The Young Girl Who Inspired the Poet

Before Childe Harold's journey unfolds, Lord Byron spent five stanzas to write a dedication page To Ianthe. It's his hymn standing from a past of indulgence and regrets humming words of passion and wisdom to a child who was just starting her life. And he's telling her: be never changed by the bleak world; be not like me; be not like me.

In 1812, George Byron was four and twenty years of age, having already had a scandalous stray of careless courtships with various ladies of high society. In 1812, Byron started seeing Lady Oxford (that's Jane Elizabeth Scott if you've forgotten her name). Charlotte Harley was her daughter. The young girl was, well, young; she had probably just turned 10 at that point.

Little Charlotte was famously charming as a child and attracted attentions from pretty much everyone. Lord Byron was obviously enamored of her, as was his book illustrator Richard Westall, who had been commissioned to illustrate the first two cantos of a version of Pilgrimage. This painting was titled Lady Charlotte Harley as Hebe by Westall. I couldn't figure out the exact date of the work, but it was surely around when these people first acquainted circa 1812-1814. Lord Byron's own portrait was painted around then as well (circa 1913). 

Here are two snaps from page 140 of The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron Vol 2 (1811-1813)

So why Ianthe? The word literally translates as "purple or violet flower". In Greek Mythology, that was the name of a Cretan girl who married Iphis after he got turned male by Isis. The story, made well known in Ovid's Metamorphoses, was probably the first ever tale about transgender marriage. The significance of giving young Charlotte Harley such a nickname probably is: firstly, to signify her youthful and pure beauty and secondly, as a subtle and suggestive wish from Byron to someone whose pureness in heart and unfamiliarity to the filths of the grown-up's world contrasts his own adulterated one. While Byron expressed affectionately to Ianthe dedicating his song of a battle against Time, it became almost a cautionary tale to the young girl; a warning, telling her not to follow his path and grow up gracefully against the race of Time.

                                       “Ah, may'st thou ever be what now thou art,

                                       Nor unbeseem the promise of thy spring,

                                       As fair in form, as warm yet pure in heart...” (ln. 10-12)

Hope was the key word , as we see Byron praising Ianthe and comparing the two of them with those glowing words.

Augusta Ada Lovelace

Such a relationship between the poet and an innocent young girl was revived, at least in my opinion, in my favourite play, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. 

It was suggested in the play, that daughter of the household Thomasina Coverly, a thirteen-year-old child mathematical genius had some connection with Lord Byron, who was visiting (the fictional) Lord and Lady Croom before setting off to sail. It has been mostly agreed that the character Thomasina is based on Ada Lavelace, Lord Byron's daughter with Anne Isabella Byron and coworker of mathematician Charles Babbage. Indeed Ada Lovelace, inheriting much of her father's qualities (quite against her mother's will), had numerous affairs with men during her youth, including one with her tutor, much like Thomasina with her tutor Septimus in the play. There are numerous indication in the play that Thomasina could very well be based on a combination of Augusta Ada and Charlotte Harley, as the coming of age elements of the character were revealed throughout the play.

Bon Voyage Harold

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a long narrative poem written/published circa 1812-1818 by George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, commonly known as Lord Byron. His best known works include Don Juan as well as, of course, the topic of our interests here: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (referred as Pilgrimage from this point on). Beneath is is part of Byron's manuscript of the poem.

 

Pilgrimage was written in four cantos with Spenserian Stanza which means that the structure of the poem usually consists of eight Iambic Pentameter lines (consist 5 pairs of short/long or under-stressed stressed syllables, e.g. traPEZE is word with an Iambic pair of syllables) followed by an Alexandrine (a 12 syllable line). The rhythm pattern is ABABBCBCC.

Pilgrimage describes the journey of Childe Harold. Childe is a medieval term for a young man who's elegible for knighthood. He represents the young generation in a post-revolutionary and Napoleonic society who were sick and tired of the war, weren't sure what they would want to do with their lives, which can be quite relevant in today's world.

Childe Harold, for example, is a young man of some degrees of nobility. We will be introduced to him as someone who had led a life of pleasure for some time, yet got disillusioned by the surface of extravaganza. He sought distraction by going on a journey to foreign countries, searching for his identity.

In other words, Harold is a young guy at the starting point of his mature life, at a loss of his world view and in lack of his self identity, and tries to gain some experience through his pilgrimage into the bewilderedness.

In this lengthy poem, Lord Byron shows us a tapestry of exotic beauty and literary gems of such richness and sometimes obscurity. I'd like to use this blog as a commonplace book for the knowledge we can soak up reading this poem, or even more, some background or loosely related information that... well, as Ada Lovelace was intrigued by his father's past, so are we.

  

Let's take a look at the author first.

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron
Born: 22-Jan-1788 London, England Died: 19-Apr-1824.
It would probably make more sense to think of Pilgrimage as an autobiographical piece: the origin as well as first example of a Byronic Hero (I'll be expanding on this topic in a future post). He was titled a national hero of Greece as he travelled to fight the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, before he died in Missolonghi of a fever he contracted at the age of 36.  

Byron's best known affair is probably with Lady Caroline Lamb who at that time much shocked the society when it started circa 1812. Lamb (13 Nov. 1785 - 26 Jan. 1828) , who was then already married to William Melbourne, described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" when they first met, which eventually became Byron's epitaph. This particular portrait was painted by Sir. Thomas Lawrence.

 

Next time, I'll introduce the dedication page of Pilgrimage, which was bestowed to Ianthe, Byron's nickname for Lady Charlotte Harley (Charlotte Bacon, nee Harley), Lady Oxford (Jane Elizabeth Scott, nee Harley)'s daughter. And from there, let the journey to the unknown begin.