"I WANT a hero": advertising for an epic hero in Don Juan.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-05

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A selection of these advertisements would form a curious book, and exhibit much of the state of England. Sometimes a gentleman advertises for a wife, sometimes a lady for a husband.

--Robert Southey, Letters from England (1807)

SOMETIMES A POET FOR A HERO, SOUTHEY MIGHT HAVE ADDED, HAD HE written Letters from England (1807) after Byron published the first installment of Don Juan (1819). "I WANT a hero," (1) Byron advertises in the first line of canto I of Don Juan--one of the most celebrated overtures not only in "Romantic" poetry but in the entire Western literary tradition. (2) I use the word "advertises" literally, and not merely as a synonym for "announces" or as a trope for the blatant publicity of Byron's epic complaint, because I will argue that in announcing his "WANT"--i.e., his "lack" or "desire" (CPW 5.673n)--of and for a hero, Byron is almost certainly parodying several types of early advertising and advertising-related discourse: namely, the newspaper "want ad" and military recruitment propaganda.

Historically, Byron's engagement with advertising in Don Juan has not attracted much critical attention, probably because it appears--at least superficially--to be limited to just a couple of passing references: namely, the squibs on "thine 'incomparable oil,' Macassar" in canto 1 (17.7-8) and "a long eulogy of Patent Blacking" in canto XVI (26.8). (3) Also contributing to the oversight is the fact that Romantic scholars have traditionally turned a blind eye to the fecund ways that popular culture and high Romantic literature mutually inflect and inform one another, though this has begun to change in recent years. (4) Nevertheless, as Marcus Wood announces in Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 (1994), a study that lays the ground work for (and, to a certain extent, engages in) this kind of critical investigation, figures like "Byron and Shelley are particularly ripe for further analysis" (265). The present article attempts to pluck some of this fruit from the vine and demonstrates that Byron's concern with, and appropriation of, advertising in Don Juan is more substantial than has been previously realized. Indeed, among the many languages and types of discourse--Greek, Latin, modern foreign languages, medical jargon, legalese, flash language, (5) etc.--appearing in the polyglot epic that Byron referred to affectionately as his "Babel," (6) advertising is no insignificant tongue.

In contrast to "[m]ost epic poets" who "plunge in 'medias res'" (1.6.1), let us, like Byron, "begin with the beginning" (1.7.2)--that is, with the opening stanza of canto 1 of Don Juan:

I WANT a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one; Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan, We all have seen him in the Pantomime Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time. (1.1.1-8)

Our consideration of this passage begins with the recognition that Byron's declaration of "WANT" is not without "literary" precedent. In his gloss on these lines Jerome J. McGann has suggested, for example, that Byron is echoing Diogenes' statement "I am looking for a man," from Diogenes Laertius' Life of Diogenes the Cynic (CPW 5.673n), a plausible claim given Byron's numerous references to Diogenes in Don Juan (VII.4, XI.28, XV.73, and XVI.43). But while Diogenes was certainly not Greek to Byron, I find an equally plausible and far more provocative precedent for Byron's "WANT" in English popular, and not ancient Greek, culture. But enough prolegomena: to the want ads.

For practical purposes, study of the English want ad begins with A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, a periodical founded in 1682 by John Houghton, the so-called "Father of Publication Advertising" (see Fig. 1). (7) The want ad's form in Houghton's Collection differed slightly, however, from the various third-person formats that became standard in the eighteenth century and that are familiar to us today (i.e., "WANTED, a --," "WANTS a SITUATION as --," the "WANT PLACES" column, and so forth). As the Victorian historian Henry Sampson pointed out in A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times (1874), one of the first full-length studies of" advertising, "In those old days [i.e., in Houghton's Collection] the advertiser and editor of the paper frequently speak in the first person singular" (85). Here is a selection of advertisements that Sampson culled from various editions of Houghton's Collection, (8) the relevance of which to the opening line of Don Juan should be immediately evident:

--I want a house keeper rarely well accomplished for that purpose. 'Tis for a suitable gentleman.

--I want several apprentices for a valuable tradesman.

--I want a negro man that is a good house carpenter and a good shoemaker.

--I want a young man about 14 or 15 years old that can trim and look after a peruke. 'Tis to wait on a merchant.

--I want a pritty boy to wait on a gentleman who will take care of him and put him out an apprentice.

--I want a young man that can write and read, mow and roll a garden, use a gun at a deer, and understand country sports, and to wait at table, and such like.

--I want a complete young man, that will wear livery, to wait on a very valuable gentleman, but he must know how to play on a violin or a flute.

--I want a genteel footman that can play on the violin to wait on a person of honour. (Sampson 85-86)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

"I WANT a hero," it would seem, has every appearance of being early want-ad boilerplate.

However, because the shift from the first- to the third-person format of the want ad seems to have taken place at the close of the seventeenth or dawn of the eighteenth century (9)--a little over three-quarters of a century before Byron's birth (1788)--it is not clear whether Byron's use of the first person deliberately invokes or only coincidentally resembles the advertising idiom of yesteryear that Sampson found so quaint. Several possibilities immediately present themselves. It may be that the derivation of "WANTED" from "I want" was still common knowledge in the early nineteenth century, it having been only several generations since the older idiom was used, or it may simply be that "Romantic" subjectivity compelled Byron to express his "want" in the first rather than the third person without his having any knowledge of the archaic idiom. I cannot prove that Byron had specific knowledge of the older, first-person idiom, but it seems unlikely to me that there had been sufficient time for the curious genealogy of the want ad to be erased completely from cultural memory by Byron's day. (10) Moreover, as I will demonstrate momentarily, the rest of stanza I specifically establishes a periodical context for Byron's "WANT," which suggests that Byron's use of the primitive advertising idiom may not be merely serendipitous.

With the rapid growth of consumer culture and the periodic press in the eighteenth century, the want ad (now phrased in the third person), like other kinds of advertisements, only became more common as the century progressed, despite the tax on advertisements. (11) In a culture in which, as a writer for the Adventurer observed in 1753, "it seem[ed] to be the great business of life to create wants as fast as they [were] satisfied," (12) the want ad became the embodiment of unbridled consumer desire. As Samuel Johnson observed in No. 40 of the Idler (Jan. 20, 1759), "... every man now knows a ready method of informing the public of all that he desires to buy or sell, whether his wares be material or intellectual; whether he makes clothes or teaches the mathematics; whether he be a tutor that wants a pupil, or a pupil that wants a tutor" (Chalmers 27:179). By the early nineteenth century, the "wants" for goods and services--mostly the latter--found in the newspapers were legion: wants for a place, wants for someone to fill a place, wants for board and lodging, wants for loans or gifts of money, occasional wants for a spouse, and occasional wants for items like India shawls, finger-organs, horses, and so forth.

An avid reader of periodicals and an acute observer of periodical culture, Byron was no stranger to the want ads...

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