Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered - Hardcover

Moore, Doris Langley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719530954 ISBN 13: 9780719530951

Publisher: John Murray, 1974

Synopsis

Byron's life was cut short at the age of thirty-six, but he had lived it so fully and among such varied scenes that a wealth of biographical material is available for posterity - letters, journals, press reports, and the reminiscences, true or false, of commentators who may be counted, literally, by the dozens. His friends recklessly destroyed his memoirs without having read them but, oddly enough, they hoarded papers which must have seemed at the time to be quite insignificant. His publisher, his several bankers, his executors, and his Italian secretary, Lega Zambelli, whom he employed for the last five years of his life, all transmitted to their descendants quantities of documents relating to his financial affairs - bills, receipts, memoranda. Gathered together, these form a hitherto unpublished archive which shed so intimate a light on the poet's habits from adolescence until death, that it is probably without parallel in the annals of famous men. Only now, for instance, is it clear how much Byron contributed in personal effort and as paymaster to the search for Shelley's body; what delays and suppressions of correspondence resulted in his seeming negligence when his little daughter, Allegra, died in an Italian convent, and how far his purse was, for months, almost the sole means of sustaining the Greek War of Independence. To sift this mass of papers, English, Italian and Greek, and make a vivid story of their contents could only have been acheived by one already thoroughly acquainted with Byron's personal history and shifting social background. There can be little doubt that Mrs Langley Moore, who has studied Byron since her youth, has accomplished this task with relish. Money is the leading, but by no means only theme of this books which published for the first time a very large number of letters, facts and explanations of events which had hitherto been obscure or only partially interpreted. A major work of historical detection.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication date: 1974
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719530954
• ISBN 13: 9780719530951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 536