Chapter 34 - Recollections, Conversations and Biographies

Summary

The many thousands of pages of biography devoted to Byron in the decades following his death formed the most substantial embodiment of his evolving cultural presence through the nineteenth century. Biographical narratives, often in the form of “recollections” or “conversations,” picked up on the critical debates surrounding Byron’s poetry in his lifetime and applied them to his behavior as a man. They included eyewitness accounts, letters and other documents that still inform biography and scholarship today. The story of Byron’s biographies is one of passionate factionalism and conflicting vested interests, reflecting the extreme feelings he provoked, focused on contentious issues of class, gender, sexuality and religion. For all these reasons and more, the biographical literature is indispensable for understanding Byron and Byronism.