Chapter 6 - Piracies, Fakes and Forgeries

Summary

People attempted to benefit from Lord Byron’s popularity while investing as little of their money as possible, and so they appropriated his writings or his name. Some of the resulting works were piracies, involving the publication of a composition without the copyright-owner’s permission, such as the one-shilling edition of Byron’s Beppo that William Dugdale published in 1823. Others were fakes, published works that misrepresented themselves (whether dishonestly or negligently) as being written by Byron, such as Reflections on Shipboard “by Lord Byron,” published in 1816 by R. S. Kirby and W. Allason. Others again were forgeries, material artifacts crafted or altered so that they appear to have been created by Byron, such as the supposed Byron letters fabricated by “Major George Gordon De Luna Byron” in the mid-nineteenth century. Both Jerome J. McGann’s Complete Poetical Works and Leslie Marchand’s Byron’s Letters and Journals include lists of dubia and apocrypha intended to repair the confusion created by fakes and forgeries. Piracies, fakes and forgeries are not just things to be weeded out, however, but are cultural works whose histories can be significant and illuminating.