John Mullan, who edited Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe for Everyman, is a professor of English at University College London. How Novels Work will appear in October.
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Biography and memoirs, Biography, Literature and literary criticism, Poetry, 1800-1899, 1800-1819, 1800-1899, 1820-1839, Byron, George Gordon
Vol. 25 No. 21 · 6 November 2003
pages 28-30 | 4199 words
Hidden Consequences
John Mullan
- Byron: Life and Legend by Fiona MacCarthy
Faber, 674 pp, £9.99, November 2003, ISBN 0 571 17997 5
The trailer for the recent BBC dramatisation of Byron’s life made no bones about the poet’s appeal. ‘Everything you’ve ever heard about him is true,’ the husky female voice-over promised. Here was a story that would excite us because of what we already thought we knew. Judging by the immediate critical response to Fiona MacCarthy’s biography, the appetite for Byron’s life is indeed sharpened by all the stories we already have. In the Guardian the historian Kathryn Hughes thought that ‘Byron was indeed someone special,’ but ‘not, perhaps, because of his poetry, which is hardly read now.’ Coinciding with this biography, an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Cult of Lord Byron, confirmed the allure of the poet’s ‘life and legend’. Everyone seems to agree that the making of a celebrity (somewhere he must have been called a ‘cultural icon’) is fascinating enough in itself. Never has a dead poet lived on so successfully without his poetry.
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Letters
Vol. 25 No. 23 · 4 December 2003
From Tony Simpson
In his review of Fiona MacCarthy's Byron, John Mullan expresses surprise at the crowds of ordinary mourners who turned out either to watch the poet's cortège on its way north or at his funeral (LRB, 6 November). Referring to MacCarthy's description of this as regret for 'the loss of a fearless and sympathetic voice', he suggests that the voice in question is that of his poetry, 'the appeal of which remains uninvestigated'. I don't think this is what is meant at all. These many hundreds of people turned out because Byron, almost alone of his class, took a very public stance on the rights of working people. His maiden speech in the House of Lords, for instance, on 12 February 1812, was a strong, lone defence of striking weavers in the industrialising North (the Luddites), and a savagely ironic attack on the mill owners who had put them out of work.
Tony Simpson
Wellington, New Zealand
