What made Byron famous? The topicality of Childe Harold, Cantos I and II, the outré character of its hero, and the high ranking identity of its author. The same mix was to keep him famous for the rest of his days as a writer. From time to time the topicality of the work will fade into the background, overwhelmed by the outré characters and a certain literary posturing, but Byron at his best will retain an up-to-the-minute immediacy. Faced with a Europe in chaos, the pilgrim Childe wanders in a vague search for the roots of our civilization, from Portugal on to Spain, following the thread back to its classical Grecian source. The European chaos might herald a rebirth, but the pilgrim is highly sceptical. Greece, in a manner familiar to the eighteenth century, seems to be on the boundary between nature and civilization, a point at which lifewas both ‘all right’, and about to go ‘all wrong’. But the overriding interest for Byron's readers lay in the ‘ennui’ of the Childe himself, and in the unorthodox nature of the political opinions shared by Childe and narrator, both of whom the readers instinctively identified with the author.

The literary trick in Childe Harold I and II is to make cynical ennui seem both meaningful and admirable. Almost everyone, then and now, has experienced the sense of pointlessness and world-weariness which haunts the Childe. Although a peculiarly adolescent feeling, it is also a highly understandable reaction to a world seemingly out of control (in this case as a result of the Napoleonic wars). But when it is experienced it is anything but meaningful and attractive. To have this feeling projected into a form which inverts its emptiness and presents it as rich and glamorous is powerfully seductive. That this transformation does not actually engage with the causes of the feeling in any very significant way is at least initially neither here nor there. Byron did this in Childe Harold in such a way that he set a fashion which has endured in popular fiction to the present day. The ‘Byronic Hero’, a mixture of dark mystery and glamorous strength, is still the staple of Mills and Boon romantic fiction. It is no surprise that its first incarnation was such an instant success.