The ‘Bowles controversy’ in England: Byron writes two letters in defence of Pope and attacks the Lake poets and the Cockneys. Lockhart’s unsigned pamphlet, John Bull’s Letter to the Right Hon. Lord Byron published.

Greek War of Liberation (from the Ottoman Empire) begins.

1822

Byron publishes A Letter to [John Murray] on the Rev. W. C. Bowles’s Strictures on… Pope; resumes Don Juan, attenuates his relationship with Murray and makes terms with the radical publisher, John Hunt. Southey attacks Byron in February in the conservative Courier. Leigh Hunt arrives with his large family in Pisa in July to join Byron and Shelley in publishing the Liberal. The first issue (15 October) includes Byron’s ‘Letter to the Editor of “My Grandmother’s Review” ’ and The Vision of Judgment, the latter resulting in hostile reviews and John Hunt’s prosecution. Murray publishes Werner in November.

Allegra dies of typhus in April; Lady Noel, Annabella’s mother, dies; Byron takes the name ‘Noel Byron’ and shares the estate, nearly doubling his income. Shelley leaves for Lerici in April, drowns in a boating accident in July. Byron, Mary Shelley and the Hunts move to Genoa in September. Friction with the Hunts.

Shelley’s Hellas published in February; also published, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, commits suicide in August.

1823

The Liberal publishes Heaven and Earth in January and The Blues in April. The Age of Bronze also published in April, The Island in June, Don Juan (now published by John Hunt) VI-VIII in July, IX-XI in August, and XII-XIV in December

Byron is elected a member of the Greek Committee in London; quarrels with the Hunts and Mary Shelley; meets Countess Blessington; becomes involved in the Revolution and sails for Greece in July, arriving at Missolonghi at the end of the year; agrees to lend the Greek Government £4,000.

Mary Shelley’s Valperga and Caroline Lamb’s Ada Reis: A Tale published.

France and Spain at war.

1824

Byron in Greece at Missolonghi, financing the army. Writes verses on thirty-sixth birthday. The Deformed Transformed published in February, Don Juan XV-XVI in March.

The Revolution is in disarray. Byron’s health deteriorates, and he dies at Missolonghi in April; his body is taken to England, where he is buried in July, with his ancestors near Newstead, having been refused interment at Westminster Abbey. His memoirs are destroyed.

Correspondence of Lord Byron with a Friend, edited by R.C. Dallas, is suppressed before it could be published; Dallas does publish Recollections of Lord Byron (1808–14), and Thomas Medwin publishes Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron at Pisa. Also published: L.E.L.’s (Laetitia Landon) The Improvisatrice; Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, including ‘Julian and Maddalo’, published in England by John Hunt and associates but quickly suppressed by Shelley’s father.

1825

Dallas’s Correspondence published in Paris. Murray produces an eight-volume edition of Byron’s poetry, and Hazlitt’s essay on ‘Lord Byron’ appears in The Spirit of the Age.

1826

Don Juan (Cantos I-XVI) published in two volumes.

1828

Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries published.

1830

Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life (two volumes) and John Galt’s The Life of Lord Byron published.

1831

Thomas Macaulay’s extensive review of Moore’s Byron published in the Edinburgh Review (June).

1832–3

3 Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington published in the New Monthly Magazine (July 1832-December 1833).

1832–4

John Murray publishes a seventeen-volume edition of The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life, by Thomas Moore, Esq.

FURTHER READING

THE ROMANTIC ERA

Brown, Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 5: Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Gaull, Marilyn, English Romanticism, The Human Context (Norton, 1988).

Renwick, W. L., English Literature: 1789–1815, and Ian Jack, English Literature: 1815–1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Both in John Buxton and Norman Davis (eds.), Oxford History of English Literature.

Wolfson, Susan, and Peter Manning (eds.), The Romantics and Their Contemporaries, Vol. 2a of David Damrosch (ed.), The Longman Anthology of British Literature, 2nd edn (New York: Longman Publishers, 2003, 3rd edition, 2006).

BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS

Blessington, Lady, Conversations of Lord Byron (1834), ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). In Genoa, Italy, in 1823, just before he left for Greece.

Eisler, Benita, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (New York: Alfred A.