Glenarvon's Achievement

Glenarvon’s Achievement, by Paul Douglass

In her condemnation of the English aristocracy and her dissection of the disastrous relationship of Calantha and Glenarvon, Lamb explores the themes of Ford richly, sharpening them with political observations of the Irish rebellion. Perhaps contemporary reviewers treated Glenarvon with excessive harshness because they felt irritated with the author’s eccentric personality and tactless exposure of private lives of the wealthy and famous. And certainly the novel has passages that are tiresome in their repetition: angst-filled trysts and overwrought exclamations of love, pain, and self-recrimination. A disproportionate irritation with these failings has persisted, with twentieth-century condemnations of the novel as ‘a deplorable production’[i] that is ‘outrageous’ and ‘badly written’.[ii] But if Lamb writes badly, and if her story is the ‘silliest production in the world,’ how did she manage to satirize so many people so hilariously? With its flaws, Glenarvon is still the work of a literate and politically sensitive mind. The novel exhibits the fruits of its author’s experience of Shakespeare, Byron, Cazotte, Moore, Marlowe, Voltaire, Dante, Tacitus, and de Laclos.

Lamb also paid homage to literary foremothers, like novelists Germaine de Staël and Ann Radcliffe, and also to Lady Morgan, who had published St. Clair, or the Heiress of Desmond (1803) and The Wild Irish Girl (1806), her most famous novel, which focused on music and national identity. Many echoes of Morgan’s work are found in Glenarvon. Glorvina O’Melville, the heroine of The Wild Irish Girl, first appears in the castle chapel playing the harp for her father and the chaplain, while the male protagonist spies upon her. Lamb introduces Elinor St. Clair in Glenarvon in the same manner. Like Lady Morgan’s heroines, the women of Glenarvon are mysterious, intelligent, and passionate about politics. Caroline also emulated Lady Morgan by incorporating Irish myth and legend into the setting of her novel. Maria Edgeworth, too, influenced Glenarvon. For example, the first song that appears in the novel is the ‘Pillalu,’ a ‘song of sorrow’ chanted by the ‘tenants and peasantry’ over the body of what they believe is the son of the local laird, the Duke of Delaval: ‘Oh loudly sing the Pillalu, / And many a tear of sorrow shed. . .’^[iii] Lamb could have observed an Irish funeral procession herself, but Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) is a more likely source, with its Irish lamentation over the dead – sometimes called ‘Whillaluh’ or ‘Ullaloo’.^[iv]

Consistent with Lady Morgan’s focus on a nexus of song and national identity, Lamb included fourteen songs in Glenarvon, and in two cases printed music to allow performance. These songs, which she published in a separate volume titled Verses from Glenarvon (1819), allude to other songs. For example, when Glenarvon sings ‘Farewell’ in volume two he does so in strains reminiscent of Byron’s well-known lyric, ‘Maid of Athens’: ‘Maid of Athens, ere we part, / Give oh give me back my heart’ is reflected in Lady Caroline’s ‘Come give thy hand, what though we part, / Thy name is fixed, within my heart’, The final stanza of Byron’s poem strikes a related chord: ‘Maid of Athens, I am gone; / Think of me, sweet! when alone’. Caroline echoes: ‘Thou’lt think of me when I am gone, / None shall undo, what I have done’.[v] Lamb obtained the help of Byron’s partner in the Hebrew Melodies (1815-1816), Isaac Nathan, who had also set ‘Maid of Athens’ to music during this period, to write the music for ‘Farewell’ printed in Glenarvon.

‘Farewell’ is symbolic of the political and personal betrayal that lies at Glenarvon’s core. Lord Glenarvon, like Lord Byron, perfected a method of riveting attention upon himself that often involved elaborate, dramatic departures – departures which promised but rarely delivered triumphant returns. Lord Glenarvon abandons his countrymen when they need him most, during Ireland’s abortive 1798 rebellion. Hoping for the aid of the French, the Society of United Irishmen have set aside their religious differences to, as Robert Kee puts it, ‘eradicate the baneful English influence and destroy the aristocratic tyrants of the land’.[vi] Malcolm Kelsall has pointed out that there Glenarvon gives little account of the oppression that provoked the rebellion, and that its landscape is a naïve representation formed by a ‘picturesque imagination’.[vii] Admittedly, Lamb had limited experience of Ireland, but the conspiracy to rebellion in Glenarvon alludes to historical fact well-known at the time, and its roots are certainly discussed in the novel.

While writing from the position of an English aristocrat, Lamb nonetheless faithfully records the disintegration of Anglo-Irish relations, about which she knew a great deal as the niece of the Lord High Treasurer of Ireland, the Duke of Devonshire, who was also the Governor of County Cork and owned Lismore Castle in County Waterford. Additionally, Lamb’s father’s owned Irish estates at Kildaton in County Kilkenny, given to his forebears by Cromwell; and Lamb’s husband was heir to the Irish Viscountcy of Melbourne, seated at Kilmore in County Cavan.[viii] Lamb portrays this complicated and fraught relationship of English aristocrats to their Irish lands and subjects in Glenarvon, depicting the Duke of Altamonte as a nobleman who has retired as a failure in social and political life, retreating ‘sullen and reserved’ to Ireland, where he proves ineffective as the Irish rebellion gathers strength. His own tenants are ‘mutinous and discontented’ because he ‘refused to attend to the grievances and burthens of which the nation generally complained’.[ix] Lamb sums up the state of Irish dissatisfaction with the occupation by the Anglo-Irish: ‘Numerous absentees had drawn great part of the money out of the country; oppressive taxes were continued; land was let and sub-let to bankers and stewards of estates, to the utter ruin of the tenants; and all this caused the greatest discontent’.[x] She portrays the duplicity of the noble class in Glenarvon himself, the apotheosis of a Whig aristocracy whose stand against tyranny was just so much self-serving theater, though admittedly she also implicitly endorses Avondale’s and Glenarvon’s contempt for the lawless rabble’s vain desire to govern themselves.[xi] In her revisions for the second edition, Lamb also attempted blunt somewhat her condemnation of Glenarvon’s political hypocrisy.[xii]

Nonetheless, Lamb depicts Glenarvon as a seducer and betrayer of women and of political rebels: ‘Glenarvon it seems has left his followers, as he has his mistress,’ remarks Cormac O’Leary, one of the United Irishmen, in volume three.[xiii] Lamb’s portrait of Glenarvon thus forms a political as well as personal observation – an anticipation of the twentieth-century feminist principle that the personal is political. Taking her cue from Mary Wollstonecraft, she decried those women who (like Lady Dartford and Sophia) succumbed to the magnetic pull of gowns, jewelry, balls, discreet affairs, and paintings made on velvet – those ‘spiritless immaculate prejudiced sticklers for propriety’.[xiv] In striving to claim a bigger world for herself, of politics, poetry, and passion, she became one of those writers who enlarged the possibilities for women.

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Notes

[i] David Cecil, Melbourne (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), p. 70.

[ii] Henry Blyth, Caro: The Fatal Passion: The Life of Lady Caroline Lamb (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972), p. 196.

[iii] Glenarvon, vol. 1, pp. 51-52.

[iv] Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (Boston: T. B. Wait, 1814), pp. 11, 99-103.

[v] See Collected Poetical Works of Byron.

[vi] Robert Kee, The Green Flag, Volume 1: The Most Distressful Country (London: Penguin, 1989), 50.

[vii] Malcolm Kelsall, ‘The Byronic Hero and Revolution in Ireland: the Politics of Glenarvon’, The Byron Journal, 9 (1981), p. 6.

[viii] T. Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants 1649-1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 21-41.

[ix] Glenarvon, vol. 1, p. 12; vol. 2, p. 77.

[x] Ibid. vol. 2, p. 77.

[xi] See Barbara Judson, ‘Roman à Clef and the Dynamics of Betrayal: The Case of Glenarvon’, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, 33:2 (2000), p. 160. Avondale expresses his contempt for the rabble when he is confronted by them on the mountain overlooking Glenarvon Bay: ‘“Fickle, senseless beings!” he said, with bitter contempt, as he heard their loyal cry. “These are the creatures we would take to govern us: this is the voice of the people; these are the rights of man.”’ Vol. 3, p. 184.

[xii] Lamb added the following passage to the third volume, chapter 32, in which St. Clare partly exonerates Glenarvon: ‘Let not rage against Glenarvon actuate your resolves: whatever he may have done, “we shall not live to see his like again.” Shew not such pleasure in trampling upon the high: my vengeance is just resentment – but how has he offended you?’ Vol. 3, p. 286.

[xiii] Glenarvon vol. 3, p. 191.

[xiv] Ibid. vol. 1, p. 163.