Chapter 3 - The letters and journals

Summary

Even if Byron’s poems had never existed he would remain a classic author. Alongside Pepys’s diary (1660–9) and Boswell’s journals (1762–95), his letters and journals constitute one of the three most significant informal autobiographies in English. There are other great letter-writers in English literature (such as John Keats, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf), and there are European writers whose correspondences match them (Madame de Sévigné, Gustave Flaubert, and Vincent van Gogh, to name but a few). But none of these possesses the range, vigour, and immediacy of Byron’s informal prose.

Byron’s formal prose, by comparison, is less successful. ‘Byron’s prose is bad’, Hazlitt wrote; ‘that is to say, heavy, laboured, and coarse’ – and, as a rule, he is right. (What Hazlitt knew were Byron’s prefaces to his various poetical works, as well as his contributions to the ‘Bowles/Pope’ literary-critical controversy of 1821: see CMP 12–83.) When Thomas Moore published his Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of His Life (1830), therefore, readers were surprised and (generally) gratified by what they found. ‘The extracts from the journals and correspondence of Lord Byron,’ the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in his review of Moore’s biography, ‘are in the highest degree valuable – not merely on account of the information which they contain respecting the distinguished man by whom they were written, but on account, also, of their rare merit as compositions.’ ‘If the epistolary style of Lord Byron was artificial,’ Macaulay concluded, ‘it was a rare and admirable instance of that highest art, which cannot be distinguished from nature.’