https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6681-1709
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ABSTRACT
Following his self-imposed exile from Britain in 1816, Byron travelled across Europe and eventually settled in Italy. From here he wrote hundreds of frank, witty, and vibrantly detailed letters. Covering everything from politics to prostitutes, Byron's animated accounts make for riotous reading, and their appreciation of foreign cultures and customs sets them apart from the majority of contemporary travel writing (tarnished by a patina of discontented yearning for Britain and British things). The first half of this article considers Byron's deft reconstruction and subversion of contemporary travel writing conventions in his Italian letters. Cloaking the worldly cosmopolite's mockery of the parochial British reader behind a veneer of generic conformity, Byron plays into travel literature's masculinist orientation by presenting himself in the established guise of the affluent aristocratic tourist encountering the tantalising-yet-dangerous feminised foreign. Accepted into the houses and hearts of a number of Italian women, Byron gained an unusual level of insight into the private intimacies of those he wittily dubs “the continental incontinent”. The second part of this article focuses on Byron's knowledge of Italian sociosexual culture, and acknowledges the unique insights and ethnographic detail embedded within his performative tales of libidinous Italian femininity - designed to titillate and educate in equal measure.
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Notes
1 Byron offers a sly comment on the growing proliferation of travel writing and the public appetite accounts from “The man who stood on the Acropolis, / And looked down over Attica, or he / Who sailed where picturesque Constantinople is, / Or seen Timbuctoo, or hath taken tea / In small-eyed China's crockery-ware metropolis, / Or sat amidst the bricks of Nineveh” (Don Juan XI.7).
2 An avid and omnivorous reader, Byron was intimately familiar with the travelogue genre; the sale catalogues of his library contain 38 separate travelogue titles (excluding naval accounts), and there are numerous additional texts mentioned in his correspondence, many of which focus on Italian travel.
3 Further studies include Stephen Cheeke, Byron and Place: History, Translation and Nostalgia (2003); Maria Schoina Romantic Anglo-Italians: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys and the Pisan Circle (2009); and Peter Cochran, Byron and Italy (2011); Alan Rawes Diego Saglia eds. Byron and Italy (2017), as well as numerous essays and articles treating various aspects of Byron's engagement with individual Italian texts and forms.
4 Out of the 593 extant letters collected in the three volumes which form the focus of this article, 416 letters were sent to men. The most common correspondents are his publisher, John Murray, his friend and factotum, Douglas Kinnaird, his university friend and travel companion, John Cam Hobhouse, and his friend and fellow poet, Thomas Moore. Between them, these four men account for 52% of the extant letters. All four were part of the same erudite metropolitan homosocial circle which had embraced Byron during his “years of fame”, men whose interests, assumptions and sense of humour Byron knew intimately and was thus able to cater to with expert precision.
5 In 1833, the commercially savvy John Murray published travellers' handbooks containing lengthy passages from Byron's poetry so tourists could read his verses in the location they described – a popular concept which continued into the twentieth century with works such as Anna McMahan (Citation1907) and Simon Cheetham (Citation1988). 's Byron in Europe: In Childe Harold's Footsteps (Wellingborough: Equation, 1988). Thus Marianne Colston, visiting Venice in 1820 felt that every step she took she saw scenes from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Journal of a Tour in France, 273).
6 Hemans, Felicia “The Restoration of Works of Art to Italy”. Bowers notes that from 1815 to 1823, “the influence of Italy on English literary culture was at its zenith”, with huge readerly interest in Italian literature, literary and artistic traditions, and in tales of travels to Italy. (Bowers Citation2005, ix). See Bandiera and Saglia (Citation2005) for a further consideration of the influence of Italian culture on British Romanticism.
7 This travelogue convention is subversively inverted in Byron's Don Juan, when the Spanish hero expresses disappointment at the blandness of the English landscape, which lacks “that more sublime construction / Which mixes up Vines, Olives, Precipices, Glaciers, Volcanoes, Oranges, and ices” in the Mediterranean. Don Juan XI.76.
8 Byron parodies this parochialism in the delighted relief exhibited by the British narrator of Don Juan on arriving in “dear Dover” after his lengthy Continental sojourn, extolling the superiority of “Albion's […] beauties” and roads ('So smooth, so level”) Don Juan X.71, 69.
9 Bowers suggests this disdain is, at least in part, attributable to rising immigration which saw foreigners increasingly “rendered as the opposite of the ‘typical Englishman’, with common motifs being malnourishment, uncleanliness, and animal comparisons” (Citation2005, 18).
10 In addition to footnotes 7 and 8, Byron's understanding is visible in his 1818 poem Beppo (both written and set in Italy) which establishes the narrator as a parodical fictionalisation of the “typical” British travel writer who, despite noting the pleasures of Italy is resolute in his preference for Britain. “England! with all thy faults I love thee still!” he exclaims, before listing a great many items marred by qualifiers which emphasise their undesirability, including “the taxes, when they're not too many”, “the weather--when it is not rainy”, and “Poor's rate, Reform, my own, the nation's debt”. This passage concludes with the fervid assertion “And so God save the Regent, Church, and King”. Recalling the eponymous hero of Samuel Richardson's The History of Sir Charles Grandison, who returns from Italy convinced of the superiority of “the Religion, the Government, [and] the Manners of England”, Byron slyly mocks the effusive patriotism of British travel writers. Stabler has commented upon how the “parenthetical asides in Beppo work to produce an oppositional voice which interrupts and undercuts lyrical reflection” (Citation2018, 234). They also interrupt and destabilise the standard laudatory reflections on Britain – the poetic form itself invoking and inverting Chard’s “symmetrical oppositions between the foreign and the familiar” in order to surreptitiously divest Britain of its alleged pre-eminence (Citation1999, 41).
11 For example, the British Review chastises Byron (“an English nobleman, an English husband, and an English father”) for valuing another country over his own in its review of Beppo (IX May 1818, 328-329).
12 According to Bruce Redford, at this time foreign travel writing must include “a young British male patrician” (Citation1996, 32). Susan Lamb, meanwhile, draws attention to the persistent figuring of the dangerously seductive pleasures of international travel (and the countries visited) as female (2009 passim). Byron parodies this anthropomorphic feminisation in Beppo, when the male British narrator leeringly describes the softly seductive Italian language as melting on his tongue “like kisses from a female mouth”.
13 “Lord Byron is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He allows fathers and mothers to bargain with him for their daughters, and though this is common enough in Italy, yet for an Englishman to encourage such sickening vice is a melancholy thing” (Shelley Citation1964, 2.58).
14 For example, Lady Morgan’s Italy unequivocally condemns the dissipate Italian nobility as “foul and fatuous”, and argues that the “the morals of Italy fell with her beauties” (Citation1821, 2.451), a view echoed by Leigh Hunt who denounces the “stupid system” of amicazia as “gross” and “hypocritical” (Liberal, 2, April 1823).
15 “What I get by my brains”, he writes gleefully, “I will spend on my b[olloc]ks – as long as I have a tester or a testicle remaining” BLJ 12.18.
16 This offers a new vantage point from which to consider Peter Cochran’s suggestion that Byron's entire time in Italy was shaped by “a vain attempt to forge a new identity for himself” (Citation2011, 1) and Barbara Schaff’s shrewd observation regarding the performative nature of Byron's letters in which he consciously occupies “the roles of the poet, the glamorous celebrity, notorious womaniser, and the poetical persona of his works” (Citation2008, 105).
17 For a longer list of these, almost all of which appear in Byron's letters, see Sweet (Citation2012, 221–3).
18 In fact, Byron arguably contributes to this trend of travel writing transforming women into tourist attractions as his detailed accounts of his Italian mistresses inspired various artists to create imaginary portraits of his lovers, and encouraged subsequent travellers to attempt to seek them out. Probably the most well-known are the illustrations of Margarita Cogni and Teresa Guiccioli in Finden's Byron's Beauties (London: John Murray, 1833).
19 Chard’s observations regarding the “self-protective irony” common to travelogues suggests that even when at his most obviously satirical, Byron is conforming to type (Citation1999, 6).
20 Byron charts this decline in his two historical dramas Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (1821) and The Two Foscari: An Historical Tragedy (1821).
21 For example, Thomas Broderick's narrative The Travels of Thomas Broderick Esq (1754), Richard Lassells’ autobiographical account The voyage of Italy, or, A compleat journey through Italy in two parts : with the characters of the people, and the description of the chief towns, churches, monasteries, tombs, libraries, pallaces, villas, gardens, pictures, statues, and antiquities : as also of the interest, government, riches, force, &c. of all the princes : with instructions concerning travel / by Richard Lassels, Gent. who travelled through Italy five times as tutor to several of the English nobility and gentry ; never before extant (Paris, 1670), and James Howell's Instructions and Directions for Foreign Travel (1642) all of which describe the dangerous and potentially fatal consequences of fraternising with the “Curtisanes in Venice”. For more details of this genre, see Sweet (Citation2012, 199–223).
22 Byron alludes, in coded terms, to his amorous interest in attractive youths.
23 Byron admires the “frank undisguised way in which every body avows everything in this part of the world” (BLJ 5.156). Byron's understanding and repeated use of this binary format in his comparisons of British and Italian women and sociosexual mores also enriches Angeletti's presentation of Byron's depictions of Italian women as inherently oppositional, both a favoured orientalist counterpart to traditional Western civilisation and a superior alternative to the Calvinist repression of his youth (Citation2012, 81, 91).
24 Sir Richard Hoare states in his 1815 Hints to Travellers in Italy, “EVERY traveller ought to have two objects in view: the one, to amuse himself: the other, to impart to his friends the information he has gained”. London: John Murray. A copy of this book is included in the sale catalogue for Byron's Library.
25 (Chard Citation1999, 9). This “imperfect” knowledge about the “customs, laws and institutions of Italy” was noted by contemporary scholars, such as Antonio Panizzi, Professor of Italian language and literature at the University of London, in his 1828 work, Extracts from Italian Prose Writers for the Use of Students in the London University.
26 Mary Shelley observed that Byron was “one of the few strangers who was admitted, or chose to be admitted, behind that singular stage” of Venetian Society (Citation2020, 8.220).
27 For more on Byron as a source of educational information for travellers, see James Buzard (Citation1993, 117–30).
28 A wife “is virtuous (according to the code) who limits herself to her husband and one lover”, he observes knowledgably, but if she takes additional lovers, she is “considered as overstepping the modesty of marriage” (BLJ 6.107, 5.155).
29 Byron emphasises this in a letter to Moore in which, seeking to alleviate any concerns his friend might have that Byron would be murdered by a vengeful cuckold, he explains that “jealousy is not the order of the day in Venice, and daggers are out of fashion, while duels, on love matters, are unknown―at least, with the husbands” (BLJ 5.166).
30 One morning, when Marianna was out, her sister-in-law snuck into Byron’s apartments. They were just getting to know each other:
[W]hen, lo! in a very few minutes in marches, to my very great astonishment, Marianna S * *, in propriâ personâ, and, after making a most polite curtsy to her sister-in-law and to me, without a single word seizes her said sister-in-law by the hair, and bestows upon her some sixteen slaps, which would have made your ear ache only to hear their echo. I need not describe the screaming which ensued. The luckless visitor took flight.
31 There “is no convincing a woman here―that she is in the smallest degree deviating from the rule of right or the fitness of things―in having an ‘Amoroso’” (BLJ 5.155).
32 Byron hints at this affable homosociality in the closing stanzas of his poem Beppo; when the hero returns to find his long-abandoned wife Laura has taken a “vice-husband” or “supernumerary slave”, the three of them live in amiable harmony thereafter (l.315).
33 Chard notes that cicisbeismo “was the object of an enormous amount of speculation” by English travellers. (Citation1999, 9).
34 The explicitly sexual nature of the relationship is intimated in his anecdote concerning how women in Ravenna, when learning of a “Sodomite”, simply express the hope he will be “converted to Adultery” (BLJ 7.51-52). This is also highlighted by his account of how Teresa's husband was initially a “complacent cuckold” but later became jealous and sought annulment or divorce (BLJ 7.94). According to Byron everyone was shocked by his behaviour – so out of keeping with regional mores; in a letter to Murray, he recounts how everyone is “furious against him―for his conduct―& his not wishing to be cuckold at three score – when every [one] else is at one” (BLJ 7.103).
35 For more details of the English Aristocracy's sociosexual mores and Byron's adoption of them, see Paterson-Morgan (Citation2022).
36 “I can understand nothing of all this”, he writes disconsolately (BLJ 6.144).
37 “The reason is that they marry for their parents and love for themselves. ―They exact fidelity from a lover as a debt of honour―while they pay the husband as a tradesman” (BLJ 7.43). The age disparity was one of the key factors contributing to the cicisbeo relationship though, as Bizzocchi notes, large differences were becoming less common towards the end of the eighteenth century (Citation2014, 68–71).
38 Byron offers an annecdote concerning the uproar when a woman was found having an affair, and was widely condemned (“all the women furious against her”) not for cheating on her husband, but rather for being unfaithful to her lover. “Great scandal”, Byron writes with relish, “planted by her lover―to be thrashed by her husband for inconstancy to her regular Servente” (BLJ 8.134).
39 “They are extremely tenacious―and jealous as furies―not permitting their Lovers even to marry if they can help it―and keeping them always close to them in public as in private whenever they can” (BLJ 7.43).
40 “I am drilling very hard to learn how to double a Shawl, and should succeed to admiration―if I did not always double it the wrong side out―and then I sometimes confuse and bring away two―so as to put all the Serventi out―besides keeping their Servite in the cold” (BLJ 7.28).
41 Byron was amused and perplexed to find himself being firmly chastised by the aged Countess Benzoni when she and her cicisbeo discovered Byron and Teresa staying alone in a hotel, without Alessandro in attendance to lend a veneer of legitimacy.
42 Indeed, Thomas Moore, visiting Byron, was appalled at how “un-English” Byron had become with his ungentlemanly dress and effeminate ways (and subversive foreign verse forms). (See Saglia Citation2010, 21).
43 Angeletti suggests there is parallel transition in his perceptions of Scotland at this point, which regains the homelike appeal of his youth (Citation2012, 83).
44 Byron's awareness of this convention is evident in Angeletti's exploration of his use of Italy and its women to articulate his views of the exotic in Chapter 3 (Citation2012).
45 For example, the eponymous hero of Richardson's The History of Sir Charles Grandison is, like Byron, a “citizen of the world” whose Continental travels give him an added polish but also expose him to a dangerously seductive Italian woman. However, he withstands her wiles and returns to England and an advantageous marriage.