A Fragment of Byron’s Working Draft For His First Published Poetry

Along with William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron was among the great romantic poets of an era he helped define.  And his interest in poetry began at a young age.  When he was not at Harrow, a prep school in northwest London, he lived with his mother.  It was here that he met Elizabeth Pigot, with whom he would have a lifelong and formative relationship. This relationship would launch his literary enterprises.

Pigot encouraged Byron’s poetic talents, convincing him to publish a book of poetry, Fugitive Pieces, which contained poems written when the poet was only 14.  She helped him collect the material and transcribed it.  However, this book was recalled before distribution and promptly burned over fears that its verses would prompt scandal.

This stopped neither Pigot nor Byron, who worked with Pigot to put out his first public set of works, Hours of Idleness, which contained more recent compositions.  This was Byron’s introduction to the public and launched a career which was as volatile and important as it was short.  One of the works Byron wrote for Hours of Idleness was “The Episode of Ninus and Euryalus,” which was, as he wrote, a “paraphrase of the Aeneid.”  This demonstrated his love of Virgil at a time when he was just 19 years old.

Manuscript signed, a portion of his original working draft of this, his earliest formally published work, two lines of corrected and revised verse from “The Episode of Ninus and Euryalus,” printed in Hours of Idleness in 1807.  “Spare, spare Ye Chiefs!  from him your rage remove, His fault was friendship, all his crime was love.” This manuscript shows the line in an earlier draft form, with important revisions by the young poet. He has crossed out, “Can this displease?  ah no!  if our prayer were one…” This shows the evolution from draft to final.

Pigot had helped Byron compile his early manuscripts and retained them after he died.  In 1828 she was discovered by the first of Byron’s biographers, Thomas Moore, and was able to supply him with a great deal of material. Pigot started a correspondence with John Murray who was involved with Byron’s publishings and his biography. It was Moore and the publisher John Murray who burnt Byron’s papers to prevent further scandal.

But not all of Pigot’s material was lost or destroyed.  Pigot retained some of Byron’s original manuscript works from this very period.  This manuscript piece comes with a note from Pigot which reads, “I affirm this to be Lord Byron’s writing, in the year 1807, EB Pigot.”

This was sent to an admirer who wrote her asking for a sample of Byron’s handwriting. Poetical manuscripts from this early in Byron’s career are uncommon. The last such piece with provenance from Pigot sold in 1993.