Byron in fiction: images of the poet in nineteenth-century Spain

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Notes

1 The first book-length biography of Byron is John Watkins’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Honourable Lord Byron (1822). After his death, works on his life proliferated. These include Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of His Life (1830), biographical accounts presumably based on the authors’ knowledge of the poet, such as Thomas Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron (1824) or Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828), and shamelessly spurious lives of Byron like John Mitford’s The Private Life of Lord Byron (1836) (North 2009, 58–100; Elfenbein 1995, 75–80). As for Byron in fiction, the valuable bibliographical information provided by Chew (1924) is revised and updated in Davis’ annotated bibliography of fictions of Byron (2003, 147–202).

2 For instance, in July 1824, just three months after Byron’s death, Theodore Hook published a detailed account of Byron’s wedding night in The John Bull Magazine and Literary Recorder, presenting it as a surviving passage of the poet’s memoirs.

3 In 1841, when “Una noche de Lord Byron” was published, Byron’s poetry had already entered the Spanish literary market, but very few Spanish readers would have been familiar with Shelley’s name. In fact, he did not receive any critical attention until the late nineteenth century (see González, Rodríguez, and Cardwell 2008), so this may be one of the earliest references to him in Spain.

4 “Una aventura de Lord Byron” was reprinted in two other Spanish periodicals in 1841: El Panorama and Biblioteca Popular.

5 Dumas released Vie et aventures de John Davys in serial form in Revue de Paris in 1839, and the following year he published it in four volumes under the title Aventures de John Davys. The book-form edition is the source text of the Spanish translation Aventuras de John Davys (1840). However, in November 1839, part of chapter 15 of the second volume – one of the chapters in which Byron appears – had already been translated and published as the folletín “Un inglés en Constantinopla” in Diario de Avisos de Madrid (10, 14, 18, 26 November 1839).

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Sara Medina Calzada

Sara Medina Calzada, Ph.D., is a lecturer of English language and literature at the University of Valladolid (Spain). She has researched and published on the historical and cultural relations between Britain and the Hispanic world in the nineteenth century, in particular, on the reception of Byron, Thomas Moore, and Charlotte Brontë in Spain, and on the representations of Spain in Romantic print culture.