Glenarvon's Reception, by Paul Douglass
Though the novel was published anonymously, the public soon knew the author’s identity. Glenarvon was viewed immediately as a ‘kiss and tell’ confessional, or as Byron damningly put it, a ‘ – and publish’ betrayal.[i] The reaction was apparently not at all what Lamb expected. Family and friends felt she had acted treacherously, and the day after the novel was published, messages of outrage began to arrive. Henry Webster called to berate her for what he believed were unflattering portraits of his brother and mother.[ii] Byron’s close associate Hobhouse wrote to say he might retaliate for the supposed assault on Lord Byron’s character by publishing some of Lamb’s letters. This message caused Lamb nothing but ‘great astonishment’, according to her mother-in-law.[iii] It is unclear whether Hobhouse had at that point actually read Glenarvon or was reacting to the gossip then circulating. Lamb’s surprise at the hubbub seems genuine. She had not intended, either, to reignite a family civil war over her behavior. Her brother-in-law Frederick and sister-in-law Lady Cowper redoubled efforts to effect William Lamb’s separation from his wife. Lamb wrote with savage irony to friends whom she suspected of encouraging the separation that ‘it is my wish that the utmost severity may be shown me by every body’.[iv]
Glenarvon has been read as a compulsive act of confession. John Clubbe suggests that the novel ‘forced itself out of her: she had to write it as much as Byron had to write his confessional poems’.[v] This is an impulse that Peter Graham likens to a volcanic explosion, over which Lamb had no control: by ‘foolishly publishing a transcript of her own folly[;] Lady Caroline makes a good confession but a bad novel’.[vi] Lamb defended herself in a preface to the second edition (see Appendix A of the present volume), charging that her relations and friends – especially her sister-in-law, Lady Cowper, mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne, and friend, Lady Holland – had ‘supported Byron for four years even though it annoyed William [Lamb]’, and that they had unfairly dredged up all Lamb’s misdemeanors and crimes at once, ‘stretching back to the days of infancy’, and sought ‘without mercy’ to have her certified insane.[vii] An echo of Lamb’s rebellion against this double standard may be perceived, as Frances Wilson points out, in the story of Lamb’s descendant from the Spencer line, Diana, Princess of Wales.[viii] Like the author herself, Glenarvon was not ‘tactful’.
Logically following from her tactlessness came charges that Lamb had committed a flagrant act of self-aggrandizement and made a shameless play for sympathy. She became untouchable, and her reputation for insanity is largely based upon her apparent act of social suicide. But if we recall Lamb’s stated motives for writing and publishing the novel, then her work seems not much of a confession. Some characters and scenes were certainly recognizable as people and places she knew, but that is often true of novels. Unfortunately, her circle of acquaintance was comprised of very public figures. Moreover, contrary to Hobhouse’s initial reaction, Byron was not the primary target for embarrassment. As she said herself, ‘Had I chosen to be ill-natured [about Byron], God knows without deviating from the truth I had plenty of means’.[ix] Admittedly, Lamb had mixed motives. She wrote to strike back at Byron and those who had snubbed her. She would accomplish this by exposing his shortcomings as a ‘hero’: Glenarvon – ‘the idol they once adored […] a coward and a hypocrite […] smooth dissembler [who] smiles while he stabs’.[x] But her deeper intention was to reveal the warped values of a society that knowingly continued to abide behaviour that was more criminal then her own. Of Calantha, the novel’s heroine, Lady Caroline wrote, ‘She heard folly censured till she took it to be criminal; but crime she saw tolerated if well concealed’.[xi] From this perspective, the novel dramatizes Calantha’s refusal to learn ‘the language of hypocrisy and deceit’.[xii] A highly unflattering mirror was held up to English aristocracy.
In addition to the impropriety of exposing her affair with Byron and putting the aristocracy in a bad light, Lamb set her novel in Ireland during the uprising for Catholic emancipation of 1798, which was brutally repressed. The novel’s scandal thus lay in at least two quarters: first, it made a public liaison even more public, dragging into the open a cast of characters from the highest aristocratic circles of England; second, it endorsed the political aspirations and military struggles of Irish Catholics, painting Glenarvon, its eponymous Byronic hero, as a traitor of their cause. For this and for his offenses against women he is condemned to hell. If Lamb thought that Glenarvon’s death, and the deathbed repentance of Calantha would put an acceptable moral context around the transgressions the novel describes, she was wrong.
Lamb’s husband was reputed to be ignorant of his wife’s authorial ambitions, but William Lamb knew Glenarvon existed long before it was published, and he apparently encouraged his wife’s writing career. He claimed ignorance only to calm family indignation. Shortly after the novel was published, he wrote Henry Colburn to say his wife had proceeded ‘without any consultation with her friends’ and that ‘there shall be published no second edition’. Colburn’s ‘knowledge of the world’ would undoubtedly help him to understand William’s decision.[xiii] William never said that he was himself ignorant of his wife’s plans – only that her friends were. Gradually, his position altered, and scarcely ten days later he had admitted he knew about the novel but claimed that he had never seen the unpleasant parts.[xiv]
The reaction of family and acquaintances to Glenarvon was generally outrage at the apparent violation of their privacy, but this was not universal. Lady Byron’s first response to Glenarvon was largely positive. She sat down a week after the novel had appeared and wrote out comments on the character of Calantha, whose creed she described as, ‘I am thought of – therefore I am’. More tellingly, she conceded that the reader might involuntarily give in to Calantha’s self-justifications, and that this could lead to adopting her view that Glenarvon embodied the ideals of love and poetry. Without the cosmetic treatment provided by Calantha’s homage, Glenarvon seemed pitiless, a man whose ‘rage was impotent in proportion to its impiety’.[xv] Lady Byron recommended the novel to others, including Lady Melbourne and Mrs. George Lamb, who was flabbergasted: ‘Your opinion of Glenarvon is very indulgent’, she remarked with that exaggerated tact of her class. ‘I agree with you in the tendency of the moral and the cleverness of many parts. . . but I cannot forgive [Lamb], for the ridicule that she throws at William, by the publishing all their private secrets’.[xvi] The opinion that Lamb had done something ‘unforgivable’ was echoed in the reviews.
The British Critic described Glenarvon as composed of ‘scenes of seduction and adultery’ that would initiate innocent minds into ‘the mysteries of profligacy’. The reviewer found Glenarvon himself an appalling figure, especially since he was presented as ‘the idol of the female heart’, and treated the book as representing the ‘morals of Paris and Vienna’ – shorthand for ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ – written by an author who seemed bent on ‘publishing to the world her own shame’, and who seemed ‘to glory in her guilt’. The reviewer dismissed the novel ‘with a mixed feeling of abhorrence and pity’.[xvii] The Theatrical Inquisitor acknowledged Lady Caroline’s ‘animated style, brilliance of imagery, and [her] skillful delineation of gloomy and mysterious character’, but decided that Glenarvon posed a ‘tiresome and revolting task’ for the reader. The author was charged with seeking to revenge herself upon ‘the society from which she has been excluded’, especially in assassinating Lady Holland’s character in the personification of the Princess of Madagascar. Like the British Critic, the Theatrical Inquisitor argued that Glenarvon was a pornographic work dangerous to ‘the young and the virtuous’, and even compared it to John Cleland’s Fanny Hill.[xviii]
Comparing Glenarvon to Fanny Hill was true hyperbole, and the suspicion of a campaign to brand the novel as grossly indecent is substantiated by similar exaggeration of its sexual explicitness in the British Lady’s Magazine. The reviewer admitted ordering the book because he had ‘been taught to expect allusion to existing character; and in truth, sent for these volumes with the idea of being entertained with all manner of fashionable scandal’. The reviewer went on to claim that he had never encountered ‘a more senseless farrago of extravagance . . . than this wretched production’, which was ‘disgusting, immoral, and tawdry’ and on top of that, ‘farcical’. Hoping to damn the author with her own words, the reviewer printed a lengthy extract from Glenarvon’s death scene on shipboard, ending lamely with the statement that the novel was ‘the silliest production in the world’. Acknowledging that the song lyrics in Glenarvon possessed ‘both nature and feeling’, the review described them as a failed attempt to dress up a tawdry item: like ‘embroidery upon a blanket’.[xix]
The Monthly Review’s short notice avoided discussion of Glenarvon’s assault upon public decency, if it detected any, and focused on the novel’s ‘strangeness’. Was it a romance or a biography?: ‘[I]t is of the doubtful gender, though a feminine production’, but overall, simply ‘wearisome’.[xx] The Augustan Review first nodded to the widely-reported scandal of the author’s having ‘intended to delineate her acquaintance under the names of the interesting persons who figure in the work’, but acknowledged not being ‘sure whether this is the case’. The reviewer then followed the Monthly Review in criticizing the novel’s artistry: ‘There is a constant straining at effect, which often fails in a most lamentable manner’, though the novel showed ‘indications of genius’ and ‘gleams of tenderness and fancy’ in its handling of the guilty passion of Calantha and Glenarvon.[xxi] Though the notice in the Augustan Review was not enthusiastic, Lamb liked it, ‘because it takes the thing fairly, and not as real characters’ – in other words, not as if she had simply transcribed her impressions of people she knew.[xxii]
A lone exception to the mostly negative reviews appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, which printed a short notice calling Glenarvon a history ‘ably and vigorously drawn’ of Byron’s crimes, and therefore ‘a fearful beacon to warn the young and inexperienced against the danger of talents unsanctified by a sense of duty’, as well as ‘an effectual antidote to the arts of deception and the blandishments of vice!’[xxiii] Perhaps the reviewer was an acquaintance of the author, for he seemed to know her stated intentions.
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Notes
[i] Lord Byron, Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand. 12 vols. (Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973-1995), vol. 5. p. 85.
[ii] Hobhouse, Recollections of a Long Life, vol. 1, p. 338.
[iii] George Paston [E. M. Symonds] and Peter Quennell, ‘To Lord Byron’: Feminine Profiles Based Upon Unpublished Letters 1807-1824 (London: John Murray, 1939), p. 73.
[iv] Lady Caroline Lamb to Lord Holland, n.d. (May 1816). British Library Add. MS 51558 f. 21.
[v] John Clubbe, ‘Glenarvon –Revised and Revisited’, p. 205.
[vi] Peter Graham, Don Juan and Regency England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), pp. 99-100.
[vii] Lady Caroline Lamb, The Whole Disgraceful Truth: Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 159.
[viii] Frances Wilson, ‘“An Exaggerated Woman”: The Melodramas of Lady Caroline Lamb’ in Frances Wilson (ed.), Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century (London: Macmillan), p. 217.
[ix] Ibid, p.193.
[x] Lamb, Glenarvon, 3:5-286.
[xi] Glenarvon 1:153.
[xii] Ibid., 1:200.
[xiii] William Lamb to Henry Colburn, 17 May 1816. Forster Collection.
[xiv] William Lamb to Lady Caroline Lamb, June 1816. John Murray Archive of the National Library of Scotland.
[xv] Lady Byron, Comments on Calantha in Glenarvon, 17 May 1816. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Dep. Lovelace Byron 118, ff. 7-8.
[xvi] Mrs. George Lamb to Lady Byron, 17 May 1816. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Dep. Lovelace Byron 78, f. 24.
[xvii] The British Critic 5 (June 1816), pp. 627-31.
[xviii] Theatrical Inquisitor 9 (August 1816), pp. 122-25.
[xix] British Lady’s Magazine 4 (August 1816), pp. 101-3.
[xx] Monthly Review 80 (June 1816), pp. 217-18.
[xxi] Augustan Review 3 (October 1816), pp. 350-54.
[xxii] Lady Caroline Lamb to John Murray, n.d. (endorsed but not dated September 1816). John Murray Archive of the National Library of Scotland.
[xxiii] New Monthly Magazine 5 (June 1816), pp. 443-44.