Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Charlotte Harley (1801–1880), to whom Byron dedicated Childe Harold, using the nickname Ianthe

The poem contains elements thought to be autobiographical, as Byron generated some of the storyline from experience gained during his travels through Portugal, the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea between 1809 and 1811.[1] The "Ianthe" of the dedication was the term of endearment he used for Lady Charlotte Harley, about 11 years old when Childe Harold was first published. Charlotte Bacon, née Harley, was the second daughter of 5th Earl of Oxford and Lady Oxford, Jane Elizabeth Scott. Throughout the poem, Byron, in character of Childe Harold, regretted his wasted early youth, hence re-evaluating his life choices and re-designing himself through going on the pilgrimage, during which he lamented various historical events including the Iberian Peninsular War among others.

Despite Byron's initial hesitation at having the first two cantos of the poem published because he felt it revealed too much of himself,[2] it was published, at the urging of friends, by John Murray in 1812, and brought both the poem and its author to immediate and unexpected public attention. Byron later wrote, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous".[3] The first two cantos in John Murray's edition were illustrated by Richard Westall, well-known painter and illustrator who was then commissioned to paint portraits of Byron.

Published on March 3, 1812, the first run of 500 quarto copies sold out in three days. There were ten editions of the work within three years. Byron was deeming the work "my best" in 1817, a year before adding a fourth canto.[4]

Byron chose for the epigraph for the 1812 edition title page a passage from Le Cosmopolite, ou, le Citoyen du Monde (1753), by Louis-Charles Fougeret de Monbron, in the original French. Translated into English, the quote emphasizes how the travels have resulted in a greater appreciation of his own country:

The universe is a kind of book of which one has read only the first page when one has seen only one's own country. I have leafed through a large enough number, which I have found equally bad. This examination was not at all fruitless for me. I hated my country. All the impertinences of the different peoples among whom I have lived have reconciled me to her. If I had not drawn any other benefit from my travels than that, I would regret neither the expense nor the fatigue.[5]

The poem has four cantos written in Spenserian stanzas, which consist of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by one alexandrine (a twelve syllable iambic line), and has rhyme pattern ABABBCBCC.

Frontispiece to a c. 1825 edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

   Lo! where the Giant on the mountain stands,
  His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun,
  With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,
  And eye that scorcheth all it glares upon,—
  Restless it rolls, now fix'd, and now anon
  Flashing afar,—and at his iron feet
  Destruction cowers to mark what deeds are done;
  For on this morn three potent Nations meet,
To shed before his Shrine the blood he deems most sweet.[6]

— Canto the First, Stanza XXXIX (lines 423–431)

Lyrics in a different form occasionally punctuate these stanzas: the farewell to England following Canto I's stanza 13 and later the address "To Inez" following stanza 84; and in Canto II the war song that follows stanza 72. Then in Canto III there is the greeting from Drachenfels following stanza 55.

The youthful Harold, cloyed with the pleasures of the world and reckless of life, wanders about Europe, making his feelings and ideas the subjects of the poem. In Canto I he is in Spain and Portugal, where he recounts the savagery of their invasion by the French. In Canto II he moves to Greece, uplifted by the beauty of its past in a country now enslaved by the Turks. Canto III finds him on the battlefield of Waterloo, from which he journeys down the Rhine and crosses into Switzerland, enchanted by the beauty of the scenery and its historic associations. In Canto IV Harold starts from Venice on a journey through Italy, lamenting the vanished heroic and artistic past, and the subject status of its various regions.

For the long poem he was envisaging, Byron chose not only the Spenserian stanza but also the archaising dialect in which The Faerie Queene was written, possibly following the example of Spenser's 18th century imitators.[7] Thus in the Pilgrimage's first three stanzas we find mote (as past tense of the verb 'might'); whilome (once upon a time) and ne (not); hight (named) and losel (good-for-nothing). If such stylistic artificiality was meant to create a distance between hero and author, it failed - protest though Byron might in the preface that his protagonist was purely fictitious. No sooner had Walter Scott read the work than he was commenting in a private letter to Joanna Baillie that "the hero, notwithstanding the affected antiquity of the style in some parts, is a modern man of fashion and fortune, worn out and satiated with the pursuits of dissipation, and although there is a caution against it in the preface, you cannot for your soul avoid concluding that the author, as he gives an account of his own travels, is also doing so in his own character."[8]

In the public sphere, the Anti-Jacobin Review came to the similar conclusion that Childe Harold "appears to be nothing but the dull, inanimate, instrument for conveying his poetical creator's sentiments to the public. Lord Byron avows the intent of this hero's introduction to be the 'giving some connection to the piece'; but we cannot, for the life of us, discover how the piece is more connected, by assigning the sentiments which it conveys to a fictitious personage, who takes no part in any of the scenes described, who achieves no deeds, and who, in short, has no one province to perform, than it would have been had Lord Byron spoken in his own person, and been the 'hero of his own tale'.[9]

In the face of unanimous scepticism, Byron gave up the pretence and finally admitted in the letter to his fellow-traveller John Hobhouse that prefaced Canto IV: "With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which everyone seemed determined not to perceive."[10]

The first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had scarcely been published before its world-weary hero was satirised in the popular Rejected Addresses of 1812. Cui Bono? enquires "Lord B". in the Spenserian stanza employed by the original:

Sated with home, of wife and children tired,
The restless soul is driven abroad to roam;
Sated abroad, all seen, yet nought admired;
The restless soul is driven to ramble home.[11]

Byron was so amused by the book that he wrote to his publisher, "Tell the author I forgive him, were he twenty times our satirist".

He was not as forgiving of the next tribute to his work, Modern Greece: A Poem (1817) by Felicia Hemans, which was dependent for its subject on the second canto of the Pilgrimage. At first published anonymously, it was even taken to be by Byron himself in one contemporary review.[12] While it was written in a similar rhetorical style, her poem used a slightly longer 10-line stanza terminating in an alexandrine. This too deplored the land's Turkish enslavement and mourned its decline, although pausing to admire the occasion in the past when "woman mingled with your warrior band" (stanza 50) in resisting invasion. Where the author diverged to take direct issue with Byron was on the controversy over the Elgin Marbles, championing instead their removal to a land that can still cherish their inspiration. To Byron's assertion that

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
  Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed,
  By British hands, which it had best behoved
  To guard those relics ne'er to be restored,

she had replied

And who may grieve that, rescued from their hands,
Spoilers of excellence and foes of art,
Thy relics, Athens! borne to other lands,
Claim homage still to thee from every heart?[13]

Over the years, others wrote works dependent on the Pilgrimage to a greater or lesser degree. George Croly celebrated the victory at the Battle of Waterloo with his Paris in 1815: A Poem (London, 1817). It was prefaced by 21 Spenserian stanzas in the Byronic manner, followed by many more sections in couplets.[14] This was followed in 1818 by the anonymous collection Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to the Dead Sea (and other poems). There the Byronic outcast of the title poem relates a catalogue of sins through thirty pages of irregular couplets, wound up by a call to last minute repentance.[15] By 1820 the habit of imitation had crossed to the US, where five Spenserian stanzas dependent on the Pilgrimage's Canto II were published under the title "Childe Harold in Boetia" in The Galaxy.[16]

But the Childe was to be found applying himself to other activities than travel. The 62 pages of Francis Hodgson's Childe Harold's Monitor, or Lines occasioned by the last canto of Childe Harold (London 1818),[17] are given over to literary satire in the manner of Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Written in heroic couplets, it champions the style of the Augustan poets against the emergent Romantic style, particularly of the Lake Poets. Childe Harold in the Shades: An Infernal Romaunt (London 1819), displays much the same sentiments.[18] The poem is set in the Classical underworld and its anonymous youthful author has since been identified as Edward Dacres Baynes.[19]

Title page of Alphonse de Lamartine's Le dernier chant du pèlerinage d'Harold, 1825

Byron's death in the Greek War of Independence initiated a new round of imitations. William Lisle Bowles responded to his interment with a generous elegy in the six stanzas of "Childe Harold's Last Pilgrimage" (1826). These were written in the same form as Byron's poem and, forgiving the bitter insults that had passed between them in the course of a public controversy, now paid a magnanimous tribute to the manner of his dying.[20]

There was also a crop of French imitations on this occasion, of which the foremost was Alphonse de Lamartine's Le Dernier Chant du Pélerinage d’Harold (Paris, 1825). Despite the poet's assertion of the originality of his 'Fifth Canto', a contemporary English review found it often dependent on Byron's works.[21] Its English translation by J. W. Lake, The Last Canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, was published from Paris in 1826. Another in heroic couplets followed from London in 1827.[22] Another French enthusiast, Jules Lefèvre-Deumier, had actually been on the way to join Byron in Greece in 1823 but a shipwreck robbed him of the opportunity to join the cause. He too recorded a pilgrimage from Paris into Switzerland in Les Pélerinages d’un Childe Harold Parisien, published in 1825 under the pseudonym D. J. C. Verfèle.[23] In the following year Aristide Tarry published the pamphlet-length Childe-Harold aux ruines de Rome: imitation du poème de Lord Byron, which was sold in aid of the Greek combatants.[24]

A later imitation of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage lay unacknowledged for more than a century. John Clare had started to compose his own "Child Harold" in 1841, during the years of his madness, sometimes identifying himself as Byron, sometimes as a bigamist Byronic hero. Its intricate narrative stanzas are interspersed with many more lyrics than had been Byron's poem, often on the subject of Clare's youthful love for Mary Joyce. But, though "more sustained in thought than anything else he ever attempted", it was written piecemeal and the fragments were never unified or published until midway through the 20th century.[25]

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• Romantic literature in English

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