However, it is only fair to point out that, despite the fashion for self-annotation, not all authors in the Romantic age appended notes to their own works. For instance, John Hookham Frere’s Whistlecraft and Giovanni Battista Casti’s Novelle Galanti – both of which served as models for Byron’s ottava rima poems – do not contain annotations. Likewise, Charles Churchill’s highly successful and influential Rosciad was not annotated either. Most prominently perhaps, neither Austen nor Keats (apart from one footnote at the end of Lamia) made use of self-annotations in their works.

For instance, Moore recorded that he spent an entire month writing the annotations on his The Loves of the Angels and his Fables for the Holy Alliance (cf. T. Moore, Journal of Thomas Moore 2: 619).

Romantic works with authorial notes which are not discussed here because they are not directly relevant for Byron can be found in my collection of self-annotated works between 1300 and 1900 in the ‘External Appendix’ (http://dx.doi.org/10.15496/publikation-68434; for a brief introduction to this collection, see p. 391). Prominent examples include Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl, Thomas Love Peacock Nightmare Abbey, Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden, and Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, The Emigrants, and Beachy Head. Furthermore, even though Byron was very familiar with them, Robert Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect are not discussed here because they are only rather sparsely annotated. For Burns’s (and other eighteenth-century Scottish poets’) self-annotations, see R. Brown, “Self‐Curation, Self‐Editing and Audience Construction by Eighteenth‐Century Scots Vernacular Poets”.

Chatsiou, for example, argues that “[c]ontemporary readers did not like the notes”, but the only evidence she cites is William Cobbett’s claim that annotations are rarely read (for Cobbett, see below) (Chatsiou, “Lord Byron” 641).

Elsewhere in this study, I also briefly discuss how other Romantic authors (Madame de Staël, Walter Scott, and the Lake Poets) used self-annotations for social networking, see p. 313 n below.

The outline that follows is based on my ‘External Appendix’ which lists more than 1100 self-annotated literary works published between 1300 and 1900: http://dx.doi.org/10.15496/publikation-68434.

It should, however, be remembered that ‘only’ about half of the English poems published during this time span featured self-annotations in the first place (see p. 78 above).

To name only a few examples (referring to the number of pages in the respective first or at least very early editions): in Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), the poem spans 190 pages and the endnotes 120 pages; in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I–II (1812), the poem takes up 113 pages and the endnotes 66 pages; in Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813), the poem covers 121 pages and the endnotes 115 pages; and in Scott’s The Lord of the Isles (1815), the poem spans 256 pages and the endnotes 164 pages.

It should, however, be noted that many xenographic commentaries in the Romantic age feature a rather overt annotatorial voice (e.g. ‘I believe that’, ‘I have learnt from the local peasants that …’). One prominent example of this approach is William Lisle Bowles 1806 edition of Pope. Hence, some Romantic self-annotators made their notes appear more neutral and objective than even scholarly annotators.

The annotations were written by Samuel Henley (who translated Beckford’s French text into English) and were endorsed by the author himself. Neither Henley’s nor Beckford’s name was mentioned in the first English edition of 1786. For more information on the collaboration between Beckford and Henley, see A. Watson, Romantic Marginality 33–38.

For a detailed discussion of Southey’s annotatorial practice see A. Watson, “Marginal Imprints”; Chatsiou, “Robert Southey’s ‘Old Curiosity-Shops’”; and Simmons, “‘Useful and Wasteful Both’”. While the annotations for Scott’s Waverly novels have received considerable scholarly attention, secondary literature about Scott’s notes for his poems is scarce. Among the few exceptions are Gillian Hughes’s “Pickling Virgil?” and John H. Alexander’s chapter “On the Notes” in his The Lay of the Last Minstrel: Three Essays. Scott’s Waverly novels were only very sparsely annotated when they first appeared; the author added the extensive commentary only before publishing the magnum opus edition of his novels (1829–1833). Since the annotations for the Waverly novels were published after Byron’s death, they will not be discussed here. For studies on them, see Mayer, “The Internal Machinery Displayed”; Mayer, “The Illogical Status of Novelistic Discourse”; Mayer, “Authors and Readers”; and Mayer, “Scott’s Editing”. Charlotte Smith’s notes also fall under this category, but they were most likely not known to Byron. For her self-annotations, see Reinfandt, “The Textures of Romanticism”; Labbe, Charlotte Smith 44–59; and Labbe, “‘Transplanted into more congenial soil’”.

For studies of Shelley’s notes on Queen Mab, see Erchinger, “Science, Footnotes and the Margins of Poetry”; and Morton, “The Notes to Queen Mab and Shelley’s Spinozism”. The annotations for Moore’s satirical poems are discussed in the 2003 edition of The Satires of Thomas Moore (ed. Jane Moore).

For a study of Wordsworth’s annotations, see Broadhead, “Framing Dialect in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads”.

For example, when describing the destroyed chapel on the battlefield of Morat, he simply glosses over the fact that he takes the description not from his own memory of the place but verbatim from the published letters of Friedrich von Matthisson (cf. CHP 3.63n; CPW 2: 307). This is the most blatant case of plagiarism that I could find in Byron’s self-annotations. Samuel Rogers had lent Byron his copy of the English translation of Matthisson’s letters (Letters Written from Various Parts of the Continent, Between the Years 1785 and 1794, published 1799), and Byron took the book with him when he went to Switzerland (cf. BLJ 5: 87–88). It is likely that these letters also made Byron and John Polidori search for the epitaph of Julia Alpinula because Polidori notes in his diary entry for 24 May 1816: “In the walls of the church we sought in vain for the inscription that Mathison [sic] mentions to Julia Alpinula” (Polidori 94). The epitaph is referred to in CHP 3.66n; CPW 2: 308. Matthisson’s letter to Friedrich von Köpken, dated 30 October 1787, both provides Julia Alpinula’s epitaph and story as well as a detailed description of the field of Morat that Byron copies without mentioning his source (cf. Matthisson 97–98; 100).

In the case of The Giaour, Byron only mentions his sources at the very end of the work, without citing particular pages or even chapters: “For the contents of some of the notes I am indebted partly to D’Herbelot, and partly to […] the ‘Caliph Vathek’” (Giaour 1334n; CPW 3: 423, for a discussion of this note, see chapter 3.2.1.2).

Byron’s tendency to tease his readers with hints at autobiographical revelations in his notes will be discussed in chapter 3.2.1.

The notes for Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse are discussed in detail by Yannick Séité in Du livre au lire; for an analysis of the ironic notes, see especially 306–12. According to Séité, Rousseau strategically used the notes to prevent readers from becoming too emotionally involved in the narrative (cf. Séité 325). The numerous negative reactions to Rousseau’s facetious notes (quoted by Séité 306–07) sound very similar to reviewers’ complaints about Byron’s annotations for The Giaour.

This practice may also have been partly inspired by two of Byron’s non-literary models of self-annotation, i.e. Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon was fond of interrupting a highly dramatic passage in the main text with a pedantic or facetious discussion of bare facts (cf. Cosgrove 148). Likewise, Peter L. Thorslev argues that in their notes both Bayle and Byron sometimes take a critical stance towards their own work and its topics: “they seem like Olympian deities to ‘laugh down from the heights’ on the subjects of their discourse” (Thorslev 70). The influence of Bayle’s notes on Byron is also discussed by Pomarè in chapter 2 of her study Byron and the Discourses of History.

For instance, one review of Vathek in the English Review (vol. 8, Sep. 1786) notes that “[i]n an age that has abounded so much with literary impostures, we confess that we cannot see the propriety of such a palpable fiction. The general strain of the work, and the many allusions to modern authors, indicate the work to be an [sic] European” (“Review of Vathek” 181).

See, for example, reviews of Thomas Little in The British Critic (vol. 18, Nov. 1801), The Poetical Register (vol. 1, Jan. 1802), and The Critical Review (vol. 34, Feb. 1802).

In the cancelled preface to Don Juan, Byron facetiously suggests that the poem should be read as an example of editorial fiction. The beginning of his preface quotes Wordsworth who asked his readers to imagine that his poem “The Thorn” is spoken by the Captain of a small trading vessel. Afterwards, Byron requests his own readers “to suppose by a like exertion of Imagination – that the following epic Narrative is told by a Spanish Gentleman[.] […] Having supposed as much of this as the utter impossibility of such a supposition will admit – the reader is requested to extend his supposed power of supposing so far as to conceive that the dedication to Mr. Southey – & several stanzas of the poem itself are interpolated by the English Editor” (Preface to Don Juan Canto 1; CPW 5: 81).

For a comprehensive collection of (Pre)Romantic attitudes to annotations (most of them, however, to xenographic annotations), see Edson, “Introduction” xxi–xxiii.

“One could have mentioned the famous poet Southey, a great pedestrian” (my translation).

The ‘tonal mismatch’ between the poem and some of the notes in CHP is discussed in chapter 3.2.1.1.

“In some instances, the text seems to be written only for the sake of the notes. […] The music breathing from her face would not have necessitated a note in a German poem – maybe not in an English one either – had the author not wanted to make a polite bow to Madame de Staël” (my translation, original emphasis). For a discussion of this note, see chapter 3.2.2.2.

A bound quarto copy of the first two cantos of CHP cost 50 shillings, half the weekly income of a gentleman (cf. O’Connell 86–87; St. Clair, “The Impact of Byron’s Writings” 4).

See, for example, the pirated Don Juan, An Exact Copy from the Quarto Edition, published in 1819 by J. Onwhyn, which cost four shillings. The compilers of commonplace books (i.e. personal collections of extracts from different texts), however, frequently did not transcribe the annotations (cf. Colclough 129). Nevertheless, commonplacers sometimes “physically cut the poem out of the periodical to stick in their album” (Throsby 237); it is not inconceivable that they sometimes also cut out particularly interesting or witty annotations.

A German translation of Byron’s The Giaour – Der Gjaur: Bruchstück einer Türkischen Erzählung (1820) – even included notes in which the translator comments on, and corrects, Byron’s annotations. The 1828 French translation Le giaour, fragmens d’un conte turc faithfully includes all of Byron’s notes. A Swedish and a Dutch translation – Giaourn, fragment af en turkisk bërattelse (1830) and De Gjouwer (1840) – reproduce many of Byron’s notes faithfully, shorten others, and add xenographic notes by the translators. (The four translations mentioned here are listed as De Gjouwer, Der Gjaur, Le Giaour, and Giaourn in the Works Cited.)

Contemporary publishers apparently did not see these long quotes as copyright violations that might endanger their sales numbers. The Quarterly Review, which was owned by Byron’s publisher Murray, for example, contains many long quotes in its review of Byron’s The Giaour (“Review of The Giaour”, vol. 10, no. 20, Jan. 1814).

However, commenting on the annotations in Gray’s The Bard, Percival Stockdale suggests that readers usually alternate between poem and notes even in a first reading: by the presence of footnotes, “the flow, and warmth of the reader’s mind, […] is checked and broken, whenever He is obliged to consult the Anecdotes at the bottom of the page: and after this interruption He recovers not, even with the assistance of the Notes, that ardour which a well-written Poem should not only inspire, but maintain” (Stockdale 104–05; also see Edson, “Introduction” xxii).

One of the most famous and often-quoted discussions of annotations in the eighteenth century, found in Johnson’s preface to his Shakespeare edition (1765), makes a similar point: “Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. […] And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness, and read the commentators. Particular passages are cleared by notes, but the general effect of the work is weakened. The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book which he has too diligently studied” (S. Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare 111).

Johnson’s preface is often cited as an argument against reading (and writing) annotations altogether. However, it seems that it rather offers advice on how and when to use them (cf. also Edson, “Introduction” xxi).

For general studies of Romantic autobiography, see Treadwell passim; Stelzig (ed.), Romantic Autobiography in England; and Stelzig, “Autobiography and Confession”.

In the preface to the first and second cantos, however, the identity between Byron and the Childe is likewise both suggested and denied. It explains that “[t]he following poem was written, for the most part, amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe. It was begun in Albania; and the parts relative to Spain and Portugal were composed from the author’s observations in those countries. […] A fictitious character is introduced for the sake of giving some connection to the piece […]. It has been suggested to me by friends […] that in this fictitious character, ‘Childe Harold,’ I may incur the suspicion of having intended some real personage: this I beg leave, once for all, to disclaim – Harold is the child of imagination, for the purpose I have stated. In some very trivial particulars, and those merely local, there might be grounds for such a notion; but in the main points, I should hope, none whatever” (CPW 2: 3–4). In the addition to the preface for CHP I–II, Byron refers to the “‘vagrant Childe,’ (whom, notwithstanding many hints to the contrary, I still maintain to be a fictitious personage)”, without clarifying whether he himself included these hints in the work or whether he refers to readers and reviewers (mistakenly) hinting at the fact that Harold might be Byron’s alter ego (CPW 2: 5).

For another statement that denies the similarities between Byron and his characters or narrators before facetiously calling this very denial into question, see his unpublished letter to Blackwood’s Monthly Magazine (1820) (cf. CMP 90; 93).

“I question whether there ever lived a man who, without looking abroad for subjects excepting as they produced an effect on himself, has contrived to render long poems turning almost entirely upon the feelings, character, and emotions of the author” (W. Scott, Letters 4: 297). “Almost all characters from Harold to Alp Arselan are more or less Lord Byron himself” (W. Scott, Letters 4: 307–08).

Scott relates that he “was not much moved by the sort of scorn of the world which [Byron’s] first poems implied because I know it is a humour of mind which those whom fortune has spoild [sic] by indulgence or irritated by reverses are apt to assume and which a man of genius sometimes may be tempted to assume because it looks melancholy and gentlemanlike and becomes a bard as well as being desperately in love or very fond of the sun-rise tho he lies in bed till nine or anxious in recommending to others to catch cold by visiting old Abbies by moonlight which he never happend to see under the chaste moonbeam himself” (W. Scott, Letters 4: 300). The third canto of CHP, however, is not a pose; it “intimates a terrible state of mind” and raises fears that Byron might “end either in actual insanity or something equally frightful”, i.e. suicide (W Scott, Letters 4: 300).

Byron has “Child Harolded himself and Outlawd himself into too great a resemblance with the pictures of his imagination” (W. Scott, Letters 4: 234). Scott’s uncertainty whether the melancholic ‘Byron’ of the poems is a fashionable pose, a genuine manifestation of the author, or a fiction that has become reality, might, of course, also reflect a wish to tell each correspondent whatever Scott assumed he/she would like to hear. Even if this were the case, the fact that he possibly felt the need to take three different positions to cater to different correspondents’ preconceptions would still show that contemporary readers were unsure whether or not they could equate Byron and his characters.

“The whole of your misanthropy […] is humbug. You do not hate men, ‘no, nor woman neither,’ but you thought it would be a fine, interesting thing for a handsome young Lord to depict himself as a dark-souled, melancholy, morbid being, and you have done so, it must be admitted, with exceeding cleverness. In spite of all your pranks, (Beppo, &c. Don Juan included,) every boarding-school in the empire still contains many devout believers in the amazing misery of the black-haired, high-browed, blue-eyed, bare-throated, Lord Byron” (Lockhart, John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron 80).

In 1821, for example, Byron himself told Moore that he had met a young American, who “did not take quite so much to me, from his having expected to meet a misanthropical gentleman, in wolf-skin breeches, and answering in fierce monosyllables, instead of a man of the world” (BLJ 8: 146). Likewise, a review of CHP III in The Portfolio, Political and Literary (vol. 1, no. 4, 23 Nov. 1816) argued that “[i]ndeed it is the real romance of his life, immeasurably more than the fabled one of his pen, which the public expects to find in his pages, and which not so much engages its sympathy, as piques its curiosity, and feeds thought and conversation” (“Review of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III” 73).

Also see Angela Esterhammer’s definition of sincerity: it is the “correspondence between (inner) reality and (outward) appearance” (Esterhammer 101). Her perceptive observation that sincerity is “inimical to performativity” (102) and yet has to be performed, i.e. that the very attempt at publicly communicating one’s sincerity imperils this very sincerity, will be of particular relevance in chapter 3.2.1.3.

As Anne Barton points out, Byron was notorious for his “almost pedantic concern for truth in his descriptions” and for his disdain for writers who got historical or cultural details wrong (Barton 16). One need only think of his comment on Wordsworth’s inaccurate description of a Turkish cemetery (“this is pure stuff”) or his annotation in CHP, requesting Sydney Owenson “to have the goodness to marry her [the heroine of her next novel] to somebody more of a gentleman than a ‘Disdar Aga’ (who by the by is not an Aga)” (BLJ 4: 325; CHP 2.73n, Paper I n; CPW 2: 199). He famously claimed to “hate things all fiction” and argued that reading the Iliad would give him “no delight” if he did not believe it to be the “truth of history (in the material facts) and of place” (BLJ 5: 203; 8: 22, original emphasis).

As might be expected, Byron was very fond of insisting on the cultural and historical correctness of his own poems. For instance, enraged by his publisher Murray’s doubts whether he was correct in having a Muslim character mention Cain in The Bride of Abydos, Byron retorted: “I don’t care one lump of Sugar for my poetry – but for my costume and my correctness on those points […] I will combat lustily” (BLJ 3: 165, original emphasis). He was similarly indignant when a reviewer argued that Conrad’s behaviour in The Corsair was unrealistic (cf. BLJ 4: 95; “Review of The Corsair”, Critical Review vol. 5, iss. 2, Feb. 1814, 144–145). In both of these cases Byron used self-annotations to affirm the truthfulness of his descriptions (cf. Bride of Abydos 2.204n; CPW 3: 440; Corsair 3.696n; CPW 3: 449).

For instance, Byron claimed that he “could not write upon any thing, without some personal experience and foundation” (BLJ 5: 14). Likewise, when Murray suggested that Byron should compose a poem about Jerusalem, he responded (perhaps with a tinge of irony): “how the devil should I write about Jerusalem – never having yet been there?” (BLJ 5: 139, original emphasis). Byron was proud of the first-hand knowledge that fed into his works and argued that it was the most important difference between him and other authors. He asserted, for example, that when writing about Venice his main advantage over Otway and Shakespeare was that “of having been at Venice – and enterd [sic] into the local Spirit of it” (BLJ 7: 194). He also claimed that The Bride of Abydos “is my story and my East – (& here I am venturing with no one to contend against – from having seen what my contemporaries must copy from the drawings of others only[)]” (BLJ 3: 168, original emphasis).

Even in the few cases in which Byron refers to written sources, he is usually decidedly unacademic and only cites the title of the work and the name of the author, giving neither the edition, nor the chapter, nor the page number. We also sometimes find information like “I quote from memory” (Island 3.334n; CPW 7: 148; cf. Don Juan 1.88n; CPW 5: 677) and the combination of bibliographical and biographical information as in “No. 31 of the Edinburgh Review (given to me the other day by the captain of an English frigate off Salamis)” (Hints from Horace 586var n; CPW 1: 438).

There are, of course, exceptions to Byron’s unscholarliness, e.g. the lengthy note at the end of The Corsair mentioned above, the appendices to Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari, and the detailed information on François de Bonnivard in a note for the “Sonnet on Chillon”. (However, the appendices to his two Venetian dramas and the note on Bonnivard are yet again framed by personal explanations, i.e. Byron’s observations on modern-day Venice and Chillon). That Byron could indeed be scholarly when he wanted to is shown in his exceedingly long note on Thomas Campbell’s mistakes in the introduction to Specimens of the British Poets and Francis Bacon’s blunders in his apophtegms (cf. Don Juan 5.147n; CPW 5: 710–13). Although Byron’s observations on Bacon are so pedantic as to border on the parodic, his journal entries and his letters to Murray about them suggest that he was serious in this note (cf. BLJ 8: 14; 8: 194).

For an unsuccessful attempt at determining the ‘sincerity’ of Byron’s works, see Philip Martin’s Byron: A Poet Before his Public, which, however, does not consider his self-annotations. Martin argues that Byron believed that the majority of his readers (especially from the middle class) “were incapable of recognizing literary distinctions” (37) and that they were “predominantly uninformed, or voluntarily undiscriminating” (39). For this reason, in all of his works before Beppo and Don Juan, Byron wrote deliberately bad poetry, only including here and there a few indications of his (in Martin’s opinion) ‘real’ opinion of his works. The tonal inconsistencies in CHP, for example, “betray[] Byron’s fundamental indifference towards his art and also evince[] an equal lack of regard for his readership” (26). Moreover, according to Martin, the oriental tales are written in a deliberately sensationalist, inept, and conventional style, which shows that Byron was making fun of his readers’ inability to detect that their inferior quality is merely a joke (cf. 53; 61–62). It is only in Beppo and especially in Don Juan that Byron is able to free himself from the wish to project a certain ‘Romantic’ image of himself to his audience and to finally be ‘sincere’ (and a good poet) (cf. 184; 186).

As this brief summary shows, Martin relies on two rather bold presuppositions: firstly, that Byron’s contemporary readers were an incompetent monolith who simply did not ‘get’ what he was trying to do and, secondly, that since Martin believes nearly all of Byron’s works except Don Juan to be bad, Byron must have thought so as well. The first presupposition has convincingly been refuted by, among others, Tom Mole (who shows how Byron addresses very different readerships) and Jane Stabler (who delineates the complex ways in which Byron’s contemporaries reacted to the tonal inconsistencies in his poems) (cf. Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity 44–59; Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History 18–42). The second is a crass simplification of the highly contradictory and ambivalent attitudes that Byron’s expressed towards his works throughout his career. Byron is, of course, partly himself to blame for the argument that his early works are just melodramatic, lackadaisical ‘cash-grabs’. In a letter to P. B. Shelley, for example, he calls his earlier writings “the exaggerated nonsense which has corrupted the public taste” (BLJ 9: 161). This, of course, presents a marked contrast to comments like “I adhere (in liking) to my fragment [The Giaour]” (BLJ 3: 237) and the care he took in revising his oriental tales. Such contradictory statements about his works can be found throughout his letters. In the case of Manfred, for instance, he first told Murray that he had “no great opinion of this piece of phantasy” and that his publisher “may either throw it into the fire or not” (BLJ 5: 170) and later was enraged when Murray dared to omit a single line (cf. BLJ 5: 257).

The fact that the apparent ‘sincerity’ of parts of Byron’s works relies on deliberate artistic methods is, for instance, stressed by Jerome McGann. He takes up Matthew Arnold’s notion of the “illusion of sincerity created by art, an illusion that makes the dramatic ‘personality’ of Byron presented in his poetry seem fully and empirically ‘real’” and concludes that “this ‘personality’ is a product of art and artifice” (McGann, Fiery Dust 26, original emphasis).

For instance, he argues that the prefatory poem “To Ianthe” (added to CHP I–II in 1814) allowed “female readers [to] imagine their own readings in the intimate terms in which Ianthe’s was presented” (Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity 58). Mole also stresses the fact that illustrations of Byron’s protagonists were designed to resemble the author himself (25; 90), and he asserts that the oriental tales’ insistence that faces can bear “traces of hidden crimes or sorrows” induced readers to try to read Byron’s own face for hints of his thoughts and feelings (60–77). In his eighth chapter, Mole describes how Don Juan turns these notions on their head by constantly “disput[ing] the extent to which the interior was legible to onlookers” (143).

For example, in 1729, Pope bemoans that “Paper […] became so cheap, and Printers so numerous, that a deluge of Authors covered the land” (Dunciad 70).

One need only think of the thirtieth poem of Horace’s third book of the Odes, which contains the famous line “Exegi monumentum aere perennius” (‘I have created a monument more lasting than bronze’). A similar hope is expressed at the end of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

For instance, Harold has become jaded by his own dissoluteness, the Giaour is tormented by his inability to save Leila, Conrad is still ruminating on a betrayal he suffered in youth, Lara (if we assume him to be Conrad under a new name, as the preface suggests) mourns Medora, and Manfred feels guilty about Astarte’s death.

Even in his ‘private’ journals (for the non-privacy of which, see below), Byron followed a similar strategy. Referring to The Corsair, he records: Hobhouse “told me an odd report, – that I am the actual Conrad, the veritable Corsair, and that part of my travels are supposed to have passed in privacy [piracy?] Um! – people sometimes hit near the truth; but never the whole truth. H. don’t know what I was about the year after he left the Levant; nor does any one – nor – nor – nor – however, it is a lie” (BLJ 3: 250, original emphasis, editor’s addition in brackets).

Beppo and Don Juan likewise feature notes that provide information on the circumstances of composition, attest to the verisimilitude of the poems, and partly identify Byron with the narrator. In Beppo, the annotated passage reads: “They went to the Ridotto (’tis a place / To which I mean to go myself to-morrow[)]” (Beppo 64). This is annotated “January 19th 1818. Tomorrow will be Sunday Sull’ Ridotto” (Beppo 64n; CPW 4: 489; as McGann notes in CPW, Byron gets the date wrong). The annotated passage does not raise any questions that might require an annotation (the question what a “Ridotto” even is has been answered in stanza 58). Thus, in a note that would seem quite irrelevant if it were a xenographic rather than an autographic one, Byron suggests that the first-person narrator can here be equated with himself and informs readers about his current leisure activities. In Don Juan, the autobiographical annotation is appended to the famous stanza on the assassination of the military commandant of Ravenna: “The other evening (‘twas on Friday last) – / This is a fact and no poetic fable –”, etc. (Don Juan 5.33). The note reads: “The assassination alluded to took place on the eighth of December, 1820, in the streets of Ravenna, not a hundred paces from the residence of the writer. The circumstances were as described” (Don Juan 5.33n; CPW 5: 707). Here, the note affirms what the poem asserts; the present stanza describes a “fact and no poetic fable”. This affirmation is needed because other – clearly fictional – passages in the poem are likewise claimed to be entirely factual by the narrator. For instance, the secret rendezvous between Juan and Julia is dated precisely to “the sixth of June, about the hour / Of half-past six – perhaps still nearer seven” (Don Juan 1.104), and the narrator later asserts that his “story’s actually true” and that he himself “and several now in Seville, / Saw Juan’s last elopement with the devil” (Don Juan 1.202–03, original emphasis). Due to such unconvincing protestations of factuality in the poem itself, one requires a note to clarify when a fact is indeed a fact.

The diary-like manner of Byron’s annotations for CHP is perhaps most apparent in an unpublished note to the second canto: “An additional ‘misery to human life!’ – lying-to at sunset for a large convoy till the sternmost pass ahead. Mem.: fine frigate, fair wind likely to change before morning, but enough at present for ten knots!” (CHP 2.20n; CPW 2: 286). Some of the annotations in CHP I–II also recycle passages from Byron’s letters to his mother and his friends in England.

For Byron’s stronger connection with the narrators of CHP and Don Juan than with their protagonists, also see Graham, “His Grand Show” 29.

For instance, passages that first appear as if they were spoken by the narrator later turn out to be spoken by Harold, e.g. the long attack against the Convention of Cintra (CHP 1.24–26) ends with the statement “[s]o deem’d the Childe” (CHP 1.27).

This annotation may be seen as yet another example of a note that differentiates between readerships (for such annotations, see chapter 3.2.2): in all authorised editions published during Byron’s lifetime, the annotation does not spell out the name of the person who is alluded to in the stanza. Thus, the reference would only have been clear to Wingfield’s family and friends. Rather than straightforwardly commemorating (and naming) Wingfield, the annotation goes on to provide an obituary on Byron’s mother and his friend Charles Skinner Matthews, who are not mentioned in the stanza at all. Furthermore, the annotation embeds the expression of Byron’s own grief in the tradition of pre-Romantic poetry. This is not only achieved through the quote from Young’s Night Thoughts in the note but also through a subtler allusion (not annotated by Byron) in the poem itself. As McGann points out, the line “And thou, my friend! – since unavailing woe” refers to an expression used at the very end of James Beattie’s The Minstrel (cf. editor’s n for CHP 1.927; CPW 2: 282). The passage in Beattie reads “Art thou, my G********, for ever fled! / And am I left to unavailing woe!” (Beattie 2.63). Here, as in Byron’s note on Wingfield, one can see the curious case of a poet commemorating a friend without naming him. Even more intriguingly, Beattie also appended an annotation to the passage. In this note on the line “Friend, teacher, pattern, darling of mankind!”, Beattie explains that “[t]his excellent Person died suddenly, on the 10th of February, 1773. The conclusion of the poem was written a few days after” (Beattie 2.62n). The similarities between Byron’s and Beattie’s literary monuments to their dead friends are apparent: both added the mournful stanzas after having already finished the rest of the poem, both supply a commemorative note, and both do not name the friend but provide certain hints that make him at least partly identifiable. Hence, the stanza and note on Wingfield, Lady Byron, and Matthews, can – just like the preface to the first two cantos of CHP – be seen as one of Byron’s attempts to align his poem with the tradition of Beattie.

For other cases in which Byron used his annotations to commemorate friends, see his long obituary on Madame de Staël in a note for CHP 4.54 (CPW 2: 235–36) and the annotation on his Cambridge acquaintance Edward Grose, who died at Waterloo and whose name was later misspelled in the Duke of Wellington’s Despatch in the official London Gazette (22 June 1815, iss. 17028). The note on him is appended to Don Juan 8.18 (CPW 5: 732), a passage that attacks public military commemorations that de-personalise and de-individualise the fallen soldiers. For a discussion of the note on de Staël, see Gardiner, passim. For the annotation about Grose, see J. R. Watson 163–64.

For instance, in his summary of a dispute between Pouqueville and a Mr. Thornton, Byron facetiously remarks: “‘Aha[’], thinks Mr. Thornton (angry with the Doctor for the fiftieth time) ‘have I caught you?’ – Then, in a note twice the thickness of the Doctor’s anecdote, he questions the Doctor’s proficiency in the Turkish tongue, and his veracity in his own” (CHP 2.73n, Paper II n; CPW 2: 292). Slightly later, Byron makes fun of a French Hellenist who threatened to throw one of his colleagues out of the window (cf. CHP 2.73n, Paper III n; CPW 2: 293).

The annotations also give Byron the chance to exact his revenge on the Edinburgh Review, which, in its article on Hours of Idleness, had questioned his knowledge of the Scottish dialect. He writes: “There is a slip of the pen, and it can only be a slip of the pen, in p. 58. No. 31. of the Edinburgh Review, where these words occur: – ‘We are told that when the capital of the East yielded to Solyman’ – It may be presumed that this last word will, in a future edition, be altered to Mahomet II. […] Query, – Was it in Scotland that the young gentlemen of the Edinburgh Review learned that Solyman means Mahomet II. any more than criticism means infallibility? […] The mistake seemed so completely a lapse of the pen (from the great similarity of the two words, and the total absence of error from the former pages of the literary leviathan) that I should have passed it over as in the text, had I not perceived in the Edinburgh Review much facetious exultation on all such detections” (CHP 2.73n, Paper III n; CWP 2: 206; 2: 294, original emphasis). The joke that the Edinburgh Review must have confounded Solyman and Mahomet due to “the great similarity of the two words” might be a reference to an annotation in Tristram Shandy (vol. 2, ch. 19). In the note, the fictional editor surmises that Tristram mistook “Lithopædus for Trinecavellius, – from the too great similitude of the names” (Sterne 121, original emphasis). Byron’s use of the annotations to react to his enemies also, of course, reminds of Pope.

The objections voiced by the Critical Review (vol. 1, no. 6, June 1812) are very similar: “The occasional bursts of humour are […] unpleasant, as breaking in too abruptly upon the general tone of the reader’s feelings” (“Review of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I–II” 571–72).

Some of the comic, satiric, homoerotic, and religiously sceptical stanzas and notes were omitted at the request of Robert Charles Dallas and John Murray (cf. Joseph 21; Murray 3). The much more serious and melancholic tone of the published version of CHP I–II was, of course, also a reaction to the recent deaths of Byron’s mother, John Wingfield, John Edleston, and Charles Skinner Matthews, of which Byron had learnt after his return to England.

There are at least two other instances of such bathetic notes in CHP. The first (though not an autobiographically anecdotal one) is appended to the following passage “Yet Mafra shall one moment claim delay, / Where dwelt of yore the Lusian’s luckless queen; / And church and court did mingle their array, / And mass and revel were alternate seen” (CHP 1.29). These lines refer to Queen Maria I of Portugal (1734–1816) (for her illness and treatment, see Peters and Willis 293). On this lofty, half-archaic, and sympathetic passage, the unpublished annotation irreverently comments: “Her insane majesty went religiously mad. Dr. Willis, who so dexterously cudgelled kingly pericraniums, could make not a thing of hers”, a satirical reference to George III, who was likewise treated by Willis (CHP 1.29n; CPW 2: 277). The other example occurs in the fourth canto (1818, six years after CHP I–II), where Byron apostrophises and mythologises the river Clitumnus: “But thou, Clitumnus! in thy sweetest wave / Of the most living crystal that was e’er / The haunt of river nymph” (CHP 4.66). There, the beginning of the annotation reads: “In my gratitude to the Clitumnus I ought not to forget the largest and very best trout that ever were seen in a river or a dish” (CHP 4.66n; CPW 2: 328).

The comment of the British Review (vol. 5, no. 9, Oct. 1813) is in a similar vein: “The notes which his lordship has added by way of explanation of these words, and also of particular facts and customs to which the poem alludes, are beyond measure trifling and injudicious. Some of them tell us what every body knew before. Some of them come in aid of the odd words used in the text, and ought not to have been rendered necessary; and some of them call our attention from the midst of tumult and slaughter to some ridiculous story, or fable of superstition. We will not say that the inimitable satyrist [sic] of the Scotish [sic] bards and reviewers is without the talent of humour; but we must say that the attempts at humour in these notes are very far below the standard of his lordship’s undoubted taste and spirit. The note upon the phenomenon of the captain pasha’s whiskers is a specimen of this ill-placed drollery. Indeed the curling of the angry Mussulman’s beard when beset with foes which threaten him with instant death, was a circumstance very ill suited to the horror of the scene which it was the poet’s purpose and duty to describe with that dignity which the most obvious of poetical proprieties demanded” (“Review of The Giaour” 141).

The annotation in CHP II which this note refers to reads as follows: “In our second land excursion, we had a narrow escape from a party of Mainnotes, concealed in the caverns beneath. We were told afterwards, by one of their prisoners subsequently ransomed, that they were deterred from attacking us by the appearance of my two Albanians: conjecturing very sagaciously, but falsely, that we had a complete guard of these Arnaouts at hand, they remained stationary, and thus saved our party, which was too small to have opposed any effectual resistance” (CHP 2.12n; CPW 2: 284–85).

The annotation also serves a further, purely intratextual function, which, however, is not related to the focus of this chapter. It implicitly characterises the Giaour by making clear that – while English readers would be more familiar with fore-sight – the belief in fore-hearing is decidedly Eastern or even exclusively Albanian. (John Galt, in his 1813 Letters from the Levant, confirms that the “Albanians have among them persons who pretend to know the character of approaching events, by hearing sounds which resemble those that will accompany, the actual occurrence” (Galt 178). Galt associates second-sight with the Scottish Highlanders and second-hearing with the Albanians (cf. ibid.)). The annotation thus highlights that the Giaour holds views that are not at all associated with his place of origin (Venice) but with the culture that he adopted (or pretended to adopt) while living in the Levant. Hence, the Giaour’s reference to second-hearing is one of many instances in the poem that call into question the status as a representative of the West that Hassan and the fisherman ascribe to him. Other examples include the passages in which he agrees with his mortal enemy Hassan that an unfaithful woman deserves death (“Yet did he but what I had done / Had she been false to more than one”; 1062–63) and in which he asserts that love is “by Alla given” (1133). Alice Levine likewise argues that “[t]he notes underscore how, at every level, The Giaour refuses the Christian/Muslim dichotomy that seems central to its subject matter” (A. Levine 132). For a recent discussion of all the elements in The Giaour that make the protagonist’s culture and religion so ‘unclassifiable’, see Bode, “Byron’s Dis-orientations”.

In his note on this passage in The Giaour, Peter Cochran dryly remarks that “[i]t is not clear that B. had, in 1813, ever seen bodies of people who had been either shot or stabbed” (Cochran, ed., The Giaour 6n6).

The original (published in Kunst und Altertum vol. 2, no. 2) reads: “Er hat oft genug bekannt was ihn quält, er hat es wiederholt dargestellt, und kaum hat irgend Jemand Mitleid mit seinem unerträglichen Schmerz, mit dem er sich, wiederkäuend, immer herumarbeitet. […] Als ein junger, kühner, höchstanziehender Mann gewinnt er die Neigung einer florentinischen Dame, der Gemal [sic] entdeckt es und ermordet seine Frau. Aber auch der Mörder wird in derselben Nacht auf der Straße todt gefunden, ohne daß jedoch der Verdacht auf irgend Jemand könnte geworfen werden. Lord Byron entfernt sich von Florenz und schleppt solche Gespenster sein ganzes Leben hinter sich drein. Dieses mährchenhafte [sic] Ereigniß wird durch unzählige Anspielungen in seinen Gedichten vollkommen wahrscheinlich” (Goethe 455).

One must notice, however, that the outcome of the anecdote casts some doubt on Byron’s intimate knowledge of Greece since it shows that he severely misjudged the dangerousness of the situation.

As in the case of CHP, contemporary reviewers were very divided over these questions. The Critical Review (vol. 4, no. 1, July 1813), for instance, argues that The Giaour shows Byron’s real feelings on religion and that the annotation on the different facial expressions of corpses is “evidently the result of personal observation” (“Review of The Giaour” 62; 68). The Scots Magazine (Oct. 1813) – likewise detecting the author in the poem – argues that Byron is inspired by a (typically Haroldian) “premature satiety of all things” and that his works are “deeply impregnated with gloomy views of human life and human fate” (“Review of The Giaour” 769). Other critics were more sceptical. Both the British Review (vol. 5, no. 9, Oct. 1813) and the Edinburgh Review (vol. 21, no. 42, July 1813) see the Giaour as a literary stereotype rather than as Byron’s alter ego. The former comments that the protagonist is “evidently one of those persons whom poetry and the German drama have, under various modifications, so frequently introduced to us” (“Review of The Giaour” 144), while the latter argues that the Giaour has the “fiery soul of the Marmion and Bertram of Scott” combined with “the constitutional gloom and the mingled disdain and regret for human nature, which were invented for Childe Harold” (“Review of The Giaour” 301, my emphasis). And the Anti-Jacobin (vol. 45, no. 183, Aug. 1813) does not even attempt to resolve the ambiguity: noting that a feeling of disappointed love runs through the poem, it comments: “Whether this be only assumed, for the purpose of heightening the poetical effect, or whether it really proceed from the heart, we presume not to decide” (“Review of The Giaour” 127).

This is, for example, tentatively suggested by Ravelhofer (cf. 30).

It has to be noted that – apart from the annotated passage discussed here – the poem makes no mention of the fact that Hassan knew that he was destined to be killed by the Giaour on this day. Quite on the contrary: during the fight, Hassan asserts that “‘[t]hough far and near the bullets hiss, / I’ve scaped a bloodier hour than this’” (Giaour 595–96) and that the Giaour will not be saved from death (cf. 617). This internal contradiction may be due to the complicated composition history of The Giaour. One might also suspect that Byron was so eager to include the anecdote on second-hearing that he cared little whether or not the annotated passage presented a ‘continuity error’.

To these five, one may perhaps add four minor instances. The first is the annotation which explains that “[g]reen is the privileged colour of the prophet’s numerous pretended descendants; with them, as here, faith (the family inheritance) is supposed to supersede the necessity of good works; they are the worst of a very indifferent brood” (Giaour 357n; CPW 3: 418). The second note makes fun of one of the Muslim narrators within the Levantine story-teller’s narrative, who believes that women have no soul. It explains that this is “[a] vulgar error; the Koran allots at least a third of Paradise to well-behaved women; but by far the greater number of Mussulmans interpret the text their own way, and exclude their moieties from heaven” (Giaour 488n; CPW 3: 419). The third is the annotation on vampires, which slightingly refers to a “long story” about these creatures told by “Honest Tournefort” and to Southey’s misspelling of the modern Greek term for them (Giaour 755n; CPW 3: 420). The fourth is appended to a passage uttered by an unknown, featureless speaker – most likely the European traveller. As he muses on desolation and loneliness, he reflects: “It is as if the desart-bird, / Whose beak unlocks her bosom’s stream / To still her famish’d nestlings’ scream, / […] / Should rend her rash devoted breast, / And find them flown her empty nest” (Giaour 951–56). The annotation for these lines raises doubts about the veracity of this notion and quips: “The pelican is, I believe, the bird so libelled, by the imputation of feeding her chickens with her blood” (Giaour 951n; CPW 3: 421).

Kroeber, Sundell, and Shilstone argue that the narrator in this passage is the fisherman, who also spoke at the beginning of The Giaour (lines 180–276), but this is unlikely (cf. Kroeber 140; Sundell 590; Shilstone 54). The narrator in the present passage briefly refers to the scene that the fisherman witnessed at the beach and introduces it thus: “But others say, that on that night” (Giaour 467, my emphasis). This suggests that the narrator of this passage cannot be identical with the fisherman and that, instead, he is yet another Muslim narrator.

I quote from the 1786 edition of Vathek (English, with more than 100 pages of notes) which Byron owned (cf. Cochran, Byron’s Library 15; 55).

There is another facetious note in The Giaour that works very similarly to the note on Al-Sirat. The annotated passage contains direct speech by a Muslim character, but it is not clear by whom exactly (possible candidates are the fisherman, the same unidentifiable narrator as in the Al-Sirat passage, Hassan’s mother, or even the Levantine coffee-house storyteller himself). The speaker curses the Giaour and prophesises that he shall writhe “[b]eneath avenging Monkir’s scythe” for having killed Hassan (Giaour 748). The corresponding annotation explains that “Monkir and Nekir are the inquisitors of the dead, before whom the corpse undergoes a slight noviciate and preparatory training for damnation. If the answers are none of the clearest, he is hauled up with a scythe and thumped down with a red hot mace till properly seasoned, with a variety of subsidiary probations. The office of these angels is no sinecure; there are but two; and the number of orthodox deceased being in a small proportion to the remainder, their hands are always full” (Giaour 748n; CPW 3: 420). As in the note on Al-Sirat, this annotation makes fun of the religious notion which is put forward seriously by a Muslim character. The method employed is a mix of the notes on the scorpion and on Al-Sirat. For one, like the scorpion note, this annotation jumbles together different registers, combining a term carrying Christian associations (“noviciate”), with the context of education and sports (“preparatory training”), woodworking or cooking (“properly seasoned”), as well as with the field of modern religious or government posts (“sinecure”), none of which are particularly apt in the context of explaining Muslim beliefs of the afterlife. Furthermore, like the note on Al-Sirat, it makes light of the danger that is being evoked in the poem, calling being tortured by two demons “a slight noviciate and preparatory training”.

I could not find any literary (or actual) models – oriental or otherwise – for the beard curling with ire before 1813; it does not seem to have been a common notion. Byron does not mention the anecdote of the Captain Pacha’s lively whiskers elsewhere.

It is not entirely clear what Byron means by the Giaour’s “interruptions” of the monk’s sermon, but several instances in his dying confession might qualify as such: “Nay, start not” (1036), “Why marvel ye?” (1149), “But talk no more of penitence” (1202), “But would’st thou pity more – say less” (1209), “Tell me no more of fancy’s gleam” (1257), as well as “Waste not thine orison” (1267).

On the one hand, this annotation reinforces the (still rather transparent) illusion that The Giaour is an authentic Turkish tale which was only edited by a European traveller, who chose to omit this part of the original story. On the other hand, the phrasing of the annotation seems to imply that the ‘editor’ had witnessed the monk’s sermon in person (he relates how it was “delivered in the nasal tone”), but this is implausible given that, according to the last note in The Giaour, the ‘editor’ only heard the Levantine’s performance in the coffee-house. Either the note is meant to inform us that the Levantine storyteller included this sermon in his tale and that he recited it “in the nasal tone of all orthodox preachers”, or Byron accidentally (and metaleptically) made the European ‘editor’ a first-hand observer of the Giaour’s dying confession. The latter possibility is not altogether inconceivable given that the passage and the annotation were only added in the seventh edition, more than half a year after The Giaour had first been published.

The negative characterisation of Hassan is, however, counteracted by the unidentified Muslim narrator (“For Courtesy and Pity died / With Hassan on the mountain side”, 346–47) and even partly by the Giaour himself, who argues that he would have acted like Hassan if Leila had betrayed him as well (“Yet did he but what I had done / Had she been false to more than one”, 1062–63).

Since the annotation in which this frame narrative is introduced only appears at the very end of the poem, one has to keep in mind that, in a first perusal, readers are not aware of the editorial framing. The last annotation, hence, retrospectively ambiguates the poem. My discussion thus refers to a second reading, during which readers are already aware of the presence of the ‘European traveller’ in the notes and the interpolations.

Susan Matthias briefly reflects on the idea of The Giaour as a “mock translation” and remarks that the manuscript title of the work was The Giaour, Fragments of a Turkish Tale, Translated (Matthias 99). However, she does not discuss what this means for the interaction between the poem and the facetious notes.

Ravelhofer likewise discusses The Giaour as editorial fiction, focussing on its framing of the (allegedly) oral nature of the ‘original’ Turkish tale.

Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse likewise features annotations in which the fictional ‘editor’ makes fun of the letters he is editing. It is possible that Byron even drew inspiration from this work for The Giaour. For further details, see p. 232 above.

Samuel Rogers’s editorial fiction The Voyage of Columbus (in the 1812 version) is also often cited as a model for The Giaour (cf. Gleckner 91; McGann, Fiery Dust 142; Peterson 28–29; Seed 15). For a brief discussion of this work and its annotations, see p. 234 above.

In the cancelled preface to the first two cantos of Don Juan, Byron would later make fun of editorial fictions containing such “interpolations”. Referring to Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” in which the author asks readers to imagine that the poem is spoken by the Captain of a small trading vessel, Byron requests his readers “to suppose by a like exertion of Imagination – that the following epic Narrative is told by a Spanish Gentleman[.] […] Having supposed as much of this as the utter impossibility of such a supposition will admit – the reader is requested to extend his supposed power of supposing so far as to conceive that the dedication to Mr. Southey – & several stanzas of the poem itself are interpolated by the English Editor” (CPW 5: 81; 83–84).

The Giaour was published only a few decades after Macpherson’s Ossian poems, Chatterton’s Thomas Rowley poems, and Beckford’s Vathek, and only shortly after Samuel Rogers’s The Voyage of Columbus and Thomas Moore’s The Poems of Thomas Little. Given their experience with such works, readers were, of course, wary whenever they encountered a ‘found’ manuscript or an ‘overheard’ story. However, as the annotations in both CHP and The Giaour constantly reminded them, Byron (unlike Beckford, for example) had been to the East. Thus, despite the era’s penchant for editorial fiction, it was not inconceivable for contemporaries that this ‘overheard’ story was, for once, authentic and that Byron was indeed only the translator, annotator, and interpolator of an original Turkish story. In an addition to the last annotation on The Giaour (the addition was first included in the fourth ed.), however, Byron raises doubts about his ‘overheard’ story by discussing the (in)authenticity of Vathek, thus drawing attention to the similarly dubious origins of The Giaour (cf. Giaour 1334n; CPW 3: 423). Furthermore, Byron’s affirmation – for a passage that is allegedly part of the original Turkish story – that the “oriental simile” in it is “fairly stolen” from oriental literature though it may appear ‘too oriental’ to be authentic adds to the doubts about the existence of this original Turkish story (cf. Giaour 494n; CPW 3: 419, original emphasis). As McGann points out, the many additions to The Giaour that Byron made in later editions further undermined his fiction of the ‘overheard’ story: “Were his readers to assume, as each new and augmented edition of his ‘snake of a poem’ came out, that he periodically recalled additional snatches of the original lay?” (McGann, Fiery Dust 143).

Reviews show that contemporary readers were divided over the existence of Byron’s ‘overheard’ story. The British Review (vol. 5, no. 9, Oct. 1813), for instance, comments that they at first erroneously “thought it to have been the translation of a genuine portion of a Turkish poem” but that they were soon undeceived (“Review of The Giaour” 133). The Edinburgh Review (vol. 21, no. 42, July 1813) is in two minds about the question. They argue that “Turk or Christian” might have written the poem, but that they do “not think any other but Lord Byron himself could have imparted the force and the character which are conspicuous in the fragments” (“Review of The Giaour” 300). Later on, they conjecture that “the Turkish original of the tale is attested, to all but the bolder sceptics of literature, by the great variety of untranslated words” (308). The Quarterly Review (vol. 10, no. 20, Jan. 1814) seems (or pretends) to blindly trust the annotation, speculating that the character of the Giaour “was, perhaps, further recommended to Lord Byron, by a recollection of the scene in which he first heard it [the tale], of the impression which it made on the eastern audience, and of the grotesque declamations and gestures of the Turkish story-teller” (“Review of The Giaour and of The Bride of Abydos” 333).

In one case, i.e. the note on second-hearing discussed above, the difference between the ‘real’ Byron and the fictional editor is being blurred. This note makes clear that in it the real-life Byron rather than any fictional annotator persona is speaking: it provides various autobiographical details (the trip to Cape Colonna, the names of Byron’s Albanian servants, the group almost being attacked by robbers), all of which are verified outside The Giaour itself – in the notes to CHP. This raises the question whether Byron is, in fact, also directly speaking in all other annotations to The Giaour or whether the straightforwardly autobiographical note on second-hearing is an exception. This example shows that there are instances in which the “I” in an annotation straightforwardly refers to the actual Byron (as in this note for 1077) and instances in which the “I” in an annotation refers to the European traveller, who may or may not be equated with Byron (as in the very last note on the poem, in which the editorial fiction is being established).

This identification is based on the fact that these passages do not contain any Eastern imagery (the touchstone for differentiating between the two ‘authors’ mentioned in the note) and that they neither recount any event related to the plot nor feature any of the characters of the main narrative. This description is for the most part consistent with Shilstone’s analysis, who, however, does not distinguish between those passages ‘told’ by the Levantine and those ‘added’ by the European ‘editor’ and argues instead that there is one overarching author-persona who ventriloquises different narrators (cf. Shilstone 52–55). According to him, the interpolations are spoken by this fictionalised author-persona directly (cf. 49; 52). He also attributes the last six lines of the poem (1329–1443) to this persona (cf. Shilstone 257n19).

The question which narrator is responsible for which passage (as well as the question how many narrators there are in the first place) is discussed, for example, by Karl Kroeber (cf. 140), Michael Sundell (cf. 590), Frederick Shilstone (cf. 52–55), Jerome McGann (cf. Fiery Dust 142–46), Robert Gleckner (cf. Byron and the Ruins of Paradise 98–117), and Christoph Bode (cf. “Byron’s Dis-Orientations” 76–78). For my own attempt at identifying both the speakers and the ‘authors’ of each passage in The Giaour, see p. 402f.

For example, the passage in which the Giaour is cursed (723–786) could be spoken by the heterodiegetic Levantine story-teller or by one of the homodiegetic Muslim characters (e.g. the fisherman or Hassan’s mother).

This makes the interaction between poem and notes in The Giaour quite similar to that in Byron’s “Lachin Y Gair”, where the speaker enthusiastically responds to the natives’ tales in the poem itself but expresses scepticism of them in the annotations. For a longer discussion, see chapter 3.4.1.

The comical annotation on the ‘libelled pelican’ (briefly mentioned above on p. 271 n above) is likewise appended to one of the interpolations (cf. Giaour 951n; CPW 3: 421).

Two other approaches to the notes of The Giaour will only briefly be mentioned here because they do not directly deal with the contrast between the serious poem and the comical notes. Firstly, Barbara Ravelhofer argues that the notes are meant to be “a swipe at Robert Southey’s metrical romance Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), in which orientalist subject matter was heavily glossed by long-winded, ponderous annotations” (Ravelhofer 27). However, apart from one reference to Southey’s poem in the note for line 755, there is no evidence that the notes in The Giaour specifically target those in Thalaba (or any other of Southey’s verse tales). The notes for Thalaba mainly consist of quotes, i.e. it is usually not Southey who is being long-winded and ponderous (and who might be ridiculed for being so) but the authors he is quoting. Hence, even if the annotations in The Giaour parodied those in Thalaba (which they do not), the parody would be directed at Southey’s sources rather than at the poet himself. Furthermore, as has been noted above, many annotations in The Giaour are (at least content-wise) drawn from Beckford’s Vathek, rather than from any of Southey’s works. It is unlikely that Byron’s use of Vathek (one of his favourite novels) is meant to be parodic. Second, Ruth Knezevich contends that the annotations in The Giaour “attempt to force the fragmented verse into a linear, objective model of narrative and scholarship. They represent an authorial and authorizing act that I shall describe as ‘textual imperialism’” (Knezevich 37). However, the very presence of the facetious, irreverent notes in The Giaour and the fact that they also make fun of the Christian prior and the European ‘editor’ counters Knezevich’s argument that the notes are mainly authoritative, objective, and imperialistic. Quite on the contrary: as shown here, they serve to complicate rather than fix or simplify the meaning of the work.

Byron did most likely not know Friedrich Schlegel’s reflections on Romantic irony (cf. Chatsiou, Paratext and Poetics 84). He does not make any reference to the concept in his works or letters; the first and only time that he (disparagingly) mentions Schlegel is in 1821, i.e. eight years after the publication of The Giaour and almost two years after he had published the first two cantos of Don Juan (cf. BLJ 8: 38–40). In 1816, Byron met Friedrich Schlegel’s brother August at Coppet, but he does not mention having discussed his brother’s philosophical ideas with him (cf. BLJ 8: 167; 172–73). Even though Byron did not know Schlegel’s concept itself, it is nevertheless permissible to describe certain phenomena in his works as instances of Romantic irony. After all, Schlegel has to be seen as the discoverer rather than the inventor of the concept (cf. Immerwahr 665). In other words, the phenomena which are subsumed under the term ‘Romantic irony’ can be found in literature long before the Romantic age, and Schlegel was merely the first to draw a connection between a certain set of philosophical and literary notions, and to apply the term ‘irony’ to them. Rather than by Schlegel’s theoretical considerations, Byron’s use of textual strategies that are associated with Romantic irony was most likely influenced by his reading of Sterne, Fielding, Cervantes, Pulci, Berni, and Ariosto, as well as – later – of Casti and Frere (cf. Joseph 183–87; Fuess 143).

See, for example, Alexandra Böhm, who argues that in Don Juan Byron “brings the high claims of Romanticism back to the mundane materiality of life” (Böhm 182). When he uses Romantic irony to represent the “contrasting, paradoxical, and open heterogeneity and multiplicity of the real” and when he employs an “unexpected conjunction of incongruous elements”, he never points to a “higher, transcendental synthesis” (183). According to her, Byron succeeds in the conjunction of opposites only on a worldly and often comical level; he never combines the mundane/facetious and the transcendental/serious in this way without entirely debasing the latter.

In the first six editions, the annotations in The Giaour were printed as footnotes; they were turned into endnotes from the seventh edition onwards (cf. Chatsiou, “Lord Byron” 650). I agree with Chatsiou’s argument that this change from foot- to endnotes was probably made in order to better allow readers to first read the poem in its entirety and to pay attention to the annotations only in a second reading.

Byron himself, however, privately stressed the sincerity of self-contradiction as early as in 1813/1814. Regarding the journal he kept during this time, he commented: “God knows what contradictions it may contain. If I am sincere with myself […] every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor” (BLJ 3: 233).

In his biography of Byron (1830–31), his friend Thomas Moore comments on this passage in Don Juan, arguing that Byron “was fully aware not only of the abundance of this quality in his own nature, but of the danger in which it placed consistency and singleness of character” (T. Moore, Lord Byron 2: 787). Slightly earlier in the biography, he explains that Byron was governed “at different moments by totally different passions” (2: 782) and that “[s]o various, indeed, and contradictory were his attributes, both moral and intellectual, that he may be pronounced to have been not one, but many” (2: 783). Likewise, he comments on Byron’s “readiness in reflecting all hues, whether of the shadows or of the lights of our variegated existence” (2: 795) and on the “unexampled versatility of his powers and feelings, and the facility with which he gave way to the impulses of both” (2: 795). For a more detailed discussion of Moore’s account of Byron’s role-playing, mobility and apparent insincerity, see Vail 169–76.

Moore’s account of Byron’s character chimes in with a famous stanza in the posthumously published seventeenth canto of Don Juan. The narrator (who is, in this case, strongly implied to be identical with Byron) reflects: “Temperate I am – yet never had a temper; / Modest I am – yet with some slight assurance; / Changeable too – yet somehow ‘Idem semper’: / Patient – but not enamoured of endurance; / Cheerful – but, sometimes, rather apt to whimper: / Mild – but at times a sort of ‘Hercules furens’: / So that I almost think that the same skin / For one without – has two or three within” (Don Juan 17.11, original emphasis).

McGann also notes that, from a political standpoint, mobility is dangerously close to treachery and opportunism – calling special attention to Byron’s comments on Robert Southey in Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment (cf. McGann, “Byron, Mobility, and the Poetics of Historical Ventriloquism” 72). To this, one may add that the narrator of Don Juan (who may, in this particular passage, be read as Byron’s alter ego) ascribes a similar political mobility to himself, (facetiously?) arguing that he “was born for opposition” and that he would immediately change his political allegiances if the party he supported came into power (Don Juan 15.22): if the current monarchist powers fell, he would first “deride their tumble” and then “turn the other way, / And wax an Ultra-royalist in loyalty, / Because I hate even democratic royalty” (15.23). While Southey’s political mobility impelled him to go the ‘safer’ way from Jacobin to royalist Poet Laureate, the narrator’s (and Byron’s) would allegedly lead them to whatever is most dangerous and rebellious.

Furthermore, rather than expressing ambivalence (i.e. the co-presence of conflicting attitudes), mobility might just as well indicate a simple move from one unambivalent attitude to the next one.

Of course, the matter is rendered even more complicated by the fact that Byron kept adding to The Giaour over several months after its first publication, with the result that there are seven different published versions of the poem. The extremely complex composition and publication history of The Giaour is traced in CPW 3: 406–13.

This might have been a reaction to reviewers’ hostile responses to the notes in The Giaour or an attempt to write works that were more consistent with what readers at that time would recognise as ‘Byronic’, i.e. full of grandeur, gloom, and disillusionment. It was only in Don Juan that Byron re-introduced the combination of the serious and the comical. Instances of self-subversion through self-annotation can, however, also be found earlier than in The Giaour. Apart from being included in CHP, they also occur in “Lachin Y Gair” (see chapter 3.4.1) and The Waltz (see chapter 3.3.3).

The letter is reprinted in CPW 3: 414. It was also reprinted in Moore’s biography of Byron, who, however, omitted Byron’s drafted annotation which questions the accuracy of Sligo’s account (cf. T. Moore, Lord Byron 1: 289–90).

These readers were: John Galt, Lord Holland, Matthew Lewis, Thomas Moore, Samuel Rogers, Lady Melbourne, and Edward Daniel Clarke (cf. BLJ 3: 200; 3: 230).

It appears from Byron’s correspondence that he initially wanted to use the letter to counter the rumours that his ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb spread about his adventures in the Ottoman empire (cf. BLJ 3: 102; 3: 155–56). Neither the exact content of these rumours, nor the number of people who heard about them can be reconstructed. I could not find a review of The Giaour that refers to the rumours; it is uncertain how well-known they were beyond Lamb’s private circle.

Medwin is usually rather unreliable. Thomas Moore, one of Byron’s closest friends, for example, argued that his book on Byron’s conversations was “full of gross errors” (T. Moore, Journal of Thomas Moore 2: 772). In this case, however, his account is more or less substantiated by Byron’s personal correspondence and journal entries.

William St. Clair contends that Byron deliberately hoaxed Medwin during their conversations, whereas Doris Langley Moore points out that Medwin seems to have been simply careless and stupid, and that neither he nor Byron appear to have been particularly sober during their talks (cf. St. Clair, “Byron’s Bamming and Humming” 43–45; D. L.-L. Moore, The Late Lord Byron 96–98).

Byron’s most conceited and irrelevant (with respect to the annotated passage) anecdotal note was never published; it only appears in the manuscript of Don Juan. Annotating the passage where Juan is forced to kiss the sultana Gulbeyaz’s “thorough-bred” fingers, he explains that “[t]here is perhaps nothing more distinctive of birth than the hand – it is almost the only sign of blood which Aristocracy can generate. – I remember a Pacha’s remarking that he knew that a certain Englishman was nobly born – because ‘he had small ears – small hands & curling silky hair’” (Don Juan 5.106n; CPW 5: 709, original emphasis). The “certain Englishman” was, of course, Byron himself, and the Pacha was Ali Pacha, whom he had met in 1809. The Pacha’s compliment made a great impression on the young Byron, who mentions it four times in his letters from Albania – twice to his mother (cf. BLJ 1: 227; 1: 249), to his schoolfriend Henry Drury (cf. BLJ 1: 238), and to his Cambridge friend Francis Hodgson (cf. BLJ 1: 254). The note in Don Juan shows that he remembered it even more than a decade later. In the published version, Byron only printed the first sentence of the annotation. Maybe he eventually realised that the fact that an old Albanian warlord had flirted with him was nothing to boast of.

The first use of “hell” in this sense that I could find occurs in Theophilus Swift’s The Gamblers, a Poem (1777). In 1809, the article “Notorious Gamblers” in the Satirist, or Monthly Meteor (vol. 4) remarks that a “Mr. Trist […] attended regularly at all the Hells” without providing an explanation of the word, which suggests that its meaning was sufficiently known to readers by this time (“Notorious Gamblers” 154, original emphasis). The first mention recorded in the OED is from 1812 (cf. “hell, n. and int.” def. A.8.).

In the passage in his “Detached Thoughts”, on which this annotation is based, Byron explains that ‘silver hell’ is “a cant name for a second rate Gambling house” (BLJ 9: 19).

The narrator, however, muses on the feeling one has right before a duel in Don Juan 4.41.

Gary Dyer makes a similar argument about Byron’s use of foreign and slang languages in Don Juan: “Even when Byron uses Latin, French, or the dialect of the Fancy to refer to innocuous or uncontroversial things, his constant reliance on these languages points to the need to disguise his meanings on other subjects” (Dyer, “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets” 574).

In his “Detached Thoughts” (see below), Byron likewise tantalises readers with the shocking confessions that he withholds from them: “If I could explain at length the real causes which have contributed to increase this perhaps natural temperament of mine – this Melancholy which hath made me a bye-word – nobody would wonder – – but this is impossible without doing much mischief. […] I must not go on with these reflections – or I shall be letting out some secret or other – to paralyze posterity” (BLJ 9: 38, original emphasis). Byron’s remarks on his Memoirs (which were burnt by his friends after his death) also constantly refer to all the things that he dared not include in them (cf. BLJ 6: 59; 6: 236; 7: 244; 9: 38; 9: 172).

In the manuscript, Byron had left out the reference to young men when quoting Horace’s lines. Hobhouse – torn between moral squeamishness and scholarly correctness – told him to “add the whole or scratch out all after femina”. Byron replied: “Quote the whole then – it was only in compliance with your Settentrionale [northern] notions that I left out the remnant of the line” (CPW 5: 681).

The decision to substitute asterisks for these lines was Murray’s rather than Byron’s. The restored lines were only published after Byron’s death.

It is probable that Byron’s acquaintance was William Wallace, later author of Memoirs of William Wallace, Esq. Late of His Majesty’s 15th Hussars (1821). The rather sentimental and moralising book recounts how the author spent his youth in gambling dens among high-society rakes and how he was eventually imprisoned for his debts. It is not recorded whether Byron knew the work.

The Memoirs were destroyed shortly after Byron’s death (against his own wishes and despite the protests of Moore). For more information on them, see D. L.-L. Moore, The Late Lord Byron 12–56 and Cochran, The Burning of Byron’s Memoirs 1–17.

See, for instance, his remarks on what unfavourable (or too honest) biographers did to the reputation of great men (cf. Don Juan 3.91–92) and his poem “Churchill’s Grave”, which ponders on both the posthumous neglect and fame of an author who was highly successful among contemporaries. It must also be kept in mind that, in the same year as he began writing his “Detached Thoughts”, Byron was deeply involved in the Pope-Bowles controversy, witnessing one of the most celebrated poets of the previous century and his personal idol falling out of favour with parts of posterity. On a grander scale, Byron also tried to assess what future generations would think of Waterloo – guessing (quite correctly) that “it will be like the battle of Zama, where we think of Hannibal more than Scipio”, i.e. remembered for Napoleon’s defeat rather than Wellington and Blücher’s victory (CHP 4.181n; CPW 2: 340).

For example, he told Lady Melbourne that he “would give the world to pass a month with Sheridan or any lady or gentleman of the old school – & hear them talk every day & all day of themselves & acquaintance – & all they have heard & seen in their lives” (BLJ 3: 129). Fuelled by his “awareness of having lived in a particular world (that of early Regency London) which had passed into history”, Byron apparently tried to provide future generations with as much gossip and amusing information about the early nineteenth century as he would have liked to hear about the eighteenth (Cheeke 157; also see 182–83).

Volume four of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, which will cover the Romantic age, has unfortunately not been published yet.

The Romantic interest in anecdotes can be seen, for example, in Thomas Moore’s posthumously published journal, in which he recorded many first-, second- and third-hand accounts of amusing incidents and bon mots.

Among others, he owned John Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century and Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature as well as the latter’s Calamities of Authors and Quarrels of Authors (cf. CMP 234; 240).

The fashion for recording table-talk stems from the seventeenth century (cf. Cuddon 708). Byron’s own table-talk has been published by a multitude of contemporaries; it is also collected in Ernest J. Lovell’s His Very Self and Voice. Lovell notes that the reliability of many of these accounts is highly contested.

Three examples may suffice to give an idea of the nature of Spence’s Observations: Pope is recorded saying: “Sir John Suckling was an immoral man, as well as debauched. The story of the French cards (his getting certain marks affixed to all that came from the great makers in France) was told me by the late Duke of Buckingham, and he had it from old Lady Dorset herself” (Spence 89). According to the Observations, Pope also reflected on the “terrible moments” one feels “after one has engaged for a large work! In the beginning of my translating the Iliad, I wished any body would hang me a hundred times” (Spence 28). And, lastly, his opinion of Elijah Fenton: “Fenton is a right honest man. He is fat and indolent; a very good scholar; sits within, and does nothing but read or compose” (Spence 135). I am quoting from the edition Byron owned (edited by Edmund Malone and published by John Murray in 1820). A modern edition (edited by James M. Osborn) came out in 1966.

The advertisement informs readers that Spence’s original manuscript was even more disorganised (cf. Spence iv). The nineteenth-century editor attempted to create some order by sorting the anecdotes according to the person to which they refer.

Byron’s “Detached Thoughts” likewise often imitate spoken discourse while also drawing attention to the fact that he was writing them down. For instance, Byron recorded: “At Brighthelmstone – (I love orthography at length) in the year 1808 Hobhouse, Scrope Davies, Major Cooper – and myself – having dined together with Lord Delvin – Count (I forget the french [sic] Emigrant nomenclature) and others – did about the middle of the night (we four) proceed to a house of Gambling – being amongst us possest of about twenty guineas of ready cash – with which we had to maintain about as many of our whoreson horses & servants – besides household and whorehold expenditure. We had I say – twenty guineas or so – & lost them – returning home in bad humour” (BLJ 9: 39, original emphasis). (The anecdote ends with Davies and Hobhouse almost killing each other but reconciling the next day.)

The absence of postal secrecy is also shown in Byron’s letters from Italy, which were intercepted by the Austrians due to his association with the carbonari. Since he knew that the Austrians would read his correspondence, he included a brief aside to them in one of his letters to Murray, so that “they may see in my most legible hand – that I think them damned Scoundrels and Barbarians – their Emperor a fool – & themselves more fools than he” (BLJ 7: 238–39). For public-private letters shortly before Byron’s age and the fact that they were likewise read by many people beside the intended recipient, also see W. L. Jones 20–22.

Even satires that were not immediately printed often existed in a curious liminal stage between private coterie and public readership. As Gary Dyer has shown, (print) publication and publicity were not necessarily the same – satirical verses could circulate in manuscript for years, being transcribed and distributed by ever new readers, before finally being printed (cf. Dyer, “Circulation of Satiric Poetry” 68).

Examples of such private-public journals include those of Mary Berry, Charles Greville, and Harriet Arbuthnot, as well as of Byron’s friends Hobhouse and Moore. When Byron got into an altercation with Hobhouse (who objected to the planned publication of Byron’s Memoirs or at least to the fact that, instead of himself, Moore was to be their editor), Byron told Murray: “Does Mr. Hobhouse dispute my right to leave Memoirs of myself for posthumous publication? Have not thousands done it? […] But the best is – that I happen to know that he himself keeps – and has kept for many years a regular diary […] – and has he done this with no view to posthumous publication? I will not believe it” (BLJ 9: 70, original emphasis).

Even before his death, Byron’s contemporaries guessed as much: John Gibson Lockhart commented that Byron had been “writing certain letters, which, although you [Byron] say they ‘never can be published,’ most undoubtedly will, one day or other, be published, and have been written, one and all of them, for the express purpose of being published” (Lockhart, John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron 106).

For the importance of literary biography in the Romantic age, also see H. Jackson, “What’s Biography Got to Do With It?”.

Susan Matthias, for instance, argues that “[t]he paratextual elements [in The Giaour] also permit Byron to speak in his own voice” (Matthias 98), and Ourania Chatsiou contends that Byron’s “voice dominates his notes” (Chatsiou, “Robert Southey’s ‘Old Curiosity-Shops’” 21).

This notion of different readerships that can be inferred and differentiated from each other on the basis of a single passage is quite different from the concept of the implied reader. Wayne C. Booth famously argued that the implied reader is a persona “whose beliefs must coincide with the author’s” and that it serves as the author’s “second self” (Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction 138). Furthermore, in his overview of different concepts of implied readership, Wolf Schmid defines the implied reader as “the author’s image of the recipient that is fixed and objectified in the text by specific indexical signs” (Schmid § 1). Schmid differentiates between two types of implied readers. The first one is a “presumed addressee to whom the work is directed and whose linguistic codes, ideological norms, and aesthetic ideas must be considered if the work is to be understood. In this function, the implied reader is the bearer of the codes and norms presumed in the readership” (Schmid § 5, original emphasis). The second (closer to Booth’s) is an “ideal recipient who understands the work in a way that optimally matches its structure and adopts the interpretive position and aesthetic standpoint put forward by the work” (Schmid § 7, original emphasis). Both of these notions refer to a single, uniform readership who is best suited to understand, and to accept the propositions of, a given text in its entirety. The notion of readerships that I am adopting here, however, takes into account that many self-annotations (and literary texts in general) deliberately play with different readerships, some of which are not at all well-equipped to understand (or to accept) the propositions of a given note in its entirety. In other words, these notes are directed at various readerships that have different levels of knowledge and, possibly, different opinions and attitudes towards the matter(s) presented.

This general reading public was, of course, by no means a uniform mass, and who was part of it could change from passage to passage. Who I mean by this general readership is everyone who (1) had at least partial access to the annotated work in question (i.e. through authentic editions, pirated editions, long quotes in reviews, or extracts in commonplace books), (2) who had no specialised knowledge or insider information on the background of a given passage, and (3) who was not personally mentioned/alluded to in this passage. Thus, depending on the passage in question, ‘general readership’ can mean, for example, anyone who is not a personal acquaintance of Byron, or who does not move in literary circles, or who is not able to detect a certain allusion, or who does not understand a foreign word or slang term. In other words, the term ‘general reading public’ is here always used to refer to those readers who have less knowledge about, or personal involvement in, specific aspects of a certain passage than any other reader or group of readers. People who were part of the general readership of one passage could be insiders in another passage, and vice versa.

Other instances of Byron boasting about his swimming feats can be found in “On Swimming from Sestos to Abydos”, Don Juan 2.105, and the “Letter to John Murray, Esq.”, which was published in the context of the Pope-Bowles controversy (cf. Byron, CMP 131).

The most prominent work arguing that Troy never existed and that the Iliad has no foundation in history is Jacob Bryant’s 1796 A Dissertation Concerning the War of Troy and the Expedition of the Grecians as Described by Homer. Byron makes disparaging remarks about Bryant in his Ravenna Journal and in Don Juan (cf. BLJ 8: 22; Don Juan 4.76; 4.101).

A decade after their journey, Byron noted in his Ravenna Journal that Hobhouse and others had “bored [him] with their learned localities” when visiting the plain of Troy (BLJ 8: 22).

For a more detailed analysis of this passage in The Bride of Abydos and its annotation, see Cheeke 63–66.

In McGann, the notion of “poetic coding” refers to “playing with language, developing systems of punning and coded talk which require some kind of special knowledge to decipher” (McGann, “Byron and ‘the Truth in Masquerade’” 194).

The most elaborate classification of the various strategies and functions of differentiating readerships/audiences can be found in Peter Kühn’s study Mehrfachadressierung: Untersuchungen zur adressatenspezifischen Polyvalenz sprachlichen Handelns (see esp. 6; 113; 133–34; 137; 139; 153). For instance, he differentiates between cases in which it is clear to uninitiated readerships that an utterance has a further meaning which they cannot understand (‘encrypted’ multi-addressing) and cases in which an ambiguous utterance seems to be absolutely unambiguous to the unitiniated, thereby veiling its further readership(s) and meaning(s) (‘conspirational’ multi-addressing) (cf. Kühn 137–39). Kühn’s work is primarily concerned with non-literary utterances. Most of his examples are drawn from political speeches, but he also refers to, for instance, employment references and patient information leaflets. His focus on non-literary texts means that he treats the differentiation of readerships as a means to a practical end rather than as a possible end in itself. As a consequence, his close-readings are almost exclusively concerned with the functions (i.e. the ‘what and why’) of multi-addressed utterances, whereas the present chapter will also analyse how exactly the text passages in question differentiate between readerships. Furthermore, Kühn’s non-literary examples almost never address their own use of multi-addressing, let alone teasingly parade it. In contrast, as will be shown in the course of this chapter, the differentiation of readerships in literary texts can be highly self-reflexive, ostentatious, and playful.

With respect to Don Juan, for example, McGann notes that the manner in which the poem is written “is precisely designed not to disguise its own procedures of mystification. Rather, [it is] flaunting its doubletalk” (McGann, “Byron and ‘the Truth in Masquerade’” 194, original emphasis).

Byron was by no means the only author in the Romantic age to use his annotations for social networking. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey’s propensity to sing each other’s praises in their notes was so notorious that the author of John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron (1821, most likely written by John Gibson Lockhart) commented: “the Lakers are not understood to be much in the habit of giving good – very good words – to any one beyond their own sweet circle. Read their notes. […] You will then perceive as all that have read them already have done, – that in fact the Lakers would fain have us believe there are no poets in the world but themselves” (Lockhart, John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron 70). The notes in Madame de Staël’s Corinne likewise contain compliments to her father, to Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Vittorio Alfieri, and Friedrich Schlegel. And Scott, in his notes, was fond of both promoting his friends’ works and of including inside jokes that, as the notes assure readers, only those who know Scott personally would understand (cf. Mayer, “Scott’s Editing” 677).

For plagiarism in the Romantic age, also see Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period as well as E. F. Smith, Byron’s Plagiarism as Judged by his Contemporaries.

That Byron indeed sometimes plagiarised (not only from literary works but also from travel narratives and even cookbooks) is illustrated in Cochran, “Byron and Plagiarism”. Also see p. 198 n above for a case in which Byron plagiarised an entire annotation – presenting the information as if it were drawn from personal experience when he is actually just copying a published letter by German poet Friedrich von Matthisson.

Another example of such a note appears in the appendix for The Two Foscari, where Byron declares that he used the expression “ocean-Rome” for Venice before having discovered it in Lady Morgan’s Italy (cf. CPW 6: 222). This note not only functions as a defence against accusations of plagiarism but also serves to clarify Byron’s political allegiances: Morgan’s “fearless and excellent work” (as Byron extols it in the appendix) deplores the dire state of contemporary Italy and attacks its Austrian rulers, for which she, in turn, was heavily criticised by conservative English reviewers.

The passage in Christabel reads: “The Lady sprung up suddenly, / The lovely Lady, Christabel! / It moan’d as near, as near can be, / But what it is, She cannot tell – / On the other Side it seems to be / Of the huge brown-breasted old Oak Tree. / The Night is chill; the Forest bare; / Is it the Wind that moaneth bleak? / There is not Wind enough in the Air / To move away the ringlet Curl / From the lovely Lady’s Cheek – / There is not wind enough to twirl / The One red Leaf, the last of its Clan, / That dances as often as dance it can” (S. T. Coleridge, Christabel 1.37–50).

For a more detailed analysis of the metre of Christabel, its origins, and its influence on Scott and Byron, see Strabone 261–97. For Byron’s comments on the unusual formal features of The Siege of Corinth, see BLJ 5: 29.

A letter to his nephew, written in 1825, shows that Coleridge was indeed quite piqued about Scott’s unacknowledged use of Christabel. He points out that “Sir W. Scott might have served me [by promoting Christabel] if he had at [that] time said only one half of what he has since avowed, in large companies” (S. T. Coleridge, Coll. Letters 5: 437, original emphasis). For a more detailed discussion of Coleridge’s thoughts on Scott and Wordsworth’s drawing inspiration from Christabel without properly acknowledging it, see Paley passim.

I could not find any reviews or other public discussions of the allegations against Scott in the years right after The Lay of the Last Minstrel had been published. The first time that Scott acknowledged his debt to Christabel in print was in 1830, possibly in response to Thomas Medwin’s 1824 Conversations of Lord Byron, in which Medwin quotes Byron arguing that “‘Christabel’ was the origin of all Scott’s metrical tales” (Medwin 172; cf. 202; cf. Paley 106).

The editor of Coleridge’s letters surmises that it might have been a copy of the unsent letter to an unknown correspondent mentioned above (cf. editor’s n for Coleridge, Coll. Letters 4: 602).

Unfortunately, Coleridge’s reply to this letter is no longer extant (his next surviving letter to Byron dates from 17 February 1816).

The review of Christabel that would eventually be published in the Edinburgh Review (vol. 27, no. 53, Sep. 1816) harshly criticises Coleridge’s poem as well as Byron’s praise of it, and briefly digresses to ridicule Byron’s recent publications. It is not clear whether the review was written by Thomas Moore (it is highly unlikely that one of Byron’s closest friends would attack him in this manner). The review might also have been written by William Hazlitt. For a recent discussion of the possible authorship of the review, see Benatti and Tonra.

It is not really clear what the reviewer’s reference to the “classical reader” means. Perhaps it alludes to the fact that Coleridge by no means invented the metre he used in Christabel (for Coleridge’s models, see Strabone 269–75).

See, for instance, the Theatrical Inquisitor (vol. 8, Mar. 1816) (“Theatrical and Literary Chit-Chat” 240) and the Monthly Review (vol. 82, Jan. 1817) (“Review of Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep” 24). Those who refer to Byron’s praise right at the beginning of their review include the Edinburgh Review (vol. 27, no. 53, Sep. 1816) (“Review of Christabel, Kubla Khan, a Vision”); the British Review (vol. 8, no. 15, Aug. 1816) (“Review of Christabel – Kubla Khan, a Vision”); the Literary Panorama (vol. 4, no. 22, July 1816) (“Review of Christabel. Kubla Khan, a Vision. The Pains of Sleep”); and the Anti-Jacobin Review (vol. 50, no. 218, July 1816) (“Review of Christabel”).

Despite Byron’s efforts, Christabel was a commercial and critical failure. A decade after its publication, Coleridge remarked that “[t]he Sale of the Christabel sadly disappointed Mr Murray. It was abused & ridiculed by the Edingburgh [sic] Review: & the Quarterly [Review] refused even to notice it” (S. T. Coleridge, Coll. Letters 5: 437).

At other times, of course, both before and after 1815, Byron was very ambivalent towards, or even dismissive of, Coleridge’s talent. For instance, writing to James Hogg in 1814, Byron sharply criticised the Lake Poets: “I hate these talkers one and all, body and soul. They are a set of the most despicable impostors […]. They know nothing of the world[.] […] Look at their beastly vulgarity, when they wish to be homely; and their exquisite stuff, when they clap on sail, and aim at fancy. Coleridge is the best of the trio – but bad is the best. Southey should have been a parish-clerk, and Wordsworth a man-midwife – both in darkness. I doubt if either of them ever got drunk” (BLJ 4: 85).

Byron’s sincerity in claiming that he had never heard or seen Christabel before composing the passage in question cannot be verified with absolute certainty, but most of the evidence confirms his statement. McGann’s conjectures on the composition history of The Siege of Corinth endorse Byron’s account. The watermark dates in the manuscripts, the physical condition of the manuscripts, and Byron’s letters suggest that lines 474–563 were written as early as in autumn 1813, i.e. nearly two years before Byron heard Scott recite Christabel (cf. editor’s n in CPW 3: 480). In his commentary on The Siege of Corinth in the posthumous Works of Byron, Thomas Moore provides a convincing explanation for the similarities between Byron’s poem and Christabel: “the poet had never read ‘Christabel’ at the time when he wrote those lines; – he had, however, [read] the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’” (T. Moore, Works of Byron 10: 105–06). In other words, Scott had been inspired by Coleridge and Byron by Scott. Given his implicit criticism of Scott for using Christabel without acknowledgement, it is a bit ironic that Byron does not admit his debt to Scott anywhere in The Siege of Corinth.

For the ‘truth’ of performance, see Zirker, William Shakespeare and John Donne 12. For the concept of performance, in general, see Fischer-Lichte 29–37.

It is not entirely clear whether Hodgson was the one who had objected to the expression, but he is the most likely candidate. The annotation must have been written between 13 November (when the lines in question were first received by Murray as a corrected fair copy to be added to the poem) and 20 November 1813 (when Byron asked Murray to delete part of the note that he had sent him) (cf. CPW 3: 432; BLJ 3: 169). The manuscript of the annotation is not extant (cf. editor’s n in Murray 50). Both the annotated lines and the (full) annotation were first printed in the proof of 21 November 1813 (cf. editor’s n in Murray 50). (The full note was eventually published; Byron seems to have retracted his order to delete part of it.) Drafts of The Bride of Abydos were read by Hodgson, William Gifford (Murray’s literary adviser), and Lord Holland (one of the foremost Whig politicians of the day) (cf. BLJ 3: 161; 166). Gifford, however, had received a proof of the poem on 12 November 1813, i.e. before the additional lines were even sent to Murray or inserted into the existing draft (cf. BLJ 3: 161). Thus, he cannot have been the one who objected to them. Besides, it is unlikely that Byron would have reacted this facetiously if the criticism had been voiced by Gifford, whom he called his “literary father” and whose opinion on literary matters he valued above everyone else’s (BLJ 11: 117, original emphasis; cf. e.g. BLJ 5: 193). It is just as implausible that the irreverent retort is directed at Holland, to whom the poem is dedicated and with whom Byron tried his best to establish a friendly relationship after having satirised him in EBSR.

Other annotations in which Byron reacts to objections that his friends and advisers raised when reading the drafts of his poems include: (1) Bride of Abydos 2.204n, in which Byron counters Murray’s argument that a Muslim character would not mention the names of Noah and Cain (CPW 3: 440; cf. also BLJ 3: 164–65), (2) Lara 1n, (a note written by Hobhouse at Byron’s request) which explains that, even though Lara’s name sounds Spanish, the poem is not set in Spain and that it is hence not incorrect to call Lara’s subjects “serfs” despite the fact that serfdom never existed in Spain (CPW 3: 453; cf. also BLJ 4: 143–46), and (3) Don Juan 13.106n, where Byron prints one of his friend’s manuscript comments criticising Byron’s claim that “[n]o angler can be a good man” (CPW 5: 759).

The correct passage in Shakespeare reads “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils” (Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice 5.1.82–84). It appears that the passage was often quoted incorrectly in Byron’s age. For instance, in the entry for “Shakespeare” in Rees’s The Cyclopædia: Or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, the line is introduced and misquoted as follows: “This is the initial of a well-known, and now proverbial, eulogium on modulated sound: ‘The man that has no music in his soul,’ etc.” (Rees n.pag., original emphasis).

In the passage in De l’Allemagne to which Byron’s note refers, de Staël not only discusses synaesthesia but also argues that the soul can be manifested or mirrored in external phenomena (I am quoting from the 1813 translation): “Why […] should not the supreme Intelligence, which formed nature and the soul, have made one the emblem of the other? There is no vain play of fancy in those continual metaphors which aid us in comparing our sentiments with external phænomena; sadness, with the clouded heaven […] – it is the same thought of our Creator, transfused into two different languages, and capable of reciprocal interpretation. […] The analogies between the different elements of external nature together constitute the chief law of the creation[.] […] For example, What is there more astonishing than the connexion [sic] between sounds and forms, and between sounds and colours? […] Sanderson, who was blind from his birth, said, that the colour of scarlet, in his idea, was like the sound of a trumpet […][.] We incessantly compare painting to music; because the emotions we feel discover analogies where cold observation would only have seen differences” (de Staël, Germany 3: 150–52).

Yet another annotation that draws attention to the collaborative nature of writing appears in Don Juan and records that, in the proof of the poem, Byron and one of his friends fought over the weighty question whether an angler can be a good man (cf. Don Juan 13.106n; CPW 5: 759).

This can be compared to Andrew Elfenbein’s argument that Byron’s works in general give readers the chance to take a glimpse at a world that they were usually barred from. He allows them to “view and identify with a secret aristocratic space not ordinarily open to public view” (Elfenbein 52). Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that most works before Don Juan were sold at a prize that would have prevented middle- and lower-class readers from buying them in the first place, so that Byron’s works were mainly read by his social equals (cf. St. Clair, “The Impact of Byron’s Writings” 4; 7).

For the collaborative nature of Romantic writing, also see St. Clair, The Reading Nation 183.

She wrote (with a great dose of feigned humility): “I do not know how to express to you, my lord, how honoured I feel to be in a note to your poem, and in what a poem! For the first time it seems to me that I am certain to be remembered by posterity, and you have placed at my disposal that real of esteem which will be yours more and more every day” (de Staël, Selected Corr. 329).

The first edition was destroyed at the behest of Napoleon before any copy could be sold. Only a handful of the 5000 copies of this edition survived (cf. Lonchamp no. 90). It was in the form of Murray’s 1813 edition that De l’Allemagne met the public eye for the first time.

For a recent discussion of the evidence for and against the possibility that Byron and Leigh had an incestuous relationship, see Rawes, “‘That Perverse Passion’” 75–79. Regardless of what actually happened between the two (a matter that will probably never be resolved with final certainty), one must at least admit that Byron was quite fond of hinting at such a relationship, both in his private correspondence and his works.

Though it is unlikely that she is meant here, it is quite possible that Lady Caroline Lamb (and many others who knew of her rather public past affair with Byron) would have interpreted the lines as a reference to herself. For the connection between ambiguity and poetic economy, see Bross passim.

It is very likely that Augusta Leigh would have been far from proud, pleased, or thrilled to read this allusion to their possible relationship. Throughout her life, she did her best to disclaim all rumours about the affair, e.g. forbidding Byron to publish the “Epistle to Augusta” in 1816.

In the draft, Selim and Zuleika were siblings; in the published version, they are cousins who initially believe themselves to be siblings.

Even Thomas Moore – one of Byron’s closest friends – appears to have learnt about Byron and Augusta’s possible relationship only after The Bride of Abydos had been published. Jeffery Vail surmises (based on their correspondence), that Byron hinted at it to Moore in May 1814, i.e. a few months after the publication (cf. Vail 144).

This teasing of readers with pieces of information that might or might not be supplied in later works or editions can be compared to Pope’s strategy of deliberately withholding information in the 1728 Dunciad in order to create a greater demand for the heavily annotated 1729 Dunciad (see chapter 2.2.1 above).

Gary Dyer paraphrases the stanza as follows: “Juan had removed from the world a great man, who in his day had made considerable commotion. Who could lead the thieves in attack in a fight, drink in the thieves’ hideout, or steal at the theater as Tom could? Who could cheat a fool as well or rob on horseback despite the threat of constables? Who, when out with his girlfriend Sal, was so lusty, so well dressed, so devoted, and so clued in?” (Dyer, “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets” 564).

Byron was not the first poet to use flash language in his works. For instance, his friend Tom Moore’s poem Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress is written in (boxing) flash. For lesser-known flash poems by Moore and others, see Dyer, “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets” 575n9. For seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precursors of slang literature, see Sorensen 27–105.

For the popularity of flash language in the Romantic age in general, also see Snowdon 35–70; Dyer, “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets” 564–67; Dart passim; and Ford 158–57; 166–87.

Byron was also friends with Tom Cribb, another of the foremost boxers of the age (cf. BLJ 3: 221). Furthermore, while he was at Cambridge, Byron organised an illegal boxing match between the professional boxers Tom Belcher and Dan Dogherty. The fight was interrupted by the magistrates, who subsequently arrested the fighters (cf. Hobhouse, Byron’s Bulldog 32; Dyer, “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets” 566).

However, boxing also had some supporters among “middle-class citizens who had made their money in manufacture and trade” (Brailsford, Bareknuckles 25). Nevertheless, these were far outnumbered by both those above and below them on the social scale (cf. Brailsford, “Morals and Maulers” 134).

The OED defines “mobility” (being a play on the term “nobility”) as “[t]he mob, the rabble; the common people; the working classes” (“mobility, n.2.”).

In April 1814, for example, Byron noted that he had been sparring “with Jackson for this last month daily” (BLJ 4: 91).

Dennis Brailsford likewise describes Jackson as someone who had “won the highest regard from pugilists and peers alike, was looked upon as a model of honesty and was accepted as the final authority on all matters pugilistic” (Brailsford, Bareknuckles 68).

For example, he claims that “no one should be a rhymer who could be any thing better” (BLJ: 3: 217), and stresses: “I do think the preference of writers to agents – the mighty stir made about scribbling and scribes, by themselves and others – a sign of effeminacy, degeneracy, and weakness. Who would write who had anything better to do? ‘Action – action – action’ – said Demosthenes: ‘Actions – actions,’ I say, and not writing, – least of all rhyme” (BLJ 3: 220, original emphasis). Also see BLJ 4: 183 and BLJ 5: 177.

The authenticity of the song quoted in the annotation cannot be ascertained. I could not find the stanzas printed anywhere before Don Juan. In his edition of the eleventh canto of Don Juan, Cochran argues that “the authenticity of this lyric is clear from its appearance in 1828 in The Finish of the Adventures of Tom, Jerry, and Logic, sequel to London Life by Pierce Egan” (Cochran (ed.), Don Juan Canto 11 13n46). However, it is just as likely that Egan took the lines from Byron’s note rather than from any real-life model.

Even though McGann stresses the presence of different (initiated and uninitiated) readerships in Byron’s poems, he nevertheless also argues that “[i]n general, it is as if Byron in his work were not simply meditating in public, but were declaring or even declaiming his inmost thoughts and feelings out loud, and directly to others” (McGann, “Private Poetry, Public Deception” 117–18).

A letter from Murray to Byron about Francis Cohen (later Sir Francis Palgrave), who had translated part of the Italian appendix in Marino Faliero, illustrates the social (and commercial) implications of the paratexts. Murray tells Byron: “You would [make] Cohen very happy & confer a great favour upon him if you would mention him in the preface – he is preparing a Work for the press & a notice of him from you would much serve him by bringing his name before the public” (Murray 364). It is unknown which of Cohen’s works this refers to; he “published no work under his own name at this time” (editor’s n in Murray 366). Possibly Murray “had in mind the report Cohen was preparing for negotiating the publication of the Public Records, of which he was soon to become the editor” (editor’s n in Murray 366).

In two cases, Byron’s attempts at social networking in his paratexts did more harm than good. Both of them occur in Marino Faliero. Firstly, in his preface, he deprecates the current state of the theatre but then qualifies this statement, arguing that “surely there is dramatic power somewhere, where Joanna Baillie, and [Henry Hart] Milman, and John Wilson exist” (Marino Faliero Pref. ll. 181–183; CPW 4: 305). Byron then proceeds to praise some of their works. This compliment to contemporary dramatists did not sit well with Byron’s Harrow schoolfellow Barry Procter, who complained to Thomas Medwin “that he had been jeered on [his] ‘The Duke of Mirandola’ not having been included in [Byron’s] enumeration of the dramatic pieces of the day” (Medwin 124). Byron wrote a letter of apology to Procter, assuring him that had he been aware of his tragedy, he “should certainly not have omitted to insert [Procter’s] name with those of other writers who still do honour to the drama” (BLJ 9: 83–84, original emphasis).

Secondly, in Appendix 5, Byron laments the desolate state of Venice, before going on to argue that “from the present decay and degeneracy of Venice under the Barbarians [i.e. Austrians], there are some honourable individual exceptions” (Marino Faliero App. 5; CPW 4: 542). He proceeds to compliment various of his friends and acquaintances, among them “Vittor Benzon, the son of the celebrated beauty, the heroine of ‘La Biondina in Gondoletta’, […] and, not least in an Englishman’s estimation, Madame Michelli, the translator of Shakspeare […], and Giuseppe Albrizzi, the accomplished son of an accomplished mother” (ibid.). However, as Byron’s friend Richard Belgrave Hoppner informed him, the three contesse mentioned in this passage – Maria Querini Benzoni, Giustina Michele, and Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi – were not content with Byron’s praise of them: “This note you must know has been the general subject of conversation […], and none of the three good ladies of whom you speak are perfectly satisfied because in fact each of them thinks you ought to have spoken of her alone. Poor Benzoni however was the most [satisfied] notwithstanding her hatred of the Albrizzi, until the malicious little Michaeli put it into her head that you ought to have celebrated her wit and amiability as her beauty was sufficiently notorious” (Cochran and Curtis (eds.) 71). For Byron’s facetious answer, see BLJ 8: 130–31. It should be noted that these two examples prove yet again – despite Cobbett’s assertion to the contrary – that annotations and other paratexts were indeed avidly read and discussed by Byron’s contemporaries (for Cobbett, see p. 236 above).

For correctors’ tasks and social status prior to the Romantic age, see Grafton, The Culture of Correction and Grafton, Inky Fingers 29–55.

“The apprentices were also employed in proof-reading but without correcting the press. […] [The apprentices] often worked as floaters, who, provided they had already developed the required abilities, were employed wherever the usual workflow made it necessary” (my translation). Percy Simpson in Proof-Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries also mentions a William Smellie whom his firm employed as a corrector while he was still an apprentice (cf. P. Simpson 160–61).

Printer’s devils seem to have been a byword for curiosity: the author of the anonymous Memoirs of a Printer’s Devil (1793) explains that “we Printer’s Devils have a strong propensity to peep into other men’s Works” (Memoirs of a Printer’s Devil 2).

It is possible that the contradictory accounts of the tasks that printer’s devils performed is due to the fact that some printing offices allowed their devils to take on more responsible jobs than other offices and also soon promoted them to ‘readers’ and ‘correctors’ (cf. Grafton, personal communication, 12 March 2021).

For an extensive history of Titivillus (also sometimes spelled Tutivillus) see Margaret Jennings’s Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recording Demon. The name of Tutivillus was first recorded in 1285 (cf. Jennings 16–17); at this time, he was not responsible for scribal errors but recorded “the idle words of churchgoers” and the “omitted or skimmed-over syllables from the carelessly recited prayers of the religious” (Jennings 10–11). I am grateful to Wolfgang Forster for drawing my attention to the notion of Titivillus.

Other telling examples of the printer’s devil appear in (1) vol. 30 of the Anti-Jacobin (4 June 1798; reprinted in Canning and Frere’s Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin 1799), where the devil spots a mistake in the poem (cf. 179 in repr.); (2) vol. 12 (1809) of the Universal Magazine, where the devil detects ‘plagiarisms’ in the text (“Literary Adventures” 372); (3) the preface to Edward Du Bois’s Fashionable Biography (1808), where the devil again spots a pun (the phrase “a luminous collection of speeches” is followed by the annotation “Quaere, vo-luminous. Printer’s Devil”) (Du Bois xxxviii, original emphasis); (4) a review of Sydney Owenson’s Woman, or Ida of Athens in the Quarterly Review (vol. 1, Feb. 1809), in which the devil facetiously corrects the review (“Review of Woman, or Ida of Athens” 51); and (5) an article about the “sage” committee of Drury Lane Theatre in The London Literary Gazette (no. 50, 3 Jan. 1818) annotated thus: “The Printer’s Devil, who is a bit of a critic, has just come to us to know if it should not be written stage committee. He thought sage must be a mistake” (“The Drama” 125, original emphasis).

Hornem’s exceedingly naive tone and the other persons mentioned in the preface (the Countess of Waltzaway, the Honourable Augustus Tiptoe) made it obvious to contemporary readers that he was a fictional persona rather than the real author. It is likely that his name is a pun on ‘horn [i.e. cuckold] them’ (cf. OED “horn, v.” def. 2.).

The double-voicedness of passages in which the real author is being ironic and the fictional annotator is being serious can, of course, also be seen in Pope’s use of the annotator persona ‘Scriblerus’. (Though in the case of Scriblerus, it is often ambiguous whether he is really serious or rather ironic as well.) For a more detailed comparison between Byron’s printer’s devil and Pope’s Scriblerus, see chapter 4.1.

In his notes, McGann explains that The Waltz was published anonymously and did not name John Murray as publisher because Byron and Murray feared the “possible legal and political repercussions” of the satiric poem (editor’s n in CPW 3: 395).

I could not find any earlier instance of a printer’s devil adding a stanza to a poem; Byron seems to have been the first to employ this persona in such an elaborate manner. In Alfred de Musset’s “Mardoche” (which is modelled on Byron’s Beppo and Don Juan) one finds another rhymed annotation, which, however, is not signed by the printer’s devil (cf. Bishop 44). There are also two rhymed notes signed by the printer’s devil in Alexander d’Arblay’s 1836 comical poem Caïssa rediviva, which are most likely indebted to Beppo (cf. d’Arblay 19; 26).

Referring to the annotated stanza 46, the Edinburgh Review (vol. 29, no. 58, Feb. 1818) comments: “This […] is the only slip of the kind in the whole work – the only passage in which the author betrays the secret […] of his own genius and his affinity to a higher order of poets than those to whom he has here been pleased to hold out a model” (“Review of Beppo” 307).

The relevant lines in stanza 51 famously read: “Oh that I had the art of easy writing / What should be easy reading! […] / […] / How quickly would I print (the world delighting) / A Grecian, Syrian, or Assyrian tale; / And sell you, mix’d with western sentimentalism, / Some samples of the finest Orientalism” (original emphasis). Commenting on these lines, Michael K. Joseph argues that Beppo “is like one of the Turkish Tales turned inside-out; Beppo’s life as a slave, renegade, and pirate, which would have made the experience of an early Byronic hero, is relegated to the distant background; and Byron turns his back on the Orientalism which he had exploited and fostered” (Joseph 135).

At the same time, one might go so far as to suggest that the note already contains a subtle hint of criticism of Byron’s new poetic style: the fact that the note is signed by the printer’s devil insinuates that even a mere errand boy can write a perfect ottava rima stanza.

As in many of the annotations attributed to Scriblerus in Pope’s Dunciads, it remains unclear whether the printer’s devil is being naive or ironic, i.e. whether or not he is fully aware that his defence of the poem is untenable.

The note appears in the middle of an attack against lawyers, where readers are presented with the following metaphor: “A legal broom’s a moral chimney-sweeper, / And that’s the reason he himself’s so dirty: / The endless soot bestows a tint far deeper / Than can be hid by altering his shirt; he” (Don Juan 10.15). The concise annotation for “soot” merely reads “Query, suit? – Printer’s devil” (CPW 5: 743). The devil pretends to have spotted a typographical error, which would mean that the poem actually contains a reference to lawyers who unnecessarily protract lawsuits for personal gain. The printer’s devil ensures that all readers are aware of the joke and reaffirms the metaphorical link between lawyer and chimney-sweeper.

The original article 12 reads: “Seront pareillement respectées les personnes et les propriétés particulières; les Habitans et en général tous les Individus qui se trouvent dans la Capitale, continueront à jouir de leurs droits et libertés, sans pouvoir être inquiétés ni recherchés en rien, relativement aux fonctions qu’ils occupent ou auraient occupées, à leur conduite et à leurs opinions politiques” (“Convention entre les Commisaires” 194).

Ney’s letter and Wellington’s answer were reprinted, and commented on, in Cobbett’s Political Register (“The Marshal to the Ambassadors”, 25 Nov. 1816) and The Examiner (“Foreign Intelligence” 26 Nov. 1815). Both newspapers had radical leanings; The Examiner was published by John Hunt, who also became Byron’s new publisher in 1822.

Byron’s own opinion of Ney is not known. He does not mention him in any of his letters or journal entries. Apart from the annotation discussed here, only his “Ode (From the French)” (1816) makes a reference to Ney. The respective lines in this poem read: “[Ney] whose honoured grave / Contains the ‘bravest of the brave’” (9–10). The lines do, however, not necessarily have to reflect Byron’s personal opinion. Even though the poem is an original composition, the title and headnote of the anonymously published work claim that it is only a translation of a French poem (ascribed to Chateaubriand); hence, Byron might only voice actual or possible French assessments of Ney. For Byron’s unfavourable opinion of Wellington, see M. Williams, “‘I like the Habeas Corpus (when we’ve got it)’” passim.

In a journal entry from 1818, Byron’s close friend John Cam Hobhouse mentions an epigram which might have served as a prototype for the Nay-Ney pun in Don Juan (cf. Cochran (ed.), Don Juan, Canto 9 2n2): “Lord Holland repeated to me an epigram on Kinnaird’s Memoir, which turned on the folly of listening to the Duke of Wellington’s guarantee: ‘To all the Duke could say, / You should have answered, Ney’” (Hobhouse, Recollections 2: 98, original emphasis). The epigram refers to the fact that Wellington (according to Lord Kinnaird) had guaranteed amnesty to a man called Marinêt, whom Kinnaird had been able to persuade to go to Paris to identify a man who had made an attempt on Wellington’s life. Despite the (in Kinnaird’s view) promised amnesty, Marinêt was arrested and tried (but eventually acquitted) for his connivance in the attempted assassination (cf. Cochran (ed.), The Byron-Hobhouse Correspondence 47n133). Byron mentions the incident in Don Juan 9.2. In his edition of Don Juan, E. H. Coleridge provides detailed background information on the case (cf. E. H. Coleridge (ed.) 6: 374). For Kinnaird’s reaction to Marinêt’s arrest, see his Letter to the Duke of Wellington, on the Arrest of M. Marinet (1818).

Also see the article about this incident in Hunt’s The Examiner on 16 September 1821, which is highly sympathetic to Ney’s son and critical of Wellington (cf. “Challenge of Marshal Ney’s Son”).

The printer’s devil – both as an annotatorial persona and a character in fiction – remained popular throughout the nineteenth century. He was either employed as a naive laughing-stock who inadvertently commits blunders (e.g. in Poe’s short story “X-ing a Paragrab” [sic]) or as a witty commentator who makes ironic remarks on the annotated poem (e.g. in the 1857 Job Morbid’s Pilgrimage written by a certain ‘D. R. M.’). I am grateful to Anthony Grafton for drawing my attention to Poe’s story.

Employed both as a clever, ironic character and as the inept butt of authors’ jokes, the printer’s devil can thus be compared to Pope’s annotatorial persona ‘Martinus Scriblerus’, who suffered the same fate at the hands of both Pope himself and later writers. Reviewers’ and authors’ propensity to jokingly attribute typographical errors to the printer’s devil continues to this day (see, for instance, Alcock et al. which begins: “By a curious trick of the proverbial printer’s devil, about ten pages of the original print-out did not appear” 289).

For the connection between ambiguity and poetic economy, see Bross passim.

There are a few further, minor examples of defensive/corrective notes in Byron. In the notes on CHP I, he acknowledges a factual mistake in his poem to which Scott had drawn his attention after its publication (cf. CHP 1.20n; CPW 2: 187). In a note on The Prophecy of Dante, he asks readers to pronounce “Beatrice” in the Italian way, so that the iambic pentameter remains intact (cf. 1.11n; CPW 4: 501), and in Parisina he quotes Shakespeare’s Richard II to justify his use of “haught” for “haughty” (cf. 267n; CPW 3: 491). Furthermore, in Mazeppa, he explains that it is permissible to describe the Palatine (a high-ranking official) as being as rich as a salt mine because, according to the note, Poland’s wealth consisted mainly in salt mines (cf. 157n; CPW: 4: 494). And in a note for the expression “strip[ping] the Saxons of their hydes” in Don Juan (10.36, original emphasis), Byron facetiously explains: “I believe a hyde of land to be a legitimate word, and, as such, subject to the tax of a quibble” (CPW 5: 744).

Also see Byron’s letter to Murray, in which he tells his publisher to write a note alerting readers to cases in which he made use of poetic licence in Marino Faliero: “Make a Note of this and put Editor as the Subscription to it. As I make such pretensions to accuracy – I should not like to be twitted even with such trifles on that score. – Of the play – they may say what they please but not so of my costume – and dram. pers. [dramatis personae] they having been real existences” (BLJ 7: 201, original emphasis).

In this respect, Byron is very similar to Scott, who likewise felt “obliged to indicate in the notes those occasions when he has departed from historical truth in the text” (Alexander 167; cf. also Clubbe 75). See, for example, the notes for The Lay of the Last Minstrel, where, in an annotation for canto 4, stanza 6, Scott explains that he introduced Lord William Howard “[b]y a poetical anachronism […] into the romance a few years earlier than he actually flourished” (W. Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel 272–73). Both Byron and Scott also took care to point out that their descriptions indeed corresponded to reality whenever they anticipated that readers might unjustly tax them with having deviated from facts (cf. Mayer, “The Illogical Status of Novelistic Discourse” 918). See, for example, Byron, Island 4.153n; CPW 7: 147.

In his edition of The Siege of Corinth, Cochran suggests that Byron not only wanted to forestall criticism for this instance of poetic licence but that he was also “determined to let the world know that he had seen eagles over Parnassus, and [as Byron explains later in the note] heard jackals howling in the ruins of Ephesus” (Cochran (ed.), Siege of Corinth 27n41). Thus, in this instance, Byron’s apparent concern for accuracy can also be seen as a pretext for self-presentation.

It is not clear how much Byron actually knew about his Gordon ancestors and their involvement in the Jacobite uprisings. In Gordons Under Arms, Skelton and Bulloch name “103 Gordons [who] entered the field for the old Chevalier in 1715 and for Prince Charlie in 1745” but only mention very few who were killed in either insurrection (Skelton and Bulloch l; cf. 507–32). Prominent Jacobites who were members of Clan Gordon included Lord Lewis Gordon (1724–1754) and John Gordon of Glenbucket (c.1673–1750), neither of whom was closely related to Byron (cf. Aikman 123–34). In The House of Gordon, Bulloch does not mention Byron’s great-grandfather, Alexander Gordon, 11th Laird of Gight, (1716–1760), in connection with Jacobite activities; he did not die in battle but most likely drowned himself (cf. Bulloch 114–17). What Byron does not mention in his note either is that there were also many Gordons who supported House Hanover, most prominently Cosmo Gordon, the third Duke of Gordon (cf. Way and Squire 147). However, there is no evidence that Byron intentionally overstated his family’s Jacobite ties or its fatalities in the two uprisings; rather, he most likely did not know better and, as McGann suggests in his notes for “Lachin Y Gair”, “seems to have had this romanticized history of the Gordons from his mother” (editor’s n in CPW 1: 373). Thus, even though Byron’s note on line 27 is still not entirely accurate, it nevertheless seems to reflect what he believed to be correct.

The Gordons of Gight to which Byron’s belonged “had a record of violence and banditry, of feuding and murder” and “were among the most notorious of the Scottish lairds” (Marchand, Life 1: 16).

The fact that Byron, in an annotation for lines supposed to be spoken by the natives of Loch na Garr, explains “I allude here to my maternal ancestors” makes clear that, ultimately, Byron is, of course, responsible for both the lines spoken by the natives and the lines uttered by the main speaker of the poem (“Lachin Y Gair” 25n, my emphasis).

This possibility can be compared to the annotations and poetic interpolations that the fictional editor in The Giaour adds to the work: the interpolations react sympathetically to the emotions and ideas depicted in the rest of them poem, while the notes adopt an irreverent and sceptical stance towards them (see chapter 3.2.1.2).

For example, in a contemporary account in the Noctes Ambrosianæ, Castlereagh’s speeches are described as being “full of unnecessary parentheses; stretched out by verbose repetitions; crowded with intangible propositions; and made ludicrous by absurd images” (J. Wilson et al. 84n).

One need only think of the preface to cantos 6–8 of Don Juan, published merely a month before cantos 9–11, which uses much harsher words against Castlereagh. In the preface, Byron anticipates that readers will object to a few stanzas alluding to Castlereagh and uses this as an opportunity to launch a severe attack on the late Foreign Secretary: “Had that person’s Oligarchy died with him, [the stanzas] would have been suppressed; as it is, I am aware of nothing in the manner of his death or of his life – to prevent the free expression of the opinions of all to whom his whole existence was consumed in endeavouring to enslave. […] [A]nd as to lamenting his death, it will be time enough when Ireland has ceased to mourn for his birth. As a Minister, I, for one of millions, looked upon him as the most despotic in intention and the weakest in intellect that ever tyrannized over a country. […] [I]f a poor radical devil such as Waddington or Watson had cut his throat, he would have been buried in a cross-road, with the usual appurtenances of the stake and mallet. […] It may at least serve as some Consolation to the Nations, that their Oppressors are not happy, and in some instances judge so justly of their own actions as to anticipate the sentence of mankind” (Don Juan 6, preface; CPW 5: 296).

The expression is most likely an allusion to Thomas Moore’s short poem “What’s My Thought Like?”, which explains that Castlereagh is like a pump because he is “a slender thing of wood / That up and down its awkward arm doth sway / And coolly spout and spout and spout away, / In one weak, washy, everlasting flood” (T. Moore, Poetical Works 177).

Castlereagh died on 12 August 1822. On 8 August 1822 Byron had sent a letter to Thomas Moore, telling him that he had just begun to write the ninth canto of Don Juan (cf. BLJ 9: 191). On 24 August he had nearly finished it, and on 9 September he sent the manuscript to England (cf. BLJ 9: 195; 204). The first time that Byron mentions Castlereagh’s death in a letter is on 27 August 1822 (cf. BLJ 9: 197). It is likely that Byron learnt about Castlereagh’s suicide from Galignani’s Messenger, the newspaper he subscribed to while he was in Italy. Galignani’s first reported the occurrence on 17 August 1822 (no. 2327) (cf. “Melancholy Death of the Marquis of Londonderry”). Evidence from Byron’s letters shows that it usually took the newspaper eleven or twelve days to reach him from Paris, perhaps even a bit less if we assume that he did not write the letters in which he refers to Galignani’s on the exact same day on which he received the newest issue. For instance, in a letter from 4 December 1821 he mentions an article about him and Napoleon being the “greatest examples of human vanity”, which appeared on 22 November 1821 (BLJ 9: 74). Another example is a letter from 1 March 1822 referring to a review of Moore’s Irish Melodies, which appeared in the issue of 17 February 1822 (cf. BLJ 9: 117). This suggests that he would have seen the article on Castlereagh’s suicide around 23 or 24 August 1822, i.e. when he was just finishing the ninth canto. For other instances in which Byron drew on news reported or reprinted in Galignani’s, see Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History chapter 5. For the importance of Galignani’s Messenger for nineteenth-century travellers on the continent, see Cooper-Richet, “Distribution, diffusion et circulation du Galignani’s Messenger (1814–1890)”.

One can contrast the preservation of the lines against Castlereagh (published by Byron’s new, radical publisher John Hunt) with the omission of a passage that makes fun of Sir Samuel Romilly’s suicide, which was meant to appear in canto 1 of Don Juan (published by the more cautious and conservative John Murray). Murray had written to Byron about the stanza, advising him to “modify or substitute others for, the lines on Romilly whose death should save him” (Murray 273; cf. also 274n2). Against Byron’s explicit orders to keep the passage as it was (cf. BLJ 6: 167), Murray omitted the whole stanza and instead printed two rows of asterisks. The stanza was only included in Don Juan after Byron’s death. (Byron hated Romilly because he believed that Romilly had accepted to become his lawyer in the separation from his wife only to suddenly change sides and represent Lady Byron. For what had actually happened, see Cochran, Byron’s Romantic Politics 203–04.)

The lines that are echoed in Marino Faliero occur in Otway’s Venice Preserved at 3.2.297–98. For a discussion of the similarities and differences between Byron’s and Otway’s two tragedies, see Jump, “A Comparison of Marino Faliero with Otway’s Venice Preserved”.

For example, a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine that (in May 1818, several years before the publication of Marino Faliero) defended Byron against charges of plagiarism, argued: “For surely, if a Plagiary be […] one who endeavours the clandestine appropriation of a borrowed thought; if allowed to be unconscious of its pre-existence, he cannot with much propriety be accused of stealing it” (“Lord Byron Vindicated” 390).

The fact that the annotation only refers to one line whereas there are parallels to Venice Preserved throughout the drama was noted in a review published in the Literary Gazette (iss. 223, 28 Apr. 1821). The reviewer complains that Marino Faliero is “neither more nor less than a remodification of Venice Preserved. The action, the characters, the catastrophe, are nearly the same”. The persons in the tragedy, “if not individually, do collectively repeat all the sentiments of the dramatis personæ of Otway; and upon this point of resemblance, the author, who is precise in acknowledging the minutest obligations, treats us with the following exquisite piece of irony [the reviewer then quotes the note]”. The review does not comment on the contradictoriness of Byron’s defence and mainly objects to the argument that obvious plagiarism is no plagiarism at all: “For ourselves, we know not what the gentlest reader may be inclined to credit; but we must declare that if any writer can be allowed to plunder another in the way Lord Byron has plundered Otway, and plead in defence that the robbery was committed in open day, we may as well concede at once, that barefaced depredation in literature is not a cognizable crime” (“Review of Marino Faliero” 260, original emphasis).

He was not the author of the review on Payne Knight’s Taste either. The actual reviewer was John Allen, the librarian of Lord and Lady Holland. It is usually suggested that Byron just misheard Allen’s name and assumed that it must refer to Hallam (cf. Bates 433).

For this problem in the Dunciads, see A. L. Williams 60–76.