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For a summary of the circumstances surrounding the composition and publication of this volume, see Ernest J. Lovell's Captain Medwin: Friend of Byron and Shelley (Austin: U of Texas P, 1962), especially chapters 5 and 6. Also informative is Lovell's edition of Medwin's text, Conversations of Lord Byron (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966), which is based on the third English edition and incorporates Medwin's annotations for a further edition that was never published. However, Lovell's accounts obscure the fact that the first edition was entitled Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron; later English editions dropped ”Journal of the” from their titles. Almost all editions published outside of England take their texts from the first edition, and thus also go under the “Journal” title. Except in the bibliography of Captain Medwin (333), Lovell refers to Medwin's volume uniformly as Conversations of Lord Byron.
Lovell calls the publication of the Conversations “one of the greatest storms in English literary history,” and estimates that fifteen editions appeared before it was all over, in a variety of languages (Captain Medwin, 163, 171- 172).
Except in wholly biographical contexts (like Medwin's), the poem “Remember Thee” has been little noticed. For a rare critical reading, see pp. 42ff. of James Soderholm, “Lady Caroline Lamb: Byron's Miniature Writ Large,” Keats-Shelley Journal 40 (1991), 24-46.
This account was excised from the third edition, and Medwin never planned to restore it. See Lovell, ed., Conversations, 219.
See Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1957), 1:396-398; and Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 11 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1973-82), 3:72; hereafter BLJ. See also The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland Prothero, 6 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1898-1904), 2:242-243n3; hereafter LJ. Other accounts appear in Lovell's His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 69-70. 617n57.
Lovell notes the existence of these extracts in his Captain Medwin (170), but he apparently did not consult them.
For more on this transaction and the Miscellany, see T. C. Grattan's Beaten Paths; and Those Who Trod Them, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865), 2:62ff. As Grattan writes, “I put Colburn in communication with Mr. Forbes, the editor of `The Attic Miscellany' and entrusted [him] with the care of its publication, leaving to that gentleman, on his being furnished with the proof-sheets, the choice of the passages from Medwin, and undertaking myself to write the article which was to introduce them” (2:63).
Interestingly enough, the one passage the Miscellany omits here involves a relative of Thomas Colley Grattan's: Byron reported to Medwin that Caroline promised “young Grattan her favours” if he would call Byron out (Lovell, ed., Conversations, 218). The reticence of the Miscellany editors here is surely based in part on the familial interests of their patron.
In the following Saturday's issue (Oct. 23), The Literary Gazette returned to the Caroline Lamb story as presented in Medwin, writing of Byron's “attack upon a woman, and one who had `loved not wisely but too well,' to which we also alluded in our last, and which being now openly circulated, it is needless in us any longer to disguise” (673). This issue reprints the Caroline anecdotes, but omits the two revealing sentences unique to the Attic Miscellany. However, the word “comi-tragic” does appear, indicating the Gazette relied in part on the Miscellany text.
New York: Wilder & Campbell (1824), 153; Baltimore: Etting Mickle (1825), 163; Paris: Baudry, 1st edition (1824), 2:69; Gesprache mit Lord Byron, Stuttgart (1824), 251; Conservations de Lord Byron ..., (Paris: Chez Pillet Ainé, 1825), 2:86; and Les Conversations de Lord Byron, Recueillies par M. Medwin... Par. M.A.P. [i.e., Amédée Pichot] Paris: Ladvocat (1824), 2:67 (this last edition comprises volumes 18 and 19 of Byron's Oeuvres nouvelles, edited by Pichot). Of all the foreign editions I have seen, only Galignani in Paris (1824) reprints Medwin's asterisks instead of “false” and “fiend.” None reprints the other prose phrases unique to the Attic Miscellany. Furthermore, Medwin's “Remember Thee” is printed with the words “false” and “fiend” in their places in several early collections of Byron's poetry: Miscellanies by Lord Byron, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1837), 3:93; and The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, “A New Edition,” 6 vols. (London: John Murray, 1855), 2:339. Both of these volumes offer a quotation from Medwin by way of explanation.
Caroline was greatly upset by Medwin's book and sent this letter to Colburn as a rejoinder. Habhouse wrote on Nov. 1, 1824, that Caroline was “in the utmost rage at Medwin's conversations representing her as not having been the object of Byron's attachment.” For this passage, and more on Caroline's letter, see Doris Langley Moore, The Late Lord Byron: Posthumous Dramas (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961), 105-106.
Lady (Sydney) Morgan, Lady Morgan's Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries, and Correspondence, 2 vols. (1862; New York: AMS, 1975), 2:207.
“`My Brain is Feminine': Byron and the Poetry of Deception,” Byron: Augustan and Romantic, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London: Macmillan, 1990), 35, 37.
He would reuse this phrase in “When We Two Parted” (a poem addressed to Lady Francis Webster) in 1815 (CPW, 2:320). McGann has discussed these poems in several places, notably “Byron and `The Truth in Masquerade,'” Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 191-209; and “The Significance of Biographical Context: Two Poems by Lord Byron,” The Writer and His Work, ed. Louis A. Martz (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978), 347-364.
Lovell notes that he cannot find these lines in Dryden (Conversations, 237). This is because they originated with William Mason, in his An Heroic Postscript to the Public (London, 1774). Medwin misquotes the lines, however, as well as misattributing them—another example of memory gone wrong in the Journals. The actual lines are, “Stretch you on satire's rack, and bid you lie / Fit garbage for the hell-hound, Infamy” (lines 109-110). Byron may have seen a version of the couplet printed in The Satirist, October 1, 1809, in an article on a radical newspaper called The British Press: “But when I find it preaching sedition... it then becomes the duty of every honest man to... expose it to the world.... `Here on the rack of satire let it lie, / Fit garbage for the hell-hound Infamy.'” (5:335). He also almost certainly encountered an allusion to the lines in a review of his own poetry in The Scourge for March 1, 1811: “he has... indulged in accusations which the magnanamity of the injured individual alone withholds him from... punishing with a severity of torture that would leave him exhausted and unpitied on the rack of infamy” (1:193).
1.262, 286-291, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 143-144.
According to McGann, “Marchand dates the lines June 1814, but this is probably not correct, as the dating on the alternate version of the poem shows.... The poem has to do with an incident involving Lady Caroline Lamb in late Jan. or Feb. 1813” (CPW, 3:424).
See also Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 211.
In this judgement, I follow Marchand (Byron: A Biography, 1:459) rather than McGann (see note 23).
In early January of 1813, Caroline managed to con Murray out of a picture of Byron; but Byron's response is mostly that of good-humored exasperation (BLJ, 3:12). This was still relatively early in their extended breaking-up. At the end of January, he wrote to Lady Melbourne, saying “I see nothing but the prospect of an endless correspondence in answering Ly. C.'s letters” (Jan. 22, 1813), indicating a sense of physical distance from her, unlike the furious paranoia of the June 1814 letter. On February 28, 1813, he was still speaking of the “charms of the fair Phryne”—rather than the “false... fiend” of 1814. See BLJ, 3:16, 23.
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