The National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh holds the largest collection of Byron’s papers as part of the John Murray Archive. It was a wonderful joy to be able to study these materials thanks to BARS’s Stephen Copley Research Award.
Born in London, Byron’s mother was Scottish, and he spent a large portion of his childhood in Aberdeen. He moved to England in 1798 when, aged ten, he inherited Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, and became Baron Byron of Rochdale upon the death of his great-uncle. Though Byron never returned to Scotland in his lifetime, it is therefore nonetheless somewhat fitting that many of the physical remnants of his literary legacy have since 2006 been held not too far from where he spent his early years.
Travelling from London to Edinburgh by train, I thought about the way that some of my journey was, in inverse, loosely retracing Byron’s journey from Aberdeen to Newstead. Together with his mother and one servant, Byron departed from Aberdeen in August 1798, crossing the Firth of Forth, and then likely going through Edinburgh and taking the Great North Road towards Nottinghamshire. The voyage was evidently memorable for him: in 1820 he noted that remembering Loch Laven made him feel ‘as it were but yesterday’ that he was there.
View of North Sea near Berwick-upon-Tweed.
My train took me along the east coast, and it occurred to me that some of the endless views of the North Sea which were slipping past my train window might have also been what ten-year-old Byron would have marvelled at as they slid past the windows of his coach. Later, when sitting in the Special Collections Reading Room at the National Library of Scotland’s George IV Bridge building, which lets one’s eye expand above Edinburgh’s rooftops and towards Arthur’s Seat, I also wondered what Byron might have seen of Edinburgh when passing through.
View from the Special Collections Reading Room at the National Library of Scotland’s George IV Bridge building.
Being able to access the materials in the John Murray Archive thanks to the Stephen Copley Research Award made it possible for me to advance my research in two areas partaking to Byron. My overall area of interest is tragedy in the Romantic period, and being able to see manuscripts partaking to some of Byron’s plays such as Manfred (1816) and Werner (1815, pub. 1822), and also some of the ways in which he writes about his tragedies in his letters to his publisher, John Murray II, was incredible. Further, I am interested in ways in which Romantic writers’ interest in tragedy seeps into the ways in which they write about themselves and the events in their own lives, blending fictional and personal drama. Byron’s letters and journals are rich in such instances, and it was wonderfully exciting to be able to trace this in the materials held as part of the Murray Archive, which includes Byron’s correspondences with his close friends and family, including his sister Augusta Leigh, and friends John Cam Hobhouse and Douglas Kinnaird.
Byron’s letters to John Murray (MS.4349).
Byron’s letters to John Cam Hobhouse (MS.43439).
Before I came to the archive, I hoped that looking at Byron’s manuscripts would mean I encountered things I wasn’t able to see by reading printed versions. Discrepancies between what he wrote initially and what was eventually printed, maybe; a crossed-out word, an alternate line. Perhaps a sentence which I had not previously come across because it had been discarded in the final version, or maybe an eloquent flurry of punctuation which the regularity of print could not fully convey. In other words, something which might help me understand his texts better, affirm how I was approaching them, or enable me to see them differently. Wonderfully, I had some thrilling encounters of precisely this kind. A crossed-out line in the draft of Hints from Horace (1811, pub. 1831) confirmed my reading of a particular section which I keep returning to, for example; the way the stage directions appear in the manuscript of Manfred developed my sense of Byron’s thinking about stageing, and so on.
Bound manuscripts of Hints from Horace (MS.4334) and Manfred (MS.4335).
But equally exciting was the way that handling these items has made me begin looking differently at Byron’s work, and my work on his work, in the first place. What I was especially struck by was how Byron’s papers show the development of his thoughts not as fixed ideas, but as a process of an idea taking shape, emerging from the disarray of that process. Some printed editions of Byron’s work gesture towards this, and indeed he himself made use of this in the ways that he chose to present some of his poetry. One such case is The Giaour (1813-15), where every new edition came with new additions, so that the final edition was nearly twice the length of the first one.
Handling Byron’s manuscripts brought the significance of that messy, uncertain, process to the foreground for me. They quiver all over with the dartings of instinct and afterthought, the pull of sound and sense and feeling, and with the careful workings of revision. My favourite moments in the Special Collections Reading Room were when I could see the imprint of Byron thinking and feeling on the page. A word in a draft crossed out, replaced, crossed out again, replaced again, such as in the messy little scraps which formed the additions to later editions of The Giaour, for example. There, one can see Byron stacking word upon word, image upon image, working out the chain of associations and the order of telling and emphasis.
Or a letter which commences in a neat, composed hand, which then becomes increasingly windswept with emotion as the letter progresses, the final lines only really legible through a mixture of inference and guesswork. I was finding myself fascinated by things I would never think to even consider if reading printed versions. How wide are the margins, how much space is there between each word, how level or slanting are the lines, are there dashes or deletions or underlining or insertions, are there squiggles or other kinds of markings? Is the paper thin and flimsy and translucent, or is it sturdy, with the edges dipped in gold; does the ink shimmer; what colour is the wax of the seal? As one attempts to decipher Byron’s sometimes tricky hand, the significance of all these physical and visual markers in gauging his purposes comes to the surface.
Byron’s letters to his sister Augusta Leigh (MS.43479).
Handling Byron’s papers, I inevitably wondered where he might have sat as he wrote this or that, whether it was morning or night-time by candlelight, whether he was alone or in company, whether he was eating or drinking something (what?) which might have caused that faint stain on a page. I’m sure we all think about these kinds of things sometimes, though such aimless conjecture can feel frivolously peripheral to academic study. But I am grateful to the Stephen Copley Research Award for providing me with the opportunity to be reminded that this kind of work of the imagination is also important. I have to let the writing touch my imagination in order to be able to listen to it closely. Sitting in the Special Collections Reading Room, holding the sheets of paper which Byron once held, and finding these beautiful moments of almost-intimacy as I let the twists and turns of his pen guide my understanding: this, I was reminded, is also a version of the same imaginative intimacy which I always hope to reach when I read.
I am grateful to the National Library of Scotland for enabling me to access these materials, and for permitting photographs taken in archive to be shared here.
Flora Lisica is Assistant Professor in English at Northeastern University London. She completed her PhD on Romantic Literature at the University of Cambridge. and has published on Byron, Keats and Mary Shelley. She is working on a monograph about tragedy in the Romantic period.