Byron, Byronism, and the Victorians

This dissertation examines how Byronism mediated Byron's life and work for Victorian writers. The first chapter discusses the equation of Byron with his heroes and its relation to the stereotype of Byron's female audience. The second examines elements of Byron's reception, beginning with the ways his work and opinions about it were disseminated. For the leisured classes, reading Byron became a test of the individual's ability to judge culture. For the working classes, reactions to Byron were closely related to religious or political loyalties as well to the possibility of emulating higher classes.; The next three chapters examine Byronism and its relation to Thomas Carlyle, Emily Bronte, and Alfred Tennyson. Carlyle's negative opinions about Byron arose in relation to the opinions of periodical reviews. His attitudes were shaped by his desire to assert the authority of bourgeois philosophy against aristocratic dilettantism. Sartor Resartus appropriates images from works of Byron and Byronism and transform them into a vehicle for the bourgeois philosophic critic.; Emily Bronte responded to Byron as his work was transformed by sibling rivalries among the Bronte children. In their Byronic juvenilia, Branwell and Charlotte reduced women to objects of male elegy; Emily created a female heroine, A.G.A., through whom she could represent a feminine form of memory. Wuthering Heights responded to her sisters' novels, which associated Byron with sides of the heroines that must be rejected. Emily revised Manfred and other Byronic texts to represent the self-destructive love of Heathcliff and Catherine.; For Tennyson, Byron was associated with the vulgar display of personality. When Tennyson's early poetry engaged Byronic subtexts, he imagined forms of heroism divorced from self-representation and moral or political concerns. In Maud, Tennyson confronted and revised a Byronic tradition of poetry about social issues, represented by Chartist and Spasmodic poets, which had grown out of the romantic mode he had earlier rejected.; The conclusion examines how non-literary forms of Byronism accommodated Byron to middle-class morality. I discuss two aspects of the renewed interest in Byron after 1860: the feminization of the Byronic hero and the relation of Byron to aestheticism. The appendix presents a survey of nineteenth-century reactions to Byron.