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COPYRIGHT 1995 Johns Hopkins University Press
Two years and twelve days after departing England for his continental tour, Lord Byron landed at Sheerness on 14 July 1811 bearing the manuscript about to rocket him into international fame.(1) It tracks the months of recurrent dislocation intrinsic to a pilgrimage that enacted the chronic discontinuity of the poet's affinitive history. Just over one-hundred lines into the new poem, a valedictory lyric by the voyaging pilgrim sings a simulated indifference to his desertion of family and friends, and foresees as his destination the desolated terrain to which in fact its author returned.(2) This essay explores Byron's response to the devastation he in disembarking met, principally as textualized in stanzas added to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 1 and 2 in August and October 1811. But these supplements, partially driven by the deaths of the friends they covertly honor - John Wingfield in 1 and John Edleston in 2 - also materialize the poet's apprehensions about reengaging a readership after his recklessly undiscriminating English Bards and Scotch Reviewers had jarred and piqued the British literary establishment in 1809. The stanzas in question encrypt anxieties aroused by gaps in Byron's personal landscape and inflamed by the imminence of a gap between poet and manuscript - by the rift created with his abandonment of the Childe to an uncertain audience. My subject, broadly, is Byron ending: suffering, evading, disguising, denying, performing, and surviving terminations; ending relationships, poems, relationships with poems and their audiences; designing structures to accommodate and facilitate the dissociative imperative that determines so much of his verse as it disabled so many of his connections. More particularly, I look at the complementary coincidence of fateful human with necessary authorial separation in Byron's elaborated conclusions to his cantos, whereby he converts a psychic deficiency into a textual strength that ministers to the anxieties it inscribes. Among these, ruptures not of his making actuate a Pilgrimage discourse that nevertheless exploits them in the vexatious task of textual termination.
Two testimonial stanzas (1.91-92) precede the deceptively conventional parting address to Byron's readership that formally concludes canto 1 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.(3) The collective circumstances inspiring them realized, with horribly concentrated impact, the vision of decimation ending Harold's "Good Night" song (CH, 1.118-197), for they resonate with the grief that staggered Byron as he learned, in Jobean succession, of the deaths of five intimates between July and October 1811, while preparing his new poem for the press. Mrs. Byron died on 1 August at Newstead Abbey, before reunion with her son who had lingered in London from mid-July. News of the deaths of two schoolmates, Hargreaves Hanson, second son of Byron's solicitor, at 23, and John Wingfield, at 20, "among my juniors and favourites [at Harrow], whom I spoilt by indulgences" (M, 21), reached Byron in late July. Charles Skinner Matthews, the poet's high-spirited Cambridge companion, strangled among underwater weeds in the River Cam on 3 August. And by 10 October, Byron knew that his beloved Cambridge chorister John Edleston was dead of consumption. On 7 August he wrote in (an uncannily proleptic Frankensteinian) anguish to Scrope Berdmore Davis:
Some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house: one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? My dear Scrope, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me, I want a friend. Matthews's last letter was written on Friday, - on Saturday he was not. . . . Come to me, Scrope, I am almost desolate - left almost alone in the world."(4)
And on the 10th to John Cam Hobhouse:
My dwelling, you already know, is the House of Mourning, & I am really so much bewildered with the different shocks I have sustained, that I can hardly reduce myself to reason by the most frivolous occupations. My poor J. Wingfield, my Mother, & and your best friend, (surely not the worst of mine) C[harles] S[kinner] M[atthews] have disappeared in one little month since my return, & without my seeing either, though I heard from All. (L, 2:69).
Hearing, Byron not only establishes a community of connections; as metaphor, hearing, more nearly than reading, realizes the presence only teased (and withheld) by epistolary texts, and of course renders proportionately more painful the lamented dissociations and the silences they signify.
On the 22nd, Byron enrolls Frances Hodgson in the listening fellowship:
You may have heard of the sudden death of my mother, and poor Matthews, which, with that of Wingfield . . . has made a sad chasm in my connexions. Indeed the blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from the shock, and though I do eat and drink and talk, and even laugh, at times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every morning convince me mournfully to the contrary. (L, 2:77)
And finally, on 7 September to Robert Charles Dallas:
In M(**) [Matthews] I have lost my 'guide, philosopher, and friend'; in Wingfield a friend only, but one whom I could have wished to have preceded in his long journey . . . [Matthews] was indeed an extraordinary man . . . To me he was much, to Hobhouse every thing . . . I did not love quite so much as I honoured him; I was indeed so sensible of his infinite superiority, that though I did not envy, I stood in awe of it . . . I am quite alone, as these long letters testify. (L, 2:93)
With relentlessly brutalizing irony, the rejections and desertions Byron had earlier sought to displace or repress by the foreign tour that became his Pilgrimage - among them, derisive reviews of Hours of Idleness (1807), mnemonically reexperienced abandonment by the beloved Mary Ann Chaworth-Musters, rebuffs by friends at Christmas and by a kinsman in the House of Lords, the deaths of two Harrow classmates, and (of scarcely less moment to Byron) the death of his prized dog Boatswain - seemed to clone themselves in successors all irreversibly final. Homecoming excited flight. Coveted welcome wrenched into experienced repudiation as home emptied itself at Byron's approach.
The traumatizing bereavements that greeted the poet, Jerome J. McGann has proposed, fed the "Consciousness awaking to her woes" (CH, 1.92.6) already foundational in the two cantos, and helped determine Byron's October decision, once he had rallied from the blitz of shattering news,
to make his personal losses assume a kind of climactic significance in his poem. . . . He created a dramatic fiction by means of which the deaths appeared in the poem in a gradual succession, culminating in the conclusion of canto 2. . . . The sense of personal losses, lamented in some of the most moving passages of the early cantos, climaxes the poet's education in woe.(5)
This observation and McGann's brief defense of it encourage me to promote the argument for "personalization" from a different angle by contextualizing Byron's eulogistic stanzas as the closural strategies of a poet deeply anxious about reconnecting with an audience literally and literarily given up in circumstances that challenged its allegiances.
The stanzas at the end of canto 1 on John Wingfield commend the Caledonian guard stationed in Coimbra, Portugal, who died there of fever on 14 May 1811, two days before the battle of Albuera, the site of which, some seventy miles to the southeast of Coimbra, Byron had visited in July 1809 en route to Seville and Cadiz.(6) This horrendous battle, commemorated in 1.43 - another added stanza - claimed nearly fourteen thousand lives, 4,158 of them British in what, even so, authorities judged a Pyrrhic victory for English forces under General William Beresford over the invading French.(7) The London Times from early June 1811 had trumpeted praise of the forces engaged in "the glorious victory at Albuera . . . Marshall Beresford speaks in the highest terms of the incomparable conduct of every part of the British army" (3 June 1811); and the next morning, in the same vein,
It is impossible by any description to enumerate every instance of discipline and valour shewn on this severely contested day, but never were troops that more valiantly or more gloriously maintained the honour of their respective countries. . . . It is impossible to do justice to the distinguished gallantry of the troops, but every individual most nobly did his duty. . . . [O]ur dead . . . were lying, as they had fought, in ranks, and every wound was in the front. (4 June 1811)
And again from The Times of 4 July, which reproduced a dispatch from Wellington to the Earl of Liverpool: "I beg to draw your Lordship's attention to the ability, the firmness and the gallantry manifested by Marshall William Beresford throughout the transaction on which he has written. . . ." Beresford "well knows that every officer and soldier deserves to be named in particular, the conduct of all has been most valiant and noble, and never were given greater proofs of brilliant British valour." And The Times prints Beresford's very detailed account of the battle, prepared for Wellington, dated Albuera, 16 May 1811:
It is with great pleasure I assure your Lordship, that the good and gallant conduct of every corps, and of every person, was in proportion to the opportunity that afforded for distinguishing themselves. I know not an individual who did not do his duty. (4 June 1811)
London papers, in short, gave extensive, even saturation coverage to the Albuera conflict, and excited among readers warm pride in the military glory earned by troops there deployed.(8)
But Byron's former Harrow classmate - annotatively identified by initials only, for reasons considered below - missed this action and whatever opportunity for honor it might have afforded him. The two had known each other for ten years, Byron's note remarks, "the better half of his life, and the happiest part of mine" (W, 2:189); and he had celebrated their Harrow companionship in "Childish Recollections," a poem self-described as a "parting song" to the institution. Lines 243-64 of that poem feature Wingfield as "Alonzo," "best and dearest of my friends":
Our sports, our studies, and our souls were one; Together we impell'd the flying ball. . . . Together join'd in cricket's manly toil, Or shar'd the produce of the river's spoil; Or, plunging from the green, declining shore, Our pliant limbs the buoyant waters bore; In every element, unchang'd, the same, All, all that brothers should be, but the name.(9)
(W, 1:166)
Memory of such pleasures would have been freshened by Byron's visit to Harrow within a week of his return to London, less...
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