Byron's Voice

Christine Kenyon Jones. The Byron Journal. Liverpool: Dec 2009. Vol. 37, Iss. 2; pg.
121, 12 pgs

Full Text
(5485 words)

Copyright Liverpool University Press Dec 2009

In 1831, some seven years after Byron's death, John Cam Hobhouse was reading the
second volume of Thomas Moore's Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of
his Life.1 Hobhouse was hostile to Moore and highly critical of the biographical project
in general. Nevertheless, reading a passage from Byron's Ravenna journal in Moore's
Life affected him deeply, and he found himself remembering Byron's laugh. 'Of all the
peculiarities of Byron his laugh is that of which I have the most distinct recollection', he
recorded in the margin of his copy of the biography.2
Hobhouse was fortunate to be able to recollect Byron's laugh, and fortunate to have
heard it in the first place. Nearly two centuries later, we have no such luck. Had Byron
lived a normal lifespan, his appearance would undoubtedly have been recorded through
photography, and had he lived to be 90 he might, like Robert Browning, have had his
voice recorded on an early phonograph by Thomas Edison.3 Byron died before the
technology existed that could mechanically record either his face or his voice, but while
to some extent the existence of many ad vivum drawn, painted and sculpted portraits
makes up for the lack of photographs in enabling us to tell what he looked like, the effect
of the written accounts of Byron's speech is to tantalise us by describing an undoubtedly
unique and distinctive voice without fully allowing us to reconstruct the sound of it.
Certainly his voice, almost as much as his face, was an object of fascination to those
who met Byron. They found it striking, enchanting, harmonious and affecting, and noted
its sweetness, sonority and clarity. Many people considered it beautiful, while others
described it in different contexts as deliberate, effeminate, drawling and both distinct and
indistinct.4 Mary Shelley, characterising Byron somewhat critically as 'Lord Raymond'
in her novel The Last Man (1826), wrote: 'His voice, usually gentle, often startled you by
a sharp discordant note, which shewed that his usual low tone was rather the work of
study than nature.'5 Several observers remarked on the hint of a Scots accent and, as late
as 1824, a Scot meeting Byron for the first time in Messolonghi recorded that he 'had a
slight burr in uttering words in which the letter r occurred, such as Corinth', describing
this trait as 'far from disagreeable'.6 This is one of the last records of Byron's voice. The
first is also one of Byron speaking with a Scottish accent, as a young child. According to
an incident recorded in Moore's Life, someone commented on the little boy's lame foot,
and, on 'hearing this allusion to his infirmity, the child's eyes flashed with anger, and

striking at her with a little whip which he held in his hand, he exclaimed impatiently,
"Dinna speak of it!"'.7
While these observations are interesting in a biographical context, it may be thought that
they do not impinge on our reading of Byron's work. If, like Hobhouse, we are inclined
to be suspicious and disdainful about biography, or to subscribe to Roland Barthes' view
that reading literary texts necessitates the 'death of the author',8 then perhaps such
preoccupations are merely misleading byways of Byron study, and distract us from more
important aspects of his writing. It is certainly the case that when critics speak of an
author's 'voice' they generally use the term in a strictly metaphorical sense, to mean only
aspects of an individual's expression and not the physical sound of the speech of that
individual. Yet the deployment of rhyme (and, to some extent, rhythm) in a poet's work
provides a way of encoding at least traces of the sound of an author's voice and of
transmitting something of its tone and its accent, as it deliberately draws attention to the
oral and aural origins of verse - its articulatory acoustics, as we might call them.
For this very reason, the choice not to take advantage of the option to rhyme is itself
interesting. Blank verse, said to have been introduced by the Earl of Surrey in his
translation of the Aeneid around 1540, was rapidly taken up in Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatic verse: supposedly because of its closeness to the rhythms of everyday speech,
but also perhaps because drama is written to be spoken by a voice or voices not the
author's own. Milton, 'justify[ing] the ways of God to Man' in Paradise Lost (I, 26), uses
blank verse to assume a quasi-biblical tone and to borrow the authority of the classical
epics and of Scripture, rather than foregrounding the sound of his own personal voice.9
Wordsworth's blank verse, too, acquires authority through its lack of rhyme and
suppresses the poet's Cumbrian accent. When this accent does emerge, in poems that are
rhymed - for example, in 'Lines Written in Early Spring' - its effect can be unsettling:
I heard a thousand blended notes
While in a grove I sat reclined
In that sweet mode when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.10
The possibilities here seem to be thotes to rhyme with 'notes' or norts to rhyme with
'thoughts', or perhaps something that is not quite either of these.
Rhymes can, in fact, expose all sorts of things about a writer's voice. The Scot John
Gibson Lockhart stigmatised Keats as a 'Cockney rhymer' in part because Keats's use of
rhymes such as 'thorns' and 'fawns' showed the loss of the sounded r in the London
dialect.11 Ironically, this kind of suppressed r has since become very much a feature of
the 'Received Pronunciation' (RP) of Standard English in England, though not in
Scotland or North America. Yet Keats's use of line endings that, to Lockhart, rhymed
neither aurally nor visually stamped the poet as someone 'without [] learning enough to

distinguish between the written language of Englishmen and the spoken jargon of
Cockneys'.12
It would be simplistic to say that Byron used rhyme in his verse only as a way of
rendering the sound of his own voice, or that Byron's rhymes simply replicate his normal
pronunciation of English. His deployment of rhyme and wordplay is far more complex
and nuanced than this. A great many factors need to be considered particularly in relation
to the rhymes in Byron's verse that do not seem perfect to a modern ear. An aural joke
such as the following from Don Juan, "'Tis time to strike such puny doubters dumb as /
The sceptics who would not believe Columbus' (XVI, 4), where the reader has, as it
were, to go back and adjust his or her pronunciation of the first line (from 'dum as' to
'dumbus') once he or she has seen the second line, simply would not work without the
written words to refer to. Byron's claim that 'I rattle on exactly as I'd talk / With any
body in a ride or walk' (Don Juan, XV, 19) is manifestly disingenuous, since he very
evidently and often requires us to read with the eye as well as the ear, privileging one or
the other as it suits him.
For the purposes of this essay, however, I want to set aside as much as possible the
aural/visual word-games Byron plays and to concentrate on the acoustic indications of
the sound of his voice that his verse provides. Through a commentary on this aspect of
the early stanzas of Don Juan, I want to try to make a start in reconstructing Byron's
voice, working with the poetic clues he gives us and with biographical information
provided by observers who left a record of his speech.
I shall also be referring to John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor
of the English Language, first published in 1791.13 This is the sister volume to what
Byron refers to as 'Walker's Lexicon' in Beppo. Here he jokingly claims that it is the
rhymes supplied by this rhyming dictionary (first published in 1775),14 rather than his
own choice of subject matter, that provide the direction of his verse, as he 'take[s] for
rhyme, to hook [his] rambling verse on, / The first that Walker's Lexicon unravels' (52).
Both the Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and the rhyming dictionary were part of a
single project by the orthoepist, elocution teacher and former actor John Walker to (as he
put it) point out 'the analogy of orthography and pronunciation' and use verse to advise
on correct pronunciation, so that 'Words liable to a Double Pronunciation are fixed in
their True Sound by a Rhyme'.15
As Byron's reference implies, Walker's dictionaries were well known, and they went
through numerous editions in Byron's lifetime, indicating the perceived need, which had
been growing since the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 and as a
result of the increased ease of travel within Britain, to establish a single, London-led
standard of pronunciation for the whole of the United Kingdom.16 Byron was of course
someone who himself had made the transition from provincial to cosmopolitan, from
Aberdeen schoolboy to English aristocrat and London dandy, commenting as he did so
on the peculiarities of Aberdonian, American and 'flash' London English, and he was
evidently acutely aware from a personal point of view of the implications of different

accents.17 'Walker's Lexicon' may have been useful to him in ways other than as a
source of rhymes for his verse.
My brief acoustic survey will concentrate on the beginning of Canto I of, and the
Dedication to, Don Juan, starting with the first stanza of the poem proper:
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time.
Byron's way of establishing the anglicised pronunciation of 'Juan' here (by rhyming it
with 'new one' and 'true one') is famous - or even notorious - and has popularly been
interpreted as a satire on the ignorance of his fellow Britons about the 'correct' way to
pronounce the Spanish Don Hwan.18 The Don Juan that Byron invokes is, however, as
he makes clear in the final couplet, very much a naturalised Englishman, and, as Peter
Cochran has pointed out, there were at least six versions of the Don Juan drama running
in London in 1817.19
The widespread (but I think mistaken) idea that this pronunciation of 'Don Juan' is an
instance of Byron's anti-British satire seems reinforced when we read the name with
exaggerated emphasis, as Jew-won, to rhyme with the modern RP pronunciation of 'new
one' and 'true one'. If, however, the word 'one' in lines 2 and 4 above is pronounced as I
believe Byron would have pronounced it in this context, basically as un - so that you get
something closer to new'un and true'un - the rhyme with an anglicised form of 'Juan'
becomes much less forced and much more natural.
The characteristics of this un-for-'one' kind of pronunciation can probably best be
summed up by reference to the kind of huntin', shootin' and fishin' mode of speech that
was common among old-fashioned English aristocrats early in the last century. Indeed
Byron's great-granddaughter, Lady Wentworth, is described as speaking in just this
manner in the 1930s by Patrick Leigh Fermor, who commented that an 'old-fashioned
elimination of final g's and sometimes of initial h's distinguished the chiselled clarity of
her speech and her vowels were so patricianly thin that they almost came full cycle'.20 A
huntin', shootin' and fishin' tendency in Byron's own pronunciation is evident elsewhere
in his rhymes, for example in stanza 30 of Don Juan I:

No doubt, this patience, when the world is damning us,

Is philosophic in our former friends;
'Tis also pleasant to be deem'd magnanimous,
The more so in obtaining our own ends;
And what the lawyers call a 'malus animus',
Conduct like this by no means comprehends:
Revenge in person's certainly no virtue,
But then 'tis not my fault, if others hurt you.
The rhyme here of 'damning us' with 'magnanimous' and 'animus' works much better if
read as dammin' us, magnanimous and animus. William Bankes is said to have noted that
Byron customarily spoke 'the first syllable of damned [] broadly',21 which I take to
mean that Byron normally said dammed and dammin' rather than the more polite (for his
time) demmed and demmin' - a supposition that seems supported by Byron's rhyme in
Don Juan, XVI, stanza 104 of 'damn' with 'epigram'.
Returning to the first stanza of Don Juan, we might also note Byron's rhyming of 'want',
'cant' and 'vaunt', none of which rhyme according to twenty-first-century RP English.
Vowels in this area were in transition in Byron's time, however. Walker comments, for
example, on how the word 'haunt', previously pronounced harnt, had recently started to
be pronounced hawnt: as a result, he believed, of the use of this pronunciation in a
popular play called The Haunted Tower.22 Walker advised that where the letters 'aun'
were followed by another consonant the vowels should be pronounced as a long a, as RP
English still pronounces 'aunt' today. This would give us varnt instead of the modern RP
English vawnt, which makes aural sense of Byron's rhyme of the French 'intrigante',
'haunt' (i.e. harnt) and 'can't' (Don Juan, XIV, 63).23 It still does not, however, provide a
good aural rhyme for 'want' or 'cant', which Walker pronounces the same way as modern
RP English does.24
One of the issues raised by these rhymes, and by similar ones elsewhere in Don Juan such as 'dull' and 'pull', or 'throne' and 'undone' (XIII, 95; XIII, 60) - is whether in these
cases Byron was relying on a traditionally sounded rhyme, or a visual or eyerhyme only,
or whether to his ear these were perfect aural or ear-rhymes as well. In most cases visual
rhymes were, in fact, relicts of what had once been aural rhymes. This is nicely
illustrated in the early eighteenth century by an anecdote told by Walker about Jonathan
Swift, who, he says, 'used to jeer at those who pronounced wind with the i short', by
saying (using the short i throughout): '"I have a great mind to find why you pronounce it
wind."'25 Walker (rather regretfully) plumps for the modern RP pronunciation for 'wind',
so we might assume that this was the norm in Byron's time, but Byron (who was a great
admirer of Swift's rhyming abilities) consistently deploys the word as if pronounced

wynd (for example, in Don Juan, XI, stanza 9: 'Or, like a billow left by storms behind, /
Without the animation of the wind').26 Shelley also famously uses the same rhyme to
conclude his 'Ode to the West Wind' - 'Oh wind / If winter come, can spring be far
behind?' (69-70).
These are instances of a 'traditional' rather than a perfect aural rhyme. Another example
may be found in stanza 13 of the Dedication to Don Juan, where Byron's execration of
Castlereagh involves not only a wonderfully onomatopoeic use of consonants (in the
sixth line) to invoke Castlereagh's slipshod speech, but also the rhyming of 'toil' with
'vile' and 'smile':
An orator of such set trash of phrase
Ineffably, legitimately vile,
That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise,
Nor foes - all nations - condescend to smile:
Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze
From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil,
That turns and turns to give the world a notion
Of endless torments, and perpetual motion.
(Don Juan, Dedication, 13)
The tile-for-'toil' pronunciation evoked here appears to be an instance of Byron using a
rhyme that was no longer aurally accurate in his own time but based on the authority of
poets such as Pope, who apparently pronounced 'join' as jine, rhyming it, for example,
with 'line', and 'join'd' (jin'd) with 'Mankind' ('Essay on Criticism', 346-47, 187-88).27
Evidence that Byron is unlikely himself to have pronounced 'join' as jine or 'toil' as tile
comes from Walker's condemnation of such a pronunciation, which he describes as 'a
prevalent practice among the vulgar'.28 Vulgar or not, Byron nevertheless again used the
rhyming potential of pronouncing 'oi' as i in Canto XIII of Don Juan, in a setting that is
serious and emotive, here rhyming 'spoil'd' with 'child' and 'wild':
But in a higher niche, alone, but crown'd,
The Virgin Mother of the God-born child,
With her son in her blessed arms, look'd round,
Spared by some chance when all beside was spoil'd;

She made the Earth below seem holy ground.

This may be superstition, weak or wild,
But even the faintest relics of a shrine
Of any worship, wake some thoughts divine. (61)
Two stanzas earlier Byron also rhymes 'pile', 'aisle' and 'soil'.
A factor that contributed to the general acceptability of eye-rhymes over earrhymes in
Byron's time was the increasing veneration for the written over the spoken word,
supported by increased literacy, the rise of dictionaries and comments such as Dr
Johnson's that for 'pronunciation the best general rule is, to consider those as the most
elegant speakers who deviate least from the written word'.29 Even if not sanctioned by
the authority of previous generations of poets, authors of Byron's generation therefore
felt increasingly free to use rhymes that were not only visual rather than aural, but that
might never have been aural rhymes in the past, and it seems likely that Byron's rhyming
of 'wont', 'upon't' and 'front' in stanza 29 of Don Juan XVI is an example of this. Indeed,
Walker comments that, even
if these imperfect rhymes were allowed to be blemishes, it would still be better to
tolerate them, than cramp the imagination by the too narrow boundaries of exactly
similar sounds. A want of perfect rhyme, if a real imperfection, is fully compensated by
gaining access to a more eligible turn of thought.30
The Dedication to Don Juan opens with a series of self-consciously contentious rhymes,
including the outrageous enjambment and double-syllable rhyme in the first stanza:
Bob Southey! You're a poet - poet Laureate,
And representative of all the race;
Although 'tis true that you turn'd out a Tory at
Last, - yours has lately been a common case: And now, my epic renegade! what are ye at,
With all the Lakers in and out of place?
This is followed by the notorious 'high, Bob / [] adry, Bob' rhyme in the couplet of the
third stanza:
And then you overstrain yourself, or so,
And tumble downward like the flying fish

Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob,

And fall, for lack of moisture, quite adry, Bob!
Also notable in acoustic terms, however, is the less self-conscious but very
Scottishsounding rhyme of 'good', 'food' and 'hood' in Canto I's second stanza. And how
conscious was Byron of the fact that, whereas in stanza 7 he has 'posterity' rhyming with
'try', in stanza 9 he rhymes both 'posterity' and 'rarity' with 'he'? He certainly seems
perfectly happy to exploit both 'traditional' and 'modern' rhyming, switching, for
example, between the outdated pronunciation of polysyllabic words ending in -y to
rhyme with 'eye' and the contemporary pronunciation (for Byron and for us) that
pronounces them to rhyme with 'see'.31
Were such switches evident in his speech? Clearly we need to be careful when using
Byron's rhymes to reconstruct his voice. Yet they contain valuable clues nevertheless.
This particular willingness, for example, to shift between -eye and -ee does, I believe,
throw light on Byron's pronunciation of his own name. According to Leigh Hunt, some
contemporaries maintained
that he called it Byron [Biron], with a short y, others Byron [Byron] with a long one. The
truth is, that he pronounced it both ways, but in general the former. Captain Medwin says
that in speaking of Lady Byron he pronounced it 'Byrn'; but this is a mistake. The
Captain's ear might not have discerned the second vowel but it was discernible to others.
'Byrn' is Byron, pronounced shortly, with the northern burr. But he called himself Byron
[Byron] sometimes; and the Italians always called him so; at least as nearly as they
could. They made it Bairon, as I have noticed in Madame Guiccioli.32
Walker notes how the preposition 'by' was pronounced 'like the verb to be' in some
contexts: 'This latter sound, however, is only tolerable in colloquial pronunciation, and
then only when used as a preposition, as when we say, Do you travel by [be] land or by
[be] water?'33 Similarly the pronoun 'my' was sometimes pronounced me, even in
educated speech, and, as late as 1889, in the recording of Browning mentioned earlier,
the poet can be heard saying 'I'm [] sorry but I can't remember me own verses' and
commenting that he will 'remember all me life' the phonograph that was recording him
(my italics).34 It seems likely that for Byron, as for Browning, be and by and me and my
were somewhat interchangeable.
Mary Shelley records an instance when, after 'a heedless girl' (perhaps Claire Clairmont)
had remarked to Byron that he had '"a little of the Scotch accent"', Byron retorted:
'"Good God, I hope not! [] I'm sure I haven't. I would rather the whole d-d country was
sunk in the sea - I, the Scotch accent!"'35 I suspect that Byron may have been 'bamming'
or 'humming' here - over-emphasising his indignation at being thought Scottish at the
expense of his hearers' credibility.36 Thomas Moore argued that 'but little weight is to be
allowed' to any anti-Scots sallies of which Byron may have been guilty.37 And of course
all things Scottish became more fashionable during the course of Byron's life as a result
of the success of Scott's verse and the Waverley novels, culminating in George IV's visit

to Edinburgh in 1822, when the King and Sir Walter both wore the kilt (with fleshcoloured tights underneath). Nevertheless, Byron was in a good position to note how the
highly prescriptive British elocutionary climate of his time was increasingly excluding
regional and popular accents in favour of the language of London and the Court. As I
hope I have demonstrated, Byron's rhymes suggest that his own pronunciation was
pluralistic, celebrating the diversity of human speech by scorning rule-bound attempts to
constrain it.
King's College London
[Reference]
1 Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of his Life, 2 volumes (London:
John Murray, 1830-31).
2 Quoted in Doris Langley Moore, The Late Lord Byron: Posthumous Dramas (London: John
Murray, 1961), p. 297.
3 Edison's first phonograph recordings were made in the late 1870s. Edison's 1889 recording of
Browning reading part of 'How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix' can be heard on a
CD compiled by Steve Cleary, Richard Fairman and Toby Oakes, The Spoken Word: Poets. Historic
Recordings from the British Library Sound Archive, 2 vols (London: British Library, 2003), I, no. 2.
4 See Ernest Lovell Jr, His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron (New York:
Macmillan, 1954), pp. xvi, 273, 309, 350, 386; Robert C. Dallas, Recollections of the Life of Lord
Byron (Norwood: Norwood Editions, 1977), p. 203.
5 Mary Shelley, The Last Man, chapter 4, paragraph 1, quoted from the hypertext edition ed. by
Steven E. Jones for Romantic Circles <http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/>.
6 Captain James Forrester, RN, quoted by Thomas Medwin in The Angler in Wales, or, Days and
Nights of Sportsmen, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1834), I, p. 212. Medwin gives no details of
the recipient of Forrester's letter, stating only that it is one of two 'very interesting' letters 'describing
a visit' by Forrester to Byron 'at Missolunghi [sic]' (II, p. 198).
7 Moore's Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, I, p. 10, quoted as the first entry in Lovell, His Very
Self and Voice, p. 3. The account continues: 'Sometimes, however, as in after life he could talk
indifferently and even jestingly of his lameness; and there being another little boy in the
neighbourhood, who had a similar defect in one of his feet, Byron would say, laughingly, "Come
and see the twa laddies with the twa club feet going up the Broadstreet."'
8 See Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath
(London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142-48.
9 Milton's choice of blank verse also reflects his republican politics, of course, as he made clear in
the famous note added in 1668 to the fourth issue of the first edition of Paradise Lost in which he
speaks of 'ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of
rhyming' (see Milton: Paradise Lost, ed. by Alistair Fowler, revised 2nd edition [Harlow: Pearson,
2007], pp. 54-55).
10 Quoted from Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology, 3rd edition (Oxford: Blackwell,
2006), p. 374 (see also n. 2).
11 See Sleep and Poetry, lines 255-56. Keats also rhymes 'thoughts' and 'sorts' in lines 287-88. For a
further discussion of this topic, see Lynda Mugglestone, '"The Fallacy of the Cockney Rhyme":
From Keats and Earlier to Auden', Review of English Studies, XLII (1991), pp. 57-66. As
Mugglestone points out, Lockhart as a Scot was 'speaking a national dialect in which rhoticity is
maintained in all positions even in the twentieth century' (p. 63).
12 John Gibson Lockhart, 'On the Cockney School of Poetry No IV', in Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine, 3 (1818), p. 521 (quoted in Mugglestone, '"The Fallacy of the Cockney Rhyme"', p. 59,
n. 9).

13 John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language ... To
which are prefixed, principles of English pronunciation (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson and T.
Cadell, 1791).
14 John Walker, A Dictionary of the English Language, Answering at once the Purposes of
Rhyming, Spelling and Pronouncing (London: T. Becket, 1775).
15 Ibid., title page. Walker's other publications on the topic are: A General Idea of a Pronouncing
Dictionary (1774); Exercises for Improvement in Elocution (1777); Hints for Improvement in the
Art of Reading (1783); Elements of Elocution (1781); Rhetorical Grammar (1785); The Melody of
Speaking (1787).
16 Joan C. Beal describes Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary as 'the most successful and
authoritative pronouncing dictionary of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. It was
reprinted over 100 times up to 1904 and was the basis of over 20 other dictionaries published in the
nineteenth century.' Edmund Burke introduced Walker to an acquaintance as 'Mr Walker, whom not
to know, by name at least, would argue want of knowledge of the harmonies, cadences, and
proprieties of our language' (Joan C. Beal, 'Walker, John [1732-1807]', Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28499>).
17 In an account of his childhood published in Moore's Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, Byron
comments in mock-philological terms upon the different appellations of the Aberdeen Grammar
School: 'Scotic, "Schule;" Aberdonic, "Squeel"'(I, p. 12). Lovell records an incident reported by
Trelawny in which Byron describes how, when the British frigate he was on in the Dardanelles met
an American trader, the American captain called the British one a 'copper-bottomed sarpent' (His
Very Self and Voice, p. 266, my italics). For 'flash' language, see Don Juan, II, sts 11-19.
18 See, for example, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)>.
19 Peter Cochran, 'Don Juan Canto First', note 3 (in 'Don Juan I', pdf attached to
<http://www.internationalbyronsociety. org/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=15>). Jane Austen saw Thomas Shadwell's 1675
comedy The Libertine, which tells the Don Juan story, in London in 1813 (see Claire Tomalin, Jane
Austen: A Life [London: Penguin, revised paperback edn, 2000], pp. 243, 334).
20 Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 157.
21 '"That damned Mr. S - ," he used to say, speaking the first syllable (as was his custom
sometimes) broadly' (William Bankes, as reported by Thomas Moore, in Lovell, His Very Self and
Voice, p. 245).
22 'This word was in quiet possession of its true sound till a late dramatick piece made its
appearance, which, to the surprise of those who had heard the language spoken half a century, was,
by some speakers, called The Hawnted Tower.[] a plain common speaker would undoubtedly have
pronounced the au as in aunt, jaunt, &c, and as it had always been pronounced in the Drummer, or
the Haunted House [italics sic]' (Walker, entry for 'Haunt', Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, 6th edn
[London: J. Johnson, 1809], p. 246). All further references to the Critical Pronouncing Dictionary
are to this edition. 'Drummer' is a reference to Joseph Addison's comedy, first produced in 1716.
23 Rhythm as well as rhyme can throw light on Byron's knowledge and pronunciation of French.
For example, in Don Juan, XVI, line 561, 'Her black, bright, downcast, yet espiegle eye', he writes
and scans the French 'espigle' as if it were pronounced espeegle, ignoring the effect of the grave
accent.
24 See Walker, Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, pp. 585, 72.
25 Walker, entry for 'Wind', Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, p. 593.
26 For Byron on Swift, see Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author
(New York: NY Review of Books, 2000), where Byron is quoted as saying that Swift 'beats us all
hollow; his rhymes are wonderful' (p. 32) and that he 'beat all the craft; he could find a rhyme for
any word' (p. 41).
27 Jane Austen's brother James rhymed 'toil' with 'smile' in a prologue he wrote for a family
production of Sheridan's The Rivals in 1784 (see Tomalin, Jane Austen, p. 42).

28 '[T]here is a very prevalent practice among the vulgar of dropping the o, and pronouncing these
words [i.e. 'boil', 'toil' and 'spoil'] as if written bile, tile, spile, &c' (Walker, Pronouncing Dictionary,
p. 50).
29 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), quoted in Mugglestone, '"The
Fallacy of the Cockney Rhyme"', pp. 57-58. Mugglestone comments: 'veneration was []
increasingly accorded to the written word above the spoken, a circumstance which led to the
escalating use and acceptability of eye-rhymes depending for their identity on correspondences
which are visual rather than phonemic. [] Linguistic acceptability, like that conferred upon rhyming
conventions, is therefore increasingly invested in the visual rather than the aural' (p. 57).
30 Walker, A Dictionary of the English Language, pp. 399-400.
31 The same possibility is exploited a few lines later in stanza 11, where Byron rhymes the plural
noun 'prophecies' with 'arise' and 'eyes'.
32 Quoted in Lovell, His Very Self and Voice, p. 309.
33 Entry for 'by', Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, p. 68.
34 Cleary et al., transcription of the Browning recording in the introductory brochure to The Spoken
Word: Poets (I, p. 4, no. 2).
35 Lovell, His Very Self and Voice, p. 609, quoting Mary Shelley from Moore, Letters and Journals
of Lord Byron, I, p. 24.
36 'Byron and Shelley enjoyed being shocking. As Regency men of fashion they thought it amusing
to spin tall tales. The game was to see how far their listeners could be induced to gape. Bamming
and humming it was called, slang for bamboozling and humbugging. Mary Godwin and Claire
Clairmont being young, female, nave and literal-minded were prime targets, often failing to detect
Byron's irony even when he was not trying to mislead' (William St Clair, The Godwins and the
Shelleys [London: Faber and Faber, 1989, repr. 1991], p. 405).
37 Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, I, pp. 22-23.

[Author Affiliation]
Christine Kenyon Jones is a Research Fellow in the Department of English at King's College
London, and a member of the Executive Committee of The Byron Society. Her books include
Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-period Writing (Ashgate, 2001) and Byron: The Image of the
Poet (Associated University Presses, 2008). She has had many book chapters and articles published
in The Byron Journal and elsewhere, on topics including Romanticism and religion, food and eating
in the Romantic period, and science fiction and Romanticism.

Indexing (document details)

Author(s):

Christine Kenyon Jones

Author Affiliation:

Christine Kenyon Jones is a Research Fellow in the Department of English

at King's College London, and a member of the Executive Committee of
The Byron Society. Her books include Kindred Brutes: Animals in
Romantic-period Writing (Ashgate, 2001) and Byron: The Image of the
Poet (Associated University Presses, 2008). She has had many book
chapters and articles published in The Byron Journal and elsewhere, on
topics including Romanticism and religion, food and eating in the
Romantic period, and science fiction and Romanticism.

Document types:

General Information

Publication title:

The Byron Journal. Liverpool: Dec 2009. Vol. 37, Iss. 2; pg. 121, 12 pgs

Source type:

Periodical

ISSN:

03017257

ProQuest document 1990706051

ID:
Text Word Count

5485

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did=0000001990706051&Fmt=3&cl
ientId=43168&RQT=309&VName=PQD

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