In 1957 Leslie Marchand's mammoth three volume biography of Byron was greeted with almost universal praise for its thoroughness, accuracy, and scholarly standards. Samuel C. Chew, himself a Byronist of the first rank, wrote of Marchand's work: "It is beyond comparison the best biography of Byron that has been published. . . . It is admirably objective and non-partisan, scholarly in its dispassionate, clear, calm record of the facts, equally admirable in its candid admission of the need to substitute inference for fact when the evidence falls short of absolute reliability." [New York Herald Tribune Review of Books, 20 October 1957.] Similarly Herschel Baker praised Marchand as "a biographer who has seen and done his duty to the facts, wisely contenting himself with trying to ascertain and tell the truth about one of the most controversial lives ever lived." [Christian Science Monitor, 24 October 1957.] A few reviewers, like Leon Edel [New Republic, 2 December 1957] criticized the book for its "lack of a shaping thesis," but many saw that as its principal virtue: they felt that Marchand, in refusing to be guided by any grand contention about Byron's greatness, was able to achieve an almost scientific accuracy in presenting the facts of his life.

When Marchand's one-volume condensation, Byron: A Portrait, appeared in 1970, it was greeted with similarly rapturous reviews. Frederick Bostetter, for example, called it "an indispensable aid to Byron scholars as well as a delightful experience for the general reader" [English Language Notes]. Since then Byron: A Portrait has been reprinted by the University of Chicago Press in an inexpensive paperback edition suitable for use in undergraduate and graduate courses. Thus, in the past half century Marchand's view of Byron has become both dominant and definitive, shaping the views of students and scholars alike.

It is my contention that this shining gem of modern American scholarship is seriously flawed. The biography is certainly weak--sometimes even scandalously so--in scholarly precision. And its weaknesses in detail are capable of undermining our confidence in the accuracy of Marchand's conclusions about major influences upon Byron's personality.

Let us consider in detail three episodes that Marchand sees as formative and significant: the sexual molestation of Byron by his governess May Gray, the homosexual inclinations in Byron prior to his travels in Turkey and Greece, and the incest with his half-sister Augusta. How effectively and honestly does Marchand present the evidence for each of these supposed events?

One of Marchand's central contentions is that Byron's entire life was colored by his early platonic passions for Mary Duff and Margaret Parker and his early sexual awakening with May Gray:

It is strange how little account has been taken of Byron's plain statement that his passions were developed very early and that this "caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts--having anticipated life." One of the two parallel developments in his relations with women, associated in his mind with Mary Duff and Margaret Parker, stimulated him to a "dash into poetry" and became the constant symbol to him of the ideally beautiful unpossessed love, the sort of image that usually blossoms in adolescence but that in Byron was a dominating vision between the years of eight and twelve. It had numerous embodiments male and female during the rest of his life. The other, the premature sexual awakening, caused disillusionment, the melancholy which springs from physical disgust and the failure of the real experience to measure up to the ideal. The first carried him into love with young girls and boys; the second into the cynical search for "fine animals" like the baker's wife in Venice. (Byron: A Portrait 21)

Here is a major thesis, one that is potentially as useful in understanding Byron's poetry as his life. But how well will it stand scrutiny?

We know from many passages in Byron's letters and journals that he did indeed fall in love with his distant cousins Mary Duff and Margaret Parker at a very young age. For example, in a journal entry dated November 26, 1813, Byron reflects at length on the importance for him of this early passion for Mary Duff, wondering why he has found it so unforgettable and telling us that he was "not eight years old" at the time and that he "certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterward" (Byron's Letters and Journals, chapter 3 [engphil.astate.edu/gallery/byron4.html]). But can we believe with equal certainty, as Marchand contends, that Byron was sexually molested by May Gray beginning in his ninth year and continuing until she was dismissed when he was eleven and a half? Certainly Byron's own testimony that he had "no sexual ideas" for years after his romance with Mary Duff should lead us to doubt that he was debauched by May Gray within one year. What evidence does Marchand present to support his sweeping hypothesis?

Here is the relevant paragraph from Byron: A Portrait:

May Gray had been sent back to Newstead, and Hanson begged Mrs. Byron to dismiss the girl. He said that while in Nottingham she was perpetually beating him [Byron], and that his bones sometimes ached from it; that she brought all sorts of Company of the very lowest Description into his apartments. But Hanson had withheld part of the story. After Byron's death he told Hobhouse: "When [Byron was] nine years old at his mothers house a free Scotch girl used to come to bed to him and play tricks with his person." Byron himself was obviously recalling this period of his boyhood when he wrote in his Detached Thoughts in 1821: "My passions were developed very early--so early, that few would believe me, if I were to state the period, and the facts which accompanied it." If Byron was nine years old when this sex play began, it must have started in Scotland and have gone on for some time before he revealed it to Hanson. It seems likely that the worst blows he suffered at the hands of May Gray were psychological rather than physical. The disillusioning experience of seeing her devote her caresses to others after their intimacy may well have roused a maddened jealousy that caused the boy to tell Hanson. This experience with an apparently pious girl who had taught him to read the Bible may have been an additional shock and in part the foundation of his lifelong hatred of cant and hypocrisy in religious people. (20)

What should we make of it? First, we should note that Hanson's letter to Mrs. Byron at the time of May Gray's dismissal does accuse her of beating Byron and of "consorting with Company of the lowest Description," but it does not charge her with any sexual mistreatment of Byron himself. That charge is based on Hobhouse's recollection of what Hanson said that Byron said some twenty-five years earlier. Moreover, we don't know exactly what Hobhouse, Hanson, or Byron might have meant by the ambiguous reference to "playing tricks with his person." Even if Hanson's memory of the episode is accurate, we cannot be certain that the eleven-year-old Byron, in his desire to get rid of a governess who both beat him and preached to him, was confining himself to the absolute truth. There is even less evidence that Byron was, as Marchand contends, "obviously recalling this period" when he wrote that his "passions were developed very early." Byron may have only been referring to his innocent passion for Mary Duff, a passion which was the frequent subject of his written meditations. Furthermore, Marchand's hypothesis about the "disillusioning experience of seeing [May Gray] devote her caresses to others after their intimacy" should be taken for what it is: wild speculation upon the flimsiest of evidence. Maybe May Gray initiated Byron into sexuality; maybe not. Maybe he subsequently saw her making love to others; probably not.

In Marchand's references to the "numerous embodiments male and female" of Byron's ideal love, we see the first of a veritable deluge of assertions, hints, and innuendoes about his presumed homosexuality. Now it is one thing to observe Byron's obvious bemusement at the homosexual antics of Ali Pacha, Velly Pacha, and Eustathius during his travels through Greece and Turkey. Given Byron's rebelliousness and his desire to try out all forms of pleasure at least once, there is little reason to doubt that when in Greece he did as the Greeks did. Early in his travels Byron wrote to his friend Henry Drury:

I see not much difference between ourselves and the Turks, save that we have foreskins and they none, that they have long dresses and we short, and that we talk much and they little.--In England the vices in fashion are whoring and drinking, in Turkey, Sodomy and smoking, we prefer a girl and a bottle, they a pipe and a pathic.--They are sensible people. . . . I like the Greeks, who are plausible rascals, with all the Turkish vices without their courage.--However some are brave and all are beautiful, very much resembling the bust of Alcibiades, the women not quite so handsome. (Selected Letters 36)

Before the end of his travels, Byron was virtually boasting about male conquests to his friend Hobhouse. (However, given Hobhouse's rather starchy Puritanism about sexuality, there is always the possibility that Byron was simply goading him for the pleasure of it.) Nonetheless, Byron saw morality as a matter of convention and he prided himself on adapting to the different conventions of life in Spain, Greece, and Italy. In Greece and Turkey the love of men for men was both permissible and esteemed, and for Byron it seems to have become both a lark and a giggle. But what was good manners in the sun-baked East was very bad manners in the chilly North.

Marchand does not directly accuse Byron of homosexuality in his years before Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Instead, he uses innuendo and shaky inference to build to the injudicious conclusion that Byron left England for the first time because of his homosexuality:

He had booked passage abroad for the sixth of May from Falmouth, and he urged Hanson to raise money on any terms. The manner in which he speaks of the urgency suggests some personal impasse more serious than the importunities of his creditors. Later, in Greece, he referred again to some mysterious reasons for his leaving England and not wanting to return there. He assured Hanson that it was not fear of the consequences of his satire that caused his impatience to leave, "but I will never live in England if I can avoid it. Why--must remain a secret. . . ." These dark hints in contrast to the open and boastful avowals of his prowess with his nymphs in London, or his frank confession to Hanson of his faux pas with the maid Lucy, might tempt the speculation that he wished to escape his own proclivities toward attachment to boys, or even that he feared some closer alliance with the Cambridge choirboy Edleston, who had wanted to live with him in London. But we shall probably never know. (Portrait 59)

This is a clever paragraph--both misleading and pernicious without being quite false. The reader is left with the impression that Byron's relationship with Edleston has taken some dark, shameful turn, for prior to this Byron had been open about--and seemingly quite proud of--his pure, Platonic love for Edleston. He had written, for example, to Elizabeth Pigot:

I rejoice to hear you are interested in my protégé; he has been my almost constant associate since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him for ever. He departs for a mercantile house in town in October, and we shall probably not meet till the expiration of my minority, when I shall leave to his decision either entering as a partner through my interest, or residing with me altogether. Of course he would in his present frame of mind prefer the latter, but he may alter his opinion previous to that period;-- however, he shall have his choice. I certainly love him more than any human being, and neither time nor distance have had the least effect on my (in general) changeable disposition. (Byron's Letters and Journals, chapt. 1) [engphil.astate.edu/gallery/byron2.html]

Here Byron was proudly asserting a Platonic love that was fairly common and respected between schoolboys in his day. It is akin to the "bosom friendships" sought out by the young heroine in the "Anne of Green Gables" series for young girls. Marchand's readers are encouraged to presume that only some particularly base imbroglio in the relationship with Edleston could have led Byron to quit England--though early in A Portrait Marchand acknowledges that the relationship with Edleston always remained a pure and ideal "romantic attachment" (38).

Marchand has perhaps subtly suggested the nature of that imbroglio in his discussion of Byron's falling out with Lord Grey de Ruthyn, the young peer who had rented Newstead Abbey before Byron came of age. Marchand tells us that Lord Grey and Byron were initially friends and that, during one of Byron's stays at Newstead,

. . . something happened that gave him [Byron] an emotional shock, and he left with the determination never to have anything to do with Lord Grey again. Though he would never reveal the nature of the offense, he hinted at it clearly enough to make it obvious that the sensuous young lord had made some kind of sexual advance which disgusted his younger companion. (Portrait 28)

While it is obvious to Marchand that something sexual must have transpired, perhaps Marchand let himself become too enchanted by gothic melodrama. Lord Grey de Ruthyn of Newstead Abbey seems a perfectly villainous name, but isn't it possible that Lord Grey had done something non-sexual that made him "the cordial object of [Byron's] detestation"? Byron was, for example, exceptionally sympathetic to animals, and Marchand himself tells us that Lord Grey used to take his guests out "on moonlight nights to shoot pheasants on their roosts" (28). Byron's detestations were more often based on principles of fairness and justice than on sexual peccadilloes, and Lord Grey's unsporting slaughter of sleeping pheasants was just the sort of thing that Byron might find most revolting.

So far as I can determine Marchand's charges about the homosexual advances of Lord Grey and Edleston are the flimsiest of speculations--not demonstrably false, but not particularly likely to be true either. Let us briefly consider the many reasons, unrelated to Edleston, that Byron had for leaving England in the spring of 1809: (1) He was deeply in debt and daily dunned by his creditors. Fleeing to the continent, as Beau Brummell had done before him, was one established way to defer repayment. (2) He had recently published English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he unmercifully satirized nearly all of the prominent poets and critics in the kingdom. Some of them, including the hot-headed Tom Moore, wanted to challenge Byron to a duel. While Byron was a splendid shot and certainly no coward, he was also aware that discretion is the better part of valor. (3) Travel in the East held inherent attraction to the young, romantic Lord Byron. (4) Byron had been drawn into social encounters with his former flame Mary Chaworth, who was now unhappily married to Colonel Musters. Mary had been worshipped by the adolescent Byron and even now both he and she turned pale and silent in each other's company. Byron may have feared that there was danger to both his honor and hers if they continued to meet. He explicitly stated those concerns in his poem "To a Lady: On Being Asked My Reason for Quitting England in the Spring." Admittedly, none of these reasons for Byron's departure is so scandalously fulfilling as Marchand's nefarious hints about unnatural love, but each has a clear basis in fact and is inherently more probable than the speculation raised by Marchand. Isn't it the biographer's duty to give more prominence to facts than to speculations?

Finally, let us consider the way in which Marchand presents the evidence concerning Byron's presumably incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta. Here is the paragraph in which Marchand first makes the case for incest:

Augusta, after staying about three weeks in London and seeing her brother constantly, had returned to Six Mile Bottom, where Byron visited her twice for several days (her husband was off somewhere following the races), and after the second visit took her back to London with him. On August 5 he made the rather surprising announcement to Lady Melbourne: "My sister, who is going abroad with me, is now in town. . . ." How deeply involved he was in that quarter Lady Melbourne did not know, though he wished yet feared to tell her. Several times he was on the brink of revealing his secret, but he drew back, though he continued to hint at something dark and forbidding. "When I don't write to you, or see you for some time you may be very certain I am about no good. . . . don't be angry with me-- which you will however; first, for some things I have said, and then for other I have not said." Augusta had gone home and the uncertainty of his mind and plans increased. He was burning with his guilty secret and had an irresistible urge to reveal it. He even wrote to Moore on August 22: ". . . I am at this moment in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape than any of the last twelve months,--and that is saying a good deal. It is unlucky we can neither live with nor without these women." (Portrait 147)

Note first of all the sly innuendo in Marchand's summary of the visits between brother and sister. Surely there is something suspicious about Byron's "surprising announcement" that his sister was staying alone with him in London and planned to follow him abroad. Or is there? Marchand is guilty of quotation out of context when he includes the words "My sister, who is going abroad with me, is now in town. . . ." without printing Byron's next words, "where she returned with me from New[mar]ket--under the existing circumstances of her lord's embarrassments she could not well do otherwise--& she appears to have still less reluctance at leaving this country than even myself" (Prothero, vol. 3, 85). Actions for which Marchand attributes a sexual cause clearly have an economic one, and conduct that Marchand presents as surprising and potentially scandalous is perfectly natural. There is nothing surprising or dishonorable about sheltering one's sister during her husband's bankruptcy.

Note how slickly Marchand has also introduced the notion of a "dark and forbidding" secret that Byron is forever "on the brink of revealing." To support this notion he quotes Byron's own words: "When I don't write to you, or see you for some time you may be very certain I am about no good. . . ." But what Marchand fails to quote is even more revealing, for Byron's letter continues: "--& vice versa--I have sent you a long scrawl & here be a second--which may convince you that I am not ashamed of myself--" (3 Aug. 1813, Prothero vol. 3, 91). Thus, Byron's words, when quoted in context, not only fail to support Marchand's contentions about some shameful secret, they directly contradict that thesis!

Moreover, this is not the only instance of quotation out of context and outright falsehood to be found in Marchand's development of the incest charge. Somewhat later in his exposition, Marchand writes: "On the 15th his sister arrived in London, and on the 18th his journal ceased. 'It is quite enough to set down my thoughts,--my actions will rarely bear retrospection'" (Portrait, 159). First of all, Byron did not stop keeping his journal on December 18th as Marchand insists. He continued to make sporadic entries in it for another four months. Secondly, Marchand has omitted a revealing sentence that preceded Byron's melancholy observation about thought and action. Byron wrote, "Much done, but nothing to record." To most readers, these words will not suggest that Byron felt his actions were shameful, but rather that they were insignificant, which is not at all the implication that Marchand wishes to create--hence, his partial quotation.

For one final example, let us consider what is possibly the most damning evidence against Byron. Marchand suggests that Byron confessed the affair to his confidante Lady Melbourne and that

Lady Melbourne still thought Augusta to blame for the beginning and the continuance of the affair, but Byron came to her defense: ". . . by the God who made me for my own misery, and not much for the good of others, she was not to blame, one thousandth part in comparison. She was not aware of her own peril till it was too late, and I can only account for her subsequent 'abandon' by an observation which I think is not unjust, that women are much more attached than men if they are treated with anything like fairness or tenderness." (Portrait 167)

My, my! That is spicy stuff! Yet once again Marchand has twisted Byron's words by partial quotation. Marchand implies that Byron is avowing a sexual affair when in fact Byron explicitly denied any physical relationship. His letter to Lady Melbourne begins:

You--or rather I--have done my A much injustice. The expression which you recollect as objectionable meant only 'loving' in the senseless sense of that wide word, and it must be some selfish stupidity of mine in my own story, but really and truly-- . . . (SP 199)

Maybe Byron is lying in claiming that he and Augusta loved only in "the senseless sense of that wide word"--though I prefer to take Byron's word instead of believing the charges laboriously developed by Annabella as she struggled to protect her custody of their child--but even if Byron may have been lying, isn't it the biographer's duty to be true to the words of his sources? And when we find clear evidence of quotation out of context and distortion, isn't it our duty as teachers and scholars and students of Byron to reject shoddy work by the distinguished Leslie Marchand as wrathfully as we would that of the lowliest undergraduate plagiarist?

Jeffrey D. Hoeper
Arkansas State University
posted on 12/17/02
copyright 2002 by Jeffrey D. Hoeper, all rights reserved