic', while the rest of his writings, including Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 'are bogus'. But can Auden be trusted here? I simply cannot agree that stanza 97 of Canto III ('Could I embody and unbosom now / That which is most within me') is, in Cochran's words, 'grossly self-dramatic', or 'off-key', as Auden puts it. Here Byron writes as if he could compress two quarts of his personality into one whisky dram and that one glass were metaphoric lightning; at the same time he shows that he is fully aware of the Areopagite irony involved in trying to represent the ineffable firewater that, distilled, smokes from his Promethean fountain pen. To my eyes, the so-called authentic 'thoughts unutterable' of Cochran's counterpointing prose quotation from Byron's letter to George Moore of 28 January 1817 seems bathetic by contrast, although the reference to Byron's mother-in-law is allowed: 'I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.'

Neither can I agree with Cochran's contention that Byron was never one of the dandies. In my opinion, Byron seems every inch an enigma wrapped in a labyrinth: the living embodiment of the classical contradictions that Cochran apprehends. For this reason the imaginatively perplexed often question Byron's enlightened yet damned paradoxes with just as much curiosity as is evident in the poet's own quicksilver interrogation of death when faced with the inert body of the assassinated commandant in Don Juan, Canto V, lines 33-39. Minus the repudiation of the dramatic mode in Byron's Gothic personas, Cochran's celebration of the prose is extremely readable; how fitting that he adds that Byron writes at lightning speed, although his handwriting is always clearly legible. Cochran then switches to his second vehicle, Ruskin, who compares the rapidity of Byron's style to the 'serene swiftness of a smith...