‘A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust’: Byron’s Artefacts of Fame
By Leigh Wetherall-Dickson
19th March 2021, ONLINE LECTURE, 5.30-6.30pm (GMT)
This is a FREE EVENT but BOOKING IS REQUIRED.
Get your tickets on Eventbrite, here.
Closer to the event, we will send a Zoom link for you to access the live talk and participate in the Q&A.
There are limited places for this event, so please book soon.
Enquiries: contact@thebyronsociety.com
Leigh Wetherall Dickson will give a talk on Byron’s views of posterity and permanence, as represented by the concept of having one’s bust immortalised in marble.
Don Juan is a literary consideration of the lastingness, or otherwise or monumental artefacts of fame, ‘name, a wretched picture, and worse bust’. Byron’s journal of ‘Detached Thoughts’ (kept between 1821 and 1822) notes that he sat for the marble bust at the particular request of his university friend John Cam Hobhouse. ‘A picture is a different matter’, he muses, because ‘everybody sits for their picture’. However, ‘a bust looks like putting up pretensions to permanency’. This online lecture considers the idea of ‘pretension to permanency’ in relation to the context of creative uncertainty that produced one of Byron’s most famous and scandalous poems, the great satirical epic Don Juan.
DETAILS
Online Zoom talk.
19th March, 2021
5.30-6.30pm (GMT)
Tickets must be booked.
Register for your FREE ticket on Eventbrite, here.
Enquiries: contact@thebyronsociety.com
Image courtesy of Francesca Parrinello
