A New Canto
A New Canto. London: William Wright, 1819.
A New Canto was published anonymously in October 1819 and received few reviews. In 1821 the Monthly Review offered this comment: ‘The writer of this lively nonsense has evidently intended it as an imitation of Lord Byron. It is a rhapsody from beginning to end, describing the sudden arrival of dooms-day; and to those who are fond of extravagance, and doggerel versification, it may seem to possess merit’.[1] Some—for example, scholar Paula Feldman—doubt that this is the work of Lady Caroline Lamb, mainly because it is more dense with allusions than her other poems. However, there is no other viable claimant to the authorship of A New Canto; and who but the author would have requested Murray to send her brother Frederick a copy of A New Canto along with another book of her own titled Penruddock?[2]
The Stainforth Library of Female Writers Catalog lists a copy with her authorship, and this copy could not have been acquired any later than 1866 [see listing]. The 1892 Dictionary of National Biography lists A New Canto as a work of Lamb’s in an article signed by George Fisher Russell Barker, a contributor to Notes & Queries and a biographer. Since then, other authoritative bibliographies have listed Lamb as the author of A New Canto.[3] The poem is a brilliant send-up of Don Juan, published at a time when a number of other parodists were taking advantage of Byron’s popularity to gain a readership. The fun had actually begun with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which had been satirized in poetry (for example, Lines to Harold (anon., 1812), and Childe Harold’s Monitor (by Francis Hodgson, 1818). Less than a week had passed after the first two cantos of Don Juan were published anonymously on July 15, 1819, when satirist and bookseller William Hone published Don Juan: Canto the Third, which consists in 114 stultifying stanzas. The anonymously published Jack the Giant Queller, or Prince Juan, offered thirty-eight stanzas of similar calibre[4] Another anonymous response to Don Juan was published at this time: Don Juan: with A Biographical Account of Lord Byron and his Family; Anecdotes of His Lordship’s Travels and Residence in Greece, at Geneva, &c., including, also, a Sketch of the Vampire Family, done in ottava rima. This work, which purports to be a biography of the poet, was printed for William Wright by W. Shackell, both of Fleet Street. The names of Wright and Shackell also appear on the publication of Lamb’s A New Canto. The editors are persuaded that Lamb is in all likelihood the author of A New Canto, and that there is no other credible claimant of authorship.
A New Canto is far better than the other contemporary satires of Don Juan. It evokes a British apocalypse – a British nightmare of political upheaval in which St, Paul’s cathedral catches fire and the ball on its dome goes ‘tumbling with a lively crash’, ‘[t]eeth chatter, china dances’ with the shock, and the Bank of England collapses, and a raving Prince Regent ‘sends about for ministers in vain’. London has become a volcano, and crowds run frantically about, seeking salvation in the church where ‘the font is hot, and fizzing’. As the earth tremors increase, the waves shake even the Peak District, far north of London, a private allusion intended to amuse Lamb’s cousins, for that is where the Devonshire country estate, Chatsworth, stands. The inventiveness and power of A New Canto derives partly from Lamb’s mastery of Byron’s tricks in Don Juan, but she may also have been mocking earlier poems of Byron’s with this volcanic scene. In his ‘Translation from Horace’, published in Hours of Idleness, Byron had described the ‘flames of an expiring world’, its ‘vast promiscuous ruin’ and wreckage a ‘glorious funeral pile’.[5]
A New Canto also mocks Byron through cutting allusions to his worship of Napoleon, who is said never to have flinched at ‘massacre or murder’. Ruthless Napoleon is contrasted with Don Juan, who ‘pitifully wince[s]’ at the conflagration. Thus Byron’s hero proves no ‘true one’ (a direct echo of the opening stanzas of Don Juan) but a ‘bloodhound spaniel-crossed’. The epithet ‘spaniel-crossed’ carried for Byron and Caroline (both dog-lovers, and both readers of Faust) connotations of impure breeding and bargains with the Devil, who first appears to Faust in the form of a dog. Lamb had been involved in breeding dogs, and was the owner of a Blenheim spaniel, a special breed that continues to this day.[6] Lamb also satirizes Byron’s pose of pretending to lose track of the story, as the narrator’s mind wanders off and devils consort with prostitutes in the London red-light district. A weakly constructed catalog of the damned draws the narrator back to the on-going destruction of Europe that provides the power of A New Canto: ‘Return we to our heaven, our fire and smoke’. But the next line is deflating: ‘Though now you may begin to take the joke!’ The joke here is that Byron’s apparent purpose is merely to perpetuate his fame, ‘And keep [his] name in capitals, like Kean’, an allusion to the career of Edmund Kean and Byron’s long-time connection to Drury Lane Theater.
As I have commented elsewhere (see the Byron page on this site) the typical recriminations and rationalizations of the jilted found in Julia’s letter to Juan at the end of Canto 1 of Don Juan might have come from many places, but the evidence argues that Glenarvon gave them their particular form in Byron’s poem. Lady Caroline certainly read Julia’s letter in Don Juan as an allusion to herself. This, taken with the insult of Canto 2’s dismissive “Some play the devil—and then write a novel” (Don Juan 2.201), caused her to write her own “New Canto” of Don Juan, published in 1819. At this time, many Byron parodies based on Childe Harold were appearing. Byron’s Cambridge friend, Reverend Frances Hodgson, had published Childe Harold’s Monitor. Satirist William Hone wrote Don Juan: Canto the Third, comprised of 114 stanzas of doggerel. The anonymous Jack the Giant Queller, or Prince Juan, consisted of thirty-eight stanzas of similar quality. Lady Caroline’s poem excels all of these. Indeed, A New Canto was an act of artistic fulfillment for which the author had served a long apprenticeship, but by this time, Byron had been well-tutored. If he ever knew of its existence, A New Canto provoked no response from him. The poem received one brief notice, then disappeared, to be forgotten for decades.
Peter Cochran has annotated a very useful complete text of A New Canto.
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Notes
[1] Monthly Review New Series. v. 94 (1821), 329. The above quotation is the complete text of the review.
[2] Lady Caroline Lamb wrote to John Murray requesting he send ‘the New Canto of Don Juan’ and two other books, including one of her own. Her request is contained in a letter in the John Murray Archive of the National Library of Scotland, undated, but probably 1823.
[3] For example, Samuel Halkett and John Laing’s Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature lists Lady Caroline as the author of A New Canto. New and Enlarged Edition, by Dr. James Kennedy, W.A. Smith, and A.F. Johnson. 7 vols. (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1926-1934). See Vol. 4 (1928), p. 168. Lamb is also listed as the author of A New Canto in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, ed. George Watson (1969).
[4] See William Hone, Don Juan, Canto the Third (London: William Hone, 1819). Anon., Jack the Giant Queller, or Prince Juan (London: W. Horncastle, 1819).
[5] George Gordon, Lord Byron, Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Jerome McGann. 7 vols. Vol. 6 co-edited by Barry Weller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-1993), Vol. 1, p. 156.
[6] The Blenheim spaniel, so called from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, was bred there after the palace was built in 1704. Lamb offered to give her Blenheim spaniel to Lady Holland as an atonement for offenses committed to their friendship when she had an affair with Lady Holland’s son, Sir Godfrey Vassal Webster, in 1810-1811. See letters of Lamb to Lady Holland, dated 12 and 25 October, 1811, contained in the British Library Add. MS 51560, ff. 196, 198.