Byron and the Victorians

This book is the first full-length study of Byron's influence on Victorian writers, concentrating on Carlyle, Emily Brontë, Tennyson, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli and Wilde. It has two emphases--to demonstrate the ways that institutions of cultural production mediate the access that later writers have to earlier ones, and to suggest the many different responses that Victorian writers had to Byron and to his celebrity in British culture. It argues that defining oneself against Byron became a ritual of the Victorian authorial career. Victorian writers did not reject Byron outright: instead, they defined themselves through fictions of personal development away from values associated with Byron toward those associated with themselves as mature Victorian writers.