The Stowe-Byron controversy : a complete resume of all that has been written and said upon the subject, re-printed from 'The Times', 'Saturday review', 'Daily News', 'Pall Mall Gazette', 'Daily Telegraph', etc. Together with an impartial review of the merits of the case / by the editor of 'Once a week'.

  • Dallas, E. S. (Eneas Sweetland), 1828-1879.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Stowe-Byron controversy : a complete resume of all that has been written and said upon the subject, re-printed from 'The Times', 'Saturday review', 'Daily News', 'Pall Mall Gazette', 'Daily Telegraph', etc. Together with an impartial review of the merits of the case / by the editor of 'Once a week'. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    23/140 (page 23)
    tion she pleads. We understand it was at one time her inten- tion to insert it in the Atlantic Monthly, so that, if an English magazine had shrunk from the burden of its first production, at any rate English newspapers would have been constrained to copy it second hand. Mrs. Stowe commences by noticing the “ Guiccioli book,” and sums up the narrative of mistress versus wife as follows:— “ Lord Byron, the hero of the story, is represented as a human being endowed with every natural charm, gift, and grace, who by the one false step of an unsuitable marriage wrecked his whole life. A narrow-minded, cold-hearted pre- cisian, without sufficient intellect to comprehend his genius, or heart to feel for his temptations, formed with him one of those mere worldly marriages common in high life, and, finding that she could not reduce him to the mathematical proprieties and conventional rules of her own mode of life, suddenly and without warning abandoned him in the most cruel and inex- plicable manner. It is alleged that she parted from him in apparent affection and good humour, wrote him a playful, con- fiding letter upon the way, but, after reaching her father’s house, suddenly and without explanation announced to him that she would never see him again ; that this sudden abandon- ment drew down upon him a perfect storm of scandalous stories, which his wife never contradicted, never in any way or shape stating what the exact reasons for her departure had been, and thus silently and quietly giving scope to all the malice of thousands of enemies. The sensitive victim was actually thus driven from England, his home broken up, and he doomed to be a lonely wanderer on foreign shores.” Mrs. Stow'e then points out that we have listened to the story as told by Lord Byron’s mistress, that in bis poems and his letters, and in Moore’s notices, we have heard the story as told by Lord Byron himself, and that the heaviest, and, indeed, only, accusation ever made against Lady Byron is that; she has not spoken at all, her story has never been told. We are reminded how, all over the world, the poet’s family mis- fortunes were discussed, how his domestic poems, the “ Fare thee well,” and others, were read and sung with tears (Moore tells us they were written with tears), and Lady Byron was everywhere regarded as “ a marble-hearted monster of correct- ness and morality, a personification of the Law unmitigated by the Gospel.” AVilson, the poet, contrasted her cold pha- rasaic morality with the conjugal fidelity of a Highland