Chapter 31 - Contemporary Critical Reception to 1824

Summary

“As an author, I am cut to atoms by the E[dinburgh] Review,” Byron wrote to John Cam Hobhouse a month after his twentieth birthday, “it is just out, and has completely demolished my little fabric of fame, this is rather scurvy treatment from a Whig Review, but politics and poetry are different things, & I am no adept in either, I therefore submit in Silence” (BLJ 1: 158–9). The savage attack on Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review of January 1808, subjecting Byron to a rite of passage reserved by Romantic periodicals for select authors, was a defining moment in the young poet’s career. If the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage would awake in 1812 to find himself famous, it was only after the author of Hours of Idleness had awoken one day early in 1808 to find himself humiliated. A harsh review of his first public poetic venture (Fugitive Pieces and Poems on Various Occasions had both been privately published), appearing in the leading periodical of the day and written (Byron assumed) by its editor, Francis Jeffrey, the man who for many of his contemporaries was or would become the leading critic of the day – all this clearly mattered to the young poet. As did the fact that the Edinburgh had recently “come out” as an unequivocally Whig review.