2025 Newstead Abbey Byron Conference

Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire

25-26 April 2025

Byron’s posthumous reputation is a complex – not to say controversial – topic. This is highlighted by the stark dichotomy between Goethe’s laudatory assessment of Byron’s poetic genius and Wordsworth’s disparaging dismissal of Byron as an immoral and poetically incompetent madman. Widely revered in the initial decades after his death, with a large statue in Hyde Park and countless new editions, piracies and forgeries of his works testifying to his continued popular appeal, nevertheless the residual whiff of scandal and morally suspect poetry disbarred him from a spot in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey for over a century.

As definitions of Romanticism coalesced in the early 20^th century, with Wordsworth at their heart, Byron was increasingly sidelined – widely perceived as an aberrant and undesirable outlier whose prolific low-quality output had been inexplicably popular with contemporary audiences. This ungenerous and inaccurate assessment has since been overturned, with Byron resuming his place in both the poetic canon and international curricula.

Following the global celebration of Byron’s life and works throughout 2024, the 2025 Newstead Abbey Byron Conference will reflect on the aftermath of Byron’s death and offer an opportunity to discuss the shaping of his posthumous reputations – encompassing both the period immediately after his demise and the longer term damage to, and redemption of, his reputation as both a man and a poet.

We invite submissions for 20 minute papers on the aftermath of Byron’s death and his myriad afterlives. Topics can include but are not restricted to:

• Byron’s autobiographical memoirs and his attempts to shape his own posthumous reputation in prose and poetry
• Biographical accounts of Byron (both hagiographic and derogatory)
• Byromania in all its forms
• Posthumous perceptions of Byron’s poetic value and morality
• Posthumous perceptions of Byron’s moral character
• Byron’s place in the literary marketplace from 1825 onwards
• Critical landscapes (from disparaging dismissal to redemptive reintegration into the canon)
• Piracies, plagiarisms and forgeries of Byron’s works
• Memories and memorials
• Byron’s role as a national icon and political figurehead (for many nations)
• Posthumous translations of Byron’s works

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to newsteadbyronconference@gmail.com by the 1^st of January 2025. Please also include a short 100 word professional biography.

There will be 3 student/early career bursaries available of £150 each. If you would like to be considered for one of these, please include a request with the proposal submission, outlining your need and any additional sources of funding.

Our issues are published in June-July and December-January. We are not currently working on any special issues, but always welcome articles (of 5,000 words) and notes (of up to 1,500 words) on Byron and his circle. We are also interested in Letters to the Editor on current hot topics and past journal articles.

If you would like to submit an article, visit the journal website, hosted by our publisher, Liverpool University Press.

Visit website.

in collaboration with The Byron Society

Saturday 17 September 2022

Bloomsbury Campus, University College London

The full programme for this event is below, and there are two options for attendees. You can attend the full-day conference, or you can book the Annual Lecture only (the Annual Lecture is free). The links for booking these two options are below.

Register for Full-Day Conference (including Annual Lecture)

Register for Annual Lecture only

One-day conference 9.15-5.15

University College London

Tickets £20 (£15 concessions)

Morning Session

9.15-9.40am            Arrival and registration, tea and coffee

9.40-10.00am          The Liberal: an introduction to the journal (David Woodhouse)

10.00-10.15am        Liberal: an introduction to the keyword (John Gardner)

10.15-10.45am        Don Juan and The Liberal (Jane Stabler)

10.45-11.15am        ‘On the Spirit of Monarchy’ (Ian Haywood)

11.15am-11.35am   Coffee

11.35am-12.35pm   Panel session on transnational liberalism in the early 1820s (chaired by Roderick Beaton and featuring Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Maria Schoina and Will Bowers)

12.35-1.30pm          Lunch

Afternoon Session

1.30-2.00pm            A Liberal’s Vision of Judgment? (Bernard Beatty)

2.00-2.30pm            The Shelleys and The Liberal (James Grande)

2.30-3.00pm            Guiseppe Molini, Leigh Hunt and The Liberal (Tim Webb)

3.00-3.20pm            Coffee

3.20-3.50pm            ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (Jon Cook)

3.50-4.05pm            Readings from The Liberal (Gregory Dart and Uttara Natarajan)

4.15-5.15pm            The Annual Lecture: ‘Preposterous Liberalism and The Liberal’ (Richard Cronin)

5.30pm                    Drinks

For enquiries, please email: theliberalbicentenary@gmail.com

Konstantina Tortomani, PhD Candidate, Department of History and Ethnology DUTH

(This blog post is based on a paper given at the 2021 International Byron Conference, which won the Byron Society Student Paper Award).

This paper which constitutes a small part of my PhD thesis, explores the first vampire Gothic novel, John William Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale (1819)[1] as a form of a response regarding the image of Greece in Byron’s early works, and especially in “The Giaour” (1813) and “Fragment of a Novel” (1819). Additionally, it will be attempted to trace the image of Greece and the Greeks in early nineteenth-century British travel literature in order to place both authors’ rhetoric about Greece in perspective. More specifically the general consensus was that the modern Greeks were the ‘unworthy’ and degraded descendants of their glorious ancestors. Additionally, Greece was depicted as a veritable ruin; devastated under oppressive Ottoman rule and ‘buried’ under the superstitious beliefs of the Orthodox clergy: the great civilization of the past was decaying and been replaced by modern barbarism. In this light, it will be shown that Byron’s image of Greece was much closer to the contemporary views of the British travelers; albeit sympathetic to the enslaved Greeks, he presents them in a heavily Orientalized light. On the contrary Polidori’s image of modern Greece seems to be, at least on the surface, diametrically opposite. Nonetheless, in his effort to defend the modern Greeks and condemn Byron’s rhetoric as imperialist, he presents them in an equally limiting way as ‘noble savages’.

1. Live your Myth in Greece: early nineteenth century British travelers and the image of Greece

‘The Greeks are, for the most part, indolent and profligate, vain, obsequious, ostentatious, poor and dirty,’ is how Edward D. Clarke chose to best describe the Greeks in his travelogue, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa which was first published in 1813. Clarke embarked on a four-year tour of Europe, Asia and Africa in 1799, beginning his journey in Scandinavia, which was followed by Russia and Turkey, then Greece and ending in the Holy Land and Egypt.[2]  As the above excerpt reveals, Clarke was not at all impressed by the state of modern Greece or its inhabitants.

As Xanthippi Kotzageorgi points out, during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, wealthy British men endeavored to travel in the Levant in search of both Oriental exoticism and traces of the ancient glory of classical Greece. Kotzageorgi summarizes that British travelers’ opinions on Greece were based on three stereotypes; Greece as an Oriental territory, Greece as the (debased) descendant of the illustrious antiquity – mostly classical Athens – and Greece as a potential colony. She asserts that the impressions of the British travelers on Greece were the product of reinforcing prior perceptions and prejudices rather than authentic and objective observations.[3]

In the context of this paper, I shall be focusing mostly on the second category of stereotypes, that of the portrayal of the modern Greeks as the debased and unworthy descendants of the glorious classical past.

One of the first and the most influential travelogues, providing a sort of basis for the other authors, was that of John Hobhouse, Byron’s companion in his tour of Greece in 1809-10. Hobhouse published his detailed account of the journey in 1817 in two volumes, entitled A Journey through Albania and other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia. Hobhouse made a similar comment on the modern Greeks’ affinity for wealth and pageantry, while maintaining that wealth was not revered by the ancient Greeks.^[4] Throughout his narrative, he drew parallels between the ancient and modern Greeks, usually finding the latter lacking. In his view, Greek antiquity signified civilization, while the modern reality represented barbarism; at the same time though, he quoted a French resident who lived in Athens to describe the Athenians: ‘believe me … they are the same canaille as they were in the days of Miltiades’.^[5]

Clarke, whom I mentioned earlier, more or less, presented a similar picture of modern Greece and the Greeks, though he considered some aspects of their culture as survivals from the ancient times. For instance, he believed that their dances contained some ancient features, while superstitions like wearing rings as spells, spitting into bosoms and the use of charms or potions for fertility were, among others, the same as in antiquity. Additionally, while traveling through ancient Orchomenos, in modern-day Livadia, he was surprised to realize that some stones that were considered sacred in ancient times, as recorded by Pausanias, were still preserved and venerated by the modern inhabitants.^[6]

However the rest of the superstitions of the modern Greeks, and especially those that were identified by the British travelers as originating in the Byzantine Empire and Orthodoxy, were extremely criticized and condemned as barbaric. This superstitious nature, alongside the oriental influence of the Turks, was the main justification for the degradation of the modern Greeks according to the travelers. For instance, Hobhouse was adamant in decrying all the Orthodox practices that he encountered and Orthodoxy itself; in one instance he referred to the Orthodox religion as a ‘degrading superstition’ that was not worthy of the term religion.^[7]

Thus, one could point out that, despite the fact that the modern Greeks are described as extremely superstitious, the practices that rescind the habits of the ancient Greeks are viewed with sympathy and benevolence, while those that stem from the Greek Church are considered heathen and barbaric. This is rather contradictory, especially as in the case of charms, where in one instance Clarke rejoiced at encountering the same protective charms as in antiquity, like rings with magical incantations or the rituals around sneezing and childbirth (9) but laughed at the concept of the protective qualities of the icons of the saints and the meticulous prayers of the monks (270). This shows that perhaps the modern Greeks were judged with double standards; anything that connected the modern traditions to the ancient ones, which was approved by the British taste, was acceptable; other influences that had shaped modern Greece were rejected as Asiatic.

The next part of this paper discusses how these preconceptions about modern Greece were reflected in the works of Byron and Polidori.

1. Sad relic versus the noble savage: The image of Greece in The Giaour and in The Vampyre

Dr. John William Polidori (1795-1821) embarked on a journey with Geneva and Italy as its final destinations in April 1816 as Lord Byron’s personal physician. He was chosen to become Byron’s companion on account of his proficiency in languages.^[8]  His relationship with his employer was quite tumultuous; however, this volatile cohabitation ended in the late summer of 1816, when Byron released Polidori of his duties.^[9]

The main event that put Polidori on the path of writing The Vampyre was the literary competition at the Villa Diodati, is a rather famous one in literary history, mostly because another Gothic masterpiece was inspired by them, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley.[10] Polidori’s novel, draws extensively from his experiences with Byron during the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati, as attested by the transference of Polidori’s relationship with Byron into the story and the relationship between Aubrey, Polidori’s main narrator and protagonist in the story, with Lord Ruthven, Byron’s alter ego.[11] In fact, many similarities can be observed between the narrative and reality: the initial idolization of Ruthven by Aubrey starts to disintegrate by the gradual unraveling of the former’s character.[12]

However, Byron’s influence in the story is not limited to the creation of the villainous vampire Ruthven. As Polidori admitted himself in his letter to the Morning Chronicle, on the 1^st of May 1819 he was inspired by Byron’s unfinished fragment, written for the competition at the Villa Diodati.^[13] In this tale, there are two main protagonists: an unnamed narrator and Augustus Darvell, a rich and worldly fellow. The two meet at a social gathering and develop a friendship. After a tour of southern Europe, Darvell becomes sick somewhere near Smyrna, which forces the travelers to stop in a Turkish cemetery. Darvell confesses that he is about to die and pleads with the narrator to perform some sort of ritual and swear that, when he returns back home, he would not tell anyone about Darvell’s death.^[14]

Indeed, the similarities between Byron’s fragment and Polidori’s tale are undeniable in the main plot of The Vampyre; a cosmopolitan older man embarks on a grand tour with a young idealist who idolizes him, the former dies in the Ottoman Empire, after extracting an oath of secrecy. What is also undeniable is the Byronic influence in choosing a Greek setting for the novel.

Matthew Gibson discusses what he considers are the reasons behind the placement of the plot in Greece in his book Dracula and the Eastern Question. More specifically, initially, he mentions that research so far has accepted the Greek location as proof of Byron’s influence on Polidori. However, he seems to believe that Polidori portrayed Byron as a vampire figure in order to argue against philhellenism, by expressing the view that the Greeks do not need the help of a person like Byron, who preyed on them instead of saving them.[15]

Another scholar who has attempted to explain the Greek setting of the novel is Ken Gelder in Reading the Vampire. Gelder claims that the tale deals with the reality of Greece in a way which Byron himself did not, since while declaiming its degeneracy, Byron did not attempt to draw realistic portrayals of contemporary Greek society. He deems that Polidori’s tale differs from Byron’s narratives because he couches the myth of the vampire very much in terms of the superstitions of the country folk of Greece. Also, he considers that Polidori places the vampire in contemporary Greece as a reflection of the rise of interest in folklore during the nineteenth century.^[16]

While I agree that Polidori obviously borrows Byron’s imagery, I would argue that he manages to create an alternate view of Greece, perhaps affected by his own Italian heritage and negative view of imperialism.^[17] In the novel both Italy and Greece are represented as Ruthven’s/Byron’s ‘playground’, where his social position allows him to treat the locals according to his whims. Indeed, Polidori’s view of the grand tour in general is rather revealing as far as this matter is concerned:

it was time for him [Aubrey] to perform the tour, which for many generations has been thought necessary to enable the young to take some rapid steps in the career of vice, towards putting themselves upon an equality with the aged … whenever scandalous intrigues are mentioned as the subjects of pleasantry or of praise.[18]

A similar conclusion could be reached based on Ruthven’s perpetual self-indulgence; in every country he visits, he takes advantage of the local population. In Rome, he apparently seduces and then kills an innocent young lady he was involved with, and consequently, ruins the fortune of her family,^[19] and in Athens, he attacks and slaughters an innocent young girl Ianthe.^[20] Not even his homeland manages to escape Ruthven’s malice, as in London, he kills Aubrey’s sister on their wedding night. ^[21] Thus, Polidori culminates the image of Byron and the Byronic hero as a malicious monster that threatens to take advantage of, and then destroy, the population of every place he visits, incapable of seeing beyond the selfish gratification of his vices.

However, I would argue that Polidori’s image of Greece was mostly a reaction against Byron’s depiction of it, rather than an attempt at its realistic portrayal. This can be corroborated by the fact that Polidori had never in fact been to Greece, nor is there any evidence that he was even interested in the subject.

Byron was inspired to write about the East in general, and Greece in particular, after his grand tour of 1809-1811.^[22] The image of abandonment and ruin which correlates to the portrayal of Greece in the majority of early nineteenth-century travel accounts is witnessed in the second canto of the poem (“Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!”). A similar symbolism is traced in ‘The Giaour’.[23] According to Nigel Leask, the image of Greece is eminent in ‘The Giaour’, and the dead Leila is  symbol for Greece.^[24] Indeed, in the poem Byron presented Greece dead, just like Leila:

Such is the aspect of this shore’

Tis Greece but living Greece no more!

So coldly sweet so deadly fair,

We start for soul is wanting there …(CPW III, 43; Il. 103-107)

As we have seen from the above-mentioned excerpts, for Byron Greece is dead and what remains is a ‘sad relic’. Alexander Grammatikos argues against the supposition that Byron considered modern Greeks as degraded descendants of the ancient Greeks. More specifically, Grammatikos, bases his theory on Byron’s Appendix and Note III in Childe Harold and on the fact that Byron actively defended modern Greek (Romaic) literature against an Edinburgh Review article^[25] that dismissed it. Furthermore, he points out Byron’s undertaking of translating modern Greek literature into English, such as the Greek version of La Marseillaise (Δεύται παίδες των Ελλήνων), in the Appendix of Childe Harold.^[26] Nonetheless, one could not fail to notice that these representatives of the Hellenic Enlightenment movement, such as Korais and Feraios,^[27] belonged to the higher social classes; for the most part they lived in European capitals (for example, Feraios lived in Bucharest and Vienna and Korais in Paris), and they had been educated in European universities. On the contrary the level of the education of the peasants of rural Greece was rather low, if not non-existent.^[28] As a result, one could suggest that the discrepancy in the image of modern Greeks in Byron’s work (the cantos of Childe Harold versus the Appendix and Index III) could be attributed to the aforementioned reasons.

On the other hand, Polidori’s The Vampyre presents a very interesting case study by offering an image of Greece that is diametrically opposite to Byron’s. While Byron had attempted to defend modern Greek scholars, who belonged to the well-educated upper class, Polidori seems to be defending the peasants by presenting an idealized version of their lives. Polidori goes even further by intentionally contrasting his image of the modern Greeks as peaceful and content in their simplicity of life to that of the prevailing picture of them in Byron’s early works, that of the poor and wretched slaves of the Ottomans.

At this point I would like to draw attention to Ianthe as a symbol for modern Greece, especially, when contrasted to Leila in Byron’s ‘The Giaour’. In fact, I believe that the name Ianthe was used deliberately by Polidori, as Byron begins Childe Harold with a dedication ‘to Ianthe’. Polidori, like Byron, laments the state of Greece at first.[29]Nonetheless, Ianthe, a Greek peasant girl from Athens, steals away his attention, with her innocence and beauty. Furthermore, Polidori seemed to be highly aware of Leila’s description, and is deliberately contrasting Ianthe to her, by using the same symbolisms to describe her, but with staggering differences. When it comes to the description of Leila by Byron, she is depicted as a woman of unparalleled beauty while alive:

Her eye’s dark charm ‘twere vain to tell,

But gaze on that of the Gazelle,

It will assist thy fancy well

As large, as languishingly dark,

But Soul beam’d forth in every spark

That darted from beneath the lid,

Bright as the jewel of Giamschid

Additionally, Leila is described as a ‘Kashmeer butterfly’ and ‘a lovely toy so fiercely sought’.^[30] However, when the story is narrated she is already dead; as a result, she does not have a real presence or voice in the poem:

Which saith, that woman is but dust,

A soulless toy for tyrant’s lust?

Also, Byron compared Leila to a gazelle, and Polidori utilizes the same parallelism, but with an important difference:

As she danced upon the plain, or tripped along the mountain’s side, one would have thought the gazelle a poor type of her beauties, for who would have exchanged her eye, apparently, the eye of animated nature, for that sleepy luxurious look of the animal suited but to the taste of an epicure.^[31]

Furthermore, while Leila was ‘a soulless toy for tyrant’s lust’, Ianthe was beaming with life and spirit as ‘she might have formed the model for a painter wishing to portray on canvass the promised hope of the faithful in Mahomet’s paradise, save that her eyes spoke too much mind for anyone to think she could belong to those who had no souls’.^[32]

In the end, while Leila dies as a victim of her Turkish master, Ianthe falls victim to the vampire, who was none other than Byron’s alter ego, Ruthven. What is more, it is rather interesting that Leila is described as a woman suffering primarily from the consequences of being enslaved to a Turkish master, whereas Ianthe is the victim of a British nobleman. I argue that through this symbolism, Polidori intends to criticize Byron’s attitude towards Greece. This censure could alternatively be an attempt to criticize colonialism too in that manner, by depicting an English nobleman as a villain. However, if in fact Polidori did intend to vilify the British upper classes because of their biased views towards different civilizations, he himself does not manage to avoid falling victim to his own prejudices.

It is rather clear that Ianthe, and her family, match the description of ‘the noble savage’. The noble savage, according to eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is an individual living in a ‘pure state of nature’ – gentle, wise, uncorrupted by the vices of civilization.^[33]According to Ellingson, the European identity was constructed in a tripartite model of contrasting cultures, the ‘European’, the ‘Oriental’ and the ‘Savage’. However, he stresses that the limits between these three distinctions were problematic, since it was not easy to discern ‘where one ended and where the other began’.^[34] Thus, not surprisingly, in Polidori’s narrative the image of the ‘Oriental’ takes up characteristics that match the profile of the ‘noble savage’:

It was innocence, youth and beauty, unaffected by crowded drawing rooms and stifling balls. … she would then describe to him the circling dance, upon the open plain, would paint to him in all the glowing colors of youthful memory, the marriage pomp she remembered viewing in her infancy; and then, turning to subjects that evidently made a greater impression upon her mind would tell him all the supernatural tales of her nurse.^[35]

From the excerpt above, it is rather obvious that Ianthe is described as a ‘noble savage’: she is a pure, innocent person, living in harmony with nature, but on the other hand she is infantile, superstitious and naive. Furthermore, Aubrey not only spots, but also mocks the superstitious character of her family, and therefore her people in general, especially regarding their belief in vampyres.^[36]Also, despite the fact that Aubrey is so in love with Ianthe that he considers marrying her, he still underlines their differences in terms of culture, education and overall her inferiority in contrast to the ‘civilized’ English society; so much so that he finds the idea of marrying her ludicrous.^[37]

What is more, both authors seem to utilize the same gendered stereotypes: the symbol for the Orient is a beautiful woman (Leila and Ianthe), facing a threat by a man (Hassan and Ruthven), who ends up killing her; then, a (western) man, distraught over her death wants to avenge her (the Giaour and Aubrey) by killing or exposing the murderer. This kind of plot brings to mind Gayatri Spivak’s views on the lack of voice on the part of Indian women under the British Empire, as far as the British abolition of widow sacrifice (sati) is concerned. Spivak contends that in this debate between British and Indian men, the party who is the most affected by this custom, the Indian woman, remains unheard. Thus, the postcolonial woman, caught between the dipoles, imperialism and patriarchy, modernization and tradition, is forced to disappear in the margins, unable not only to decide for herself, but even to be heard.^[38]

Similarly, in Leila’s and Ianthe’s cases, the reader never gets to hear them speak for themselves. The only information about them is given to us indirectly, through the view of ‘western’ men. The only difference between ‘The Giaour’ and The Vampyre is that in the former Leila was killed by a ‘brown’ man, while in the latter Ianthe died in the hands of a ‘western’ fiend.

Additionally, the Giaour claimed that he had possessed Leila like Hassan did, thus exhibiting an equally “oppressing” behavior:

Tis true, I could not whine or sigh,

I knew but to obtain or die.

I die – but first I have possest. (1112-14)

However, the one who actually dies as a result of this ‘possession’ is Leila. As a result, the Giaour is either unaware or indifferent to the consequences that Leila would have to face as an outcome of their liaison. In parallel, in The Vampyre Aubrey makes plans about his future with Ianthe, since he seems to be slowly convincing himself that due to the intensity of his feelings he should marry her. Then, he admits that ‘Ianthe was unconscious of his love’, which leads the reader to wonder how Aubrey could possibly contemplate marriage, without knowing if Ianthe would be willing to accept such a proposal, or even returns his affection.^[39]

To conclude, it is my contention that Polidori wrote The Vampyre as a commentary on Byron and his works on Greece. By indirectly contrasting Ianthe to Leila, Polidori attempted to oppose the poet, by showing a different image of Greece that instead of being a ruin, as presented by Byron, is a place full of life. Nonetheless, in his attempt to present Greece in a different way than Byron, he constructed an image just as limiting; while Byron was influenced by ancient Greece in his view of the modern one, Polidori seems to be equally driven by the contemporary British (and European) notions of how wayward, superstitious and simplistic the modern Greeks were. As a result, both images of modern Greece were equally limiting and presented out of their sociopolitical context of Greece.

Nevertheless, this view of The Vampyre as a condemnation of Byron’s uncontrollable debauchery matches partially Ken Gelder’s theory that The Vampyre was written as a social critique over the higher, aristocratic class that Byron was a member of. To be more specific, Gelder suggests that the Byronic vampire is employed as a symbol for the upper-class cosmopolitans who, like a vampire, drain the life out of the places they visit, by victimizing the lower classes wherever they go.^[40] This idea has its merits, since one could perhaps suggest that Polidori, who aspired to be a writer but was forced to work as a doctor, resented Byron’s ability to do whatever he desired without facing any consequences. It could be this defiance of limits that was a characteristic of the aristocratic class in which Byron belonged that played a part in his vilification by Polidori.

Finally, I would conclude that, since Polidori viewed the grand tour as a rite of passage into adulthood through vice, it could be argued that the vampiric characteristics attributed to Byron are an additional commentary of his Orientalist practices: a British aristocrat is exhibiting an ‘oriental’ disease. The same knowledge that was used to designate the low cultural level of a group of people was now being attributed to the British lord that preyed on them and which he continued to spread back in London as well. This suggests that Polidori’s discourse against Byron was primarily based on class politics by vilifying the aristocracy and secondarily as a rhetoric against Byron’s Orientalism of the Greek peasants. However, ultimately, Polidori’s own image of the Greek peasants, that of the ‘noble savage’, ended up being equally Orientalist, and like Leila and Ianthe the Greeks peasants remain unheard.

[1] The publication story of this novel is rather interesting in itself, as initially and erroneously so, it was credited as a work written by Lord Byron. J. W. Polidori , ‘The Vampyre’, in John Polidori The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, R. Morrison and C. Baldick (eds), 1997, New York, Oxford University Press, p. vii-viii.

[2] E. D. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa: Part First Russia, Tatary and Turley, vol. 1, London, Printed for T. Cadell and W, Davies, 1810, pp. i-iii.

[3] X. Kotzageorgi, ‘British Travelers in the Early Nineteenth Century on Greece and the Greeks’, in Balkan Studies, vol. 3, no 2, 1992, pp. 209-211.

[4] J. C. Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania and other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople during the Years 1809 and 1810, vol. 1, Philadelphia, Published by M. Carey and Son, 1817, pp. 26-7.

[5] Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania, vol. 1, pp. 243, 249.

[6] Clarke, Travels in Various Countries, pp. 9-11, 216.

[7] Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania, vol. 1, p. 130.

[8] A. McConnell Stott, The Poet and the Vampyre, New York, Pegasus Books LLC, 2014, pp. 15-18.

[9] Polidori , The Vampyre, p. i.

[10] McConnel Stott, The Poet and the Vampyre, pp. 145-146; Rossetti, The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, pp. 125-126.

[11] Polidori embarked on the journey to the Continent with Byron, against his father’s wishes, much like Aubrey.^[11] This is confirmed by Rosetti, Polidori’s nephew, in the introduction to his edited diary: ‘Polidori’s father had foreseen, in the Byronic scheme, disappointment as only too likely, and he opposed the project, without success.’^[11]  Despite such warnings, Polidori seemed to be quite taken with his employer, and as he himself aspired to a literary career, he was eager to share his writing, unfortunately, with dismal results. According to Polidori’s diary, when he gave a play of his to Byron, John Hobhouse  and Scrope Davies,  they openly mocked it, which he took quite badly.^[11] This initial episode set the tone for the entire summer; after a series of episodes that even led to a suicide attempt on Polidori’s behalf, Byron decided to fire Polidori the following September.^[11]

[12] Ibid, p. 7.

[13] J. W. Polidori, The Morning Chronicle, 01/05/1819, p. 3, available from the British Newspaper Archive (accessed on 09/11/2018).

[14] G. G. Byron, ‘A Fragment’, in Mazeppa, London, John Murray, 1819.

[15] M. Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the 19^th Century Near East, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 15-16.

[16] Gelder, Reading the Vampire, pp. 35-38.

[17] Polidori considered himself Anglo-Italian and was an ardent supporter of the Italian cause for liberation. McConnel Stott, The Poet and the Vampyre, pp. 21, 35-39.

[18] Polidori, The Vampyre, p. 5.

[19] Ibid, p. 16.

[20] Ibid., pp. 11-12.

[21] Ibid,, p. 23.

[22] P. Stock, The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 19.

[23] ‘The Giaour’ is the first of the Turkish Tales. The plot is set in Ottoman-ruled Morea in the late eighteenth century and the main storyline revolved around the antagonism between the Giaour, a Christian from Venice and Hassan, a Turkish lord. The reason for this rivalry was Leila, a slave of Hassan’s, who developed an affair with the Giaour. Hassan found out about Leila’s adultery and he condemned her to death by the customary manner of being put into a sewn sack and be thrown in the sea. Then, the Giaour avenged her death by ambushing Hassan and killing him in combat. Afterwards the Giaour retired in a monastery, tortured by the memories of his actions. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095851147

[24] N. Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 33.

[25] In the journal in question, the writer of the essay presented a review of Korai’s translation of Strabo’s Geography. In this review he suggests that Modern Greek literature, as a corrupted form of Greek, has no merit of its own, but is better used as a tool in better understanding the ancient, pure, Greek language. (pp. 237-38)

[26] A. Grammatikos, “‘Let Us Look At Them As They Are’: Lord Byron and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and Print Culture”, in European Romantic Review, vol. 27, No 2, 2016, pp. 234, 237, 241.

[27] Byron wrongly attributed the Greek version of La Marseillaise to Rigas Feraios, an important political writer, and prominent scholar of the Hellenic Enlightenment. A. Vakalopoulos, Modern Greek History, Thessaloniki, Ekdoseis Vanias, 2005p. 241).

[28] Vakalopoulos, Modern Greek History, pp. 81, 141, 144.

[29] and soon occupied himself in tracing the faded records of ancient glory upon monuments that apparently, ashamed of chronicling the deeds of freemen only before slaves, had hidden themselves beneath the sheltering soil or many colored lichen. (Polidori. The Vampyre, p. 8.)

[30] P. J. Kitson, Byron and post-colonial criticism: the eastern tales, in Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies, (ed.) Stabler J., New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 118-119.

[31] Polidori, The Vampyre, pp. 8-9.

[32] Ibid., p. 9.

[33] A. Aleiss, ‘Le Bon Sauvage: Dances with Wolves and the Romantic Tradition’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1991, p. 91.

[34] Ibid., pp. 128-129.

[35] Polidori, ‘The Vampyre’, p. 10.

[36] and often, as she told him the tale of the living vampire … his blood would run cold, whilst he attempted to laugh her out of such idle and horrible fantasies; but Ianthe cited to him the names of old men who had at last detected one living among themselves … when they [Ianthe’s parents] all at once begged of him not to return at night … They described it as the resort of vampyres in their nocturnal orgies, and denounced the most heavy evils impending upon him who dared to cross their path. Aubrey made light of their representations, and tried to laugh them out of the idea. Ibid, p. 10.

[37] Ibid, p. 10.

[38] G. C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture London, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 297, 307.

[39] Polidori, The Vampyre, p. 10

[40] Gelder, Reading the Vampire, pp. 29-34.

A description of the planned anthology is below. So far, Professor Webb has collected poems about Byron by the following: W. H. Auden, Demetrios Capetanakis, Andy Crofter, N. S. Thompson and thirteen others, Lawrence Durrell, Leontia Flynn, Peter Levi, Edwin Morgan, John Julius Norwich, Peter Porter, F. T. Prince and Susanna Roxman. If anyone has any suggestions to make, especially about Byronic coverage (which is not as strong as it might be and almost ignores the earlier poetry, including Childe Harold), he would be very happy to hear from you! Of course, the same applies to the other poets or to any other relevant issues. Please send all suggestions to him at egetw@bristol.ac.uk.

Outline of Anthology:

This is an anthology of poetic responses and re-creations of the lives (or, more properly, selected parts of the lives) of the English Romantic Poets, ranging from the First World War to the present. Quotations from academics are deliberately excluded, unless they are poets primarily or as well, such as Seamus Heaney, Lucy Newlyn, David Constantine or Michael O’Neill. The Romantic poets who have most obviously qualified for scrutiny by other poets are: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, Keats and Clare. In recent times, lesser focus has also been accorded to Moore, Southey, Landor and Hunt. Although De Quincey was exclusively a writer of prose, he has attracted the attention of more than one contemporary poet (unlike Hazlitt or Lamb or Peacock or, especially, the once-fashionable Scott), while the author of Frankenstein (herself not a poet, unlike, say Felicia Hemans or Laetitia Landon or Charlotte Smith) seems to be (with Dorothy Wordsworth) the only woman writer to have received poetic treatment.

For all its apparent exclusivity, I have already discovered well over 200 poems which engage with the Romantic poets, including sequences by Robert Gittings (Keats), Amy Clampitt (Keats), Robert Cooperman (Percy Bysshe Shelley), Lucy Newlyn (the Wordsworths) and a group of fifteen contemporary poets (Byron’s Don Juan). A number of ‘big-name’ poets are candidates for inclusion as contributors: for instance, Owen, Yeats, Auden, Brecht, Geoffrey Hill, Ashbery, Borges, Jaccotet, Hughes, Heaney, Bonnefoy, Lowell, Gunn and Bertolucci. Other notable names include, among many others: Betjeman, Spender, Blunden, Causley, Kennelly, Tony Harrison, Pasolini, Enright, Ewart, Stevie Smith, F. T. Prince, Roethke, Hirsch, Morgan, Davie, Longley, Beer, Fanthorpe, Porter, Sikelianos, Kavanagh, R. S. Thomas, Constantine, Dunn, Mahon, Duffy,  Birtwhistle, Paulin, Szirtes, Muldoon and Greenlaw. Countries other than England are significant contributors: America, Serbo-America (Charles Simic), Australia, India, Africa, Greece, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. All these diverse poems  (many of which are not as well-known as they deserve to be) are of interest in themselves but they also have a lot to tell us about the changing reputations of the poets, the relations between the poets and their lives, and the links between poetry and biography.

This book concentrates on poetry but my introduction and notes will also suggest that a full exploration would need to include the following: drama, films (for the cinema and for TV), art, music of various kinds including opera, musicals, and song-cycles, novels, short stories and children’s literature, not to mention the manifestations of popular culture: restaurants, cafes, hotels, street-names, rock and pop music (Blake is particularly popular in the music world), newspapers, kitchen furniture, hair-dressing salons, graffiti, etc. The Wordsworth Trust has already organized some pioneering conferences to explore some of these possibilities and the unexpected but enduring influence of Romantic examples.

Newstead Abbey Byron Society Conference:

For details of the 2023  Byron Society Conference, ‘Byron: Independence and Integrity, click here.  

IABS Conferences:

Details of the 2023 International Byron Conference, click here.