2 - Byron and the business of publishing

Summary

None of the other Romantics was as loftily dismissive of the business (or 'trade') of publishing as Byron could be. Nonetheless, Byron's literary career was crucially shaped by the practical contingencies of publishing. In turn, his status as literary lion had significant effects on the Regency publishing world - not least in helping to make the name and fortune of what would become one of the great London houses, John Murray of Albemarle Street. Byron's mobility - his protean capacity to be of many minds, strike many poses, hold in suspension apparently contradictory opinions - is nowhere more evident than in his attitudes toward the business side of his 'scribbling labours'. Now he's the nonchalant aristocrat who writes for his own pleasure, now the canny best-selling author who gloats over sales - and mocks his gloating as if to disavow it. Now he disdains the critics' notice, now their disdain provokes his savage indignation. The following pages will take up Byron's relations with the various publishers to whom he entrusted his works (notably the conservative John Murray and the radical John Hunt), his fate at the hands of the pirates who brought out cheap, unauthorized editions of his works, and the connections between details of book production and the evolving nature of Byron's readership. First, however, a few words on how and why a young lord comes to publish at all.