Customer Reviews

Lord Byron at Harrow School: Speaking Out, Talking Back, Acting Up, Bowing Out

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Elledge's wonderful book will be relished by anyone interested in how Byron became Byron (the famous and infamous Byron, the adored Byron, the poet Byron), by anyone interested in the odd ins-and-outs of English public-school education in the early nineteenth century, or by anyone interested in the London theatre of that time. This book provides a continually witty, revealing, and brilliant reading of the long- and short-term effects of Byron's dramatic recitations at Harrow, where he was in residence from 1801 to 1805. It unearths fascinating material about contemporaneous educational practices, relating these at every point to the young Byron's flowering genius and to his struggles within what might be called, with understatement, an unusual family. And when Elledge turns to William Henry West Betty, the thirteen-year-old theatrical sensation whom Byron more or less risked his life to see, and see again, we get a delicious picture of celebrity mania to rival the later nineteenth-century tumult over Liszt. The book is beautifully written, its sentences gem-cut. Elledge wears his immense learning lightly and manages to combine vast scholarship and keen interpretation without the slightest loss of narrative and dramatic interest. It's pungent, fast-paced, and hard to put down. An award-winning performance.

Literary biography is rarely so amusing as Elledge's treatment of Byron's adolescence. But then, Byron will be Byron, and Elledge knows that better than anyone. A leading expert on English Romanticism's bad boy, Elledge expresses both the rigor of a scholar and the histrionics of his subject that defined the ethos of an age.