Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Map of Byron's Switzerland
- Part One
- Part Two
- 9 Coppet
- 10 Romans à clef
- 11 Chamonix
- 12 The Problem of Claire and the First of the Visitors
- 13 Reconciliation
- 14 Old Friends
- 15 Polidori Does Not Suit
- 16 The Jungfrau
- Afterwords
- 1 Lewis, de Staël and ‘Poor Polidori’
- 2 The Shelley Party and Allegra
- 3 The Road to Greece
- 4 Last Rites
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - Reconciliation
from Part Two
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Map of Byron's Switzerland
- Part One
- Part Two
- 9 Coppet
- 10 Romans à clef
- 11 Chamonix
- 12 The Problem of Claire and the First of the Visitors
- 13 Reconciliation
- 14 Old Friends
- 15 Polidori Does Not Suit
- 16 The Jungfrau
- Afterwords
- 1 Lewis, de Staël and ‘Poor Polidori’
- 2 The Shelley Party and Allegra
- 3 The Road to Greece
- 4 Last Rites
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Matthew Lewis had been at Oxford with Fox's nephew, Lord Holland, and knew most of the people in that sector of the fashionable world Byron had frequented, as well as many other important figures outside it. It was therefore inevitable that he should have met Madame de Staël when she came to England, especially as he shared with her such a strong interest in German literature. Describing Lewis much later, Byron said that he was ‘a good man – a clever man – but a bore’ (‘pestilently prolix’ is a term he had used earlier to describe how boring he could be). ‘He was a Jewel of a Man,’ he went on, ‘had he been better set – I don't mean personally, but less tiresome – for he was tedious – as well as contradictory to every thing and every body.’ It was no doubt the spirit of contradiction in Lewis which helped to ensure that on one of his meetings with de Staël in England (the same at which she complained that Byron would shut his eyes during dinner), the two of them had a serious disagreement. ‘They fell out, alas!’, Byron had lamented, ‘and now they will never quarrel again. Could not one reconcile them for the “nonce”?’ It was perhaps with the idea of reconciliation that he accompanied Lewis to Coppet although, once there, he made sure he introduced a topic which he knew would set his guest ‘by the ears’ with Madame de Staël. He was quite fond of this kind of mischief-making.
The topic Byron launched was slavery, and it was one on which Lewis had a right to feel expert since his father had not only left him a lot of money, but also two large plantations in Jamaica with hundreds of slaves. Unlike his father, Lewis had been a keen supporter of the 1807 Act which abolished the slave trade in the British empire, but the quarrel was then over whether existing slaves should be freed (something which did not happen until 1833). He felt, as de Staël probably did not, that emancipation would be a bad thing in that it would destroy the economy of the plantations, leave the freed slaves destitute, and result in violence against the whites.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Byron in GenevaThat Summer of 1816, pp. 103 - 110Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011