Byron: A Life in Ten Letters
Andrew Stauffer
Cambridge University Press, £25

THIS is a fine introduction to the great poet, which should stimulate the reader to read or reread the poems. Its author, Professor Andrew Stauffer, is chair of the Department of English at the University of Virginia, and president of the Byron Society of America.

It is not a full biography; for this, one should turn to Leslie Marchand’s Byron: a biography or to Fiona MacCarthy’s more recent Byron: life and legend. 

Instead, Stauffer chooses from among Byron’s 3,000 letters ten of his most eloquent, which show his Protean development from student at Cambridge, to Regency rake exploiting almost every woman he met, to his chaotic and sordid life in Venice, and finally to his involvement in the tumultuous politics of Italy and Greece.

The first letter, of October 26 1807, is from Trinity College, Cambridge, which he called “a villainous Chaos of Dice and Drunkenness, nothing but Hazard and Burgundy, Hunting, Mathematics and Newmarket, Riot and Racing.” 

From Ravenna, he wrote on August 1 1819, “Come what may — I will never flatter the Million’s canting in any shape — circumstances may or may not have placed me at times in a situation to lead the public opinion — but the public opinion — never led me nor ever shall lead me.” He hated “the cant which is the crying sin of this double-dealing and false-speaking time of selfish spoilers.” 

The saddest letter, of August 27 1822, includes a desolate one-paragraph account of the burning of Shelley’s body after his tragic drowning. The last letter, of February 25 1824, is from Missolonghi, written just weeks before he died.

As Lady Blessington, his last confidante, noted: “Byron is a perfect chameleon... taking the colour of whatever touches him. He is conscious of this, and says it is owing to the extreme mobility of his nature.” She recorded him as saying: “I am such a strange melange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me. There are but two sentiments to which I am constant — a strong love of liberty, and a detestation of cant.”

Byron’s poetry, like that of his friend and rival Shelley, was Promethean. Byron’s greatest poem, Don Juan, established the modern poetics of the self-aware, infinitely flexible speaking voice, blending everyday speech and slang with rhetoric.
    
As an aristocrat, a hereditary member of the peerage, and an immensely rich landowner, Byron nevertheless espoused reform. He spoke just three times in the House of Lords, twice in 1812 and once in 1813: against the government’s imposing death sentences on Luddites, carried out in 1813 when the government executed seventeen textile workers; promoting Ireland’s rights; and supporting the reformer Major Cartwright against government harassment. 

But the counter-revolutionary state blocked all efforts at reform, so Byron threw himself into supporting national liberation struggles abroad.

After the end of the wars with France, Italy was a patchwork of city-states and republics ruled by the Austrian empire. The French revolution, and Napoleon himself, had inspired the revolutionary notion that empires and absolute monarchies were not eternal. These ideas spread across all Europe’s countries, and by 1820 the Risorgimento — the movement for Italy’s national freedom and unity — was on the rise. 

Byron embraced this cause. In August 1820, he was initiated into the Carbonari, the clandestine political society devoted to shaking off the Austrian yoke and setting up a free republic. He attended its secret meetings in the pine forest outside Ravenna. But in 1820 the Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia and Prussia sent an army to crush the Carbonari revolt in Naples and Sicily, causing “the ruin of Italian hopes.” 

Byron then turned his efforts towards Greece’s struggle for freedom. The people of Italy only achieved their independence and unity in 1861, after forty more years of struggle.

In 1821, Greece’s fight against Ottoman rule started with the uprising in Morea. By the spring of 1823, the Greek people’s War of Independence was well under way, and Byron threw himself into this cause too. 

In the ninth letter, of April 7 1823, he wrote modestly and wittily: “I saw Capt. Blaquiere and the Greek Companion of its mission on Saturday. Of course I entered very sincerely into the object of their journey — and have even offered to go up to the Levant in July — if the Greek provisional government think that I could be of any use. It is not that I could pretend to anything in a military capacity — I have not the presumption of the philosopher at Ephesus — who lectured before Hannibal on the art of war — nor is it much that an individual foreigner can do in any other way — but perhaps as a reporter of the actual state of things there — or in carrying on any correspondence between them and their western friends — I might be of use — at any rate I would try.”

Tragically, his gallant efforts were cut short when he died of a fever, its effects worsened by his doctors, at Missolonghi on April 19 1824. 

His example helped to inspire the thousand volunteers from many nations who rushed to help the Greek people in 1825. The British people’s support for Greek freedom helped to push the British government to join in defeating the Ottoman navy in the 1827 Battle of Navarino. This weakened the Ottoman empire so much that the Greek people were able to win their independence, in 1830.