Settling accounts

Keith Walker

• ‘A heart for every fate’: Byron’s Letters and Journals, Vol. 10, 1822-1823 edited by Leslie Marchand
  Murray, 239 pp, £8.95, March 1980, ISBN 0 7195 3670 7

‘A heart for every fate’: the title Marchand has chosen, from the enchanting lyric Byron wrote to Thomas Moore in 1817, doesn’t seem quite appropriate. It would have been better to borrow Doris Langley Moore’s Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered, for in these months in Genoa (October 1822 – June 1823) Byron was settling his accounts with his creditors, with his public, with his publisher John Murray, with his mistress, and making arrangements to settle his accounts with life and fame. Late in this volume we see Byron discussing a collected edition of his poems with J.W. Lake. Elsewhere Byron says he wants to amass enough money to be able to leave something to his sister Augusta and her children, and to contribute to the Greek cause. He laughs at himself in assuming the role of miser: ‘I am economizing – have sold three horses and pay all bills in person – keeping a sharp look out – on the candle’s ends.’