Chapter 35 - Posthumous Reception and Reinvention to 1900

Summary

Just as the myth of Byron was not created by the poet alone during his lifetime, so after his death a whole industry kept the myth-making machinery running. Byronic aura was reproduced, challenged and reinvented throughout the nineteenth century, in new editions, portraits of the poet, accounts of his life and conversation, fictionalizations of his life story, continuations of his poems, adaptations, imitations, memorials and tributes. British and American tourists took Byron with them to the Continent, where his verse mediated their experience of natural landscapes and classical ruins. Byron and the heroes of his romances – so often blended together by the public – provided the template for both literary characters and real-life imitators who styled themselves after their idol. The many flavors, straight or parodic, of the “Byronic hero” suggest the range of nineteenth-century takes on the electric, contradictory, confounding Lord Byron himself: ruggedly handsome individualist, effeminate Regency fop, savage misanthrope, devilish charmer, demonic scoffer, hopeless romantic, dreamboat outlaw, perverse criminal, exilic wanderer, mad genius, noble revolutionary, egotistical poseur.