Revolution and Byron inherited his mother’s lib-
eral politics. The early British romantic poets,
Byron’s predecessors and older contemporaries,
including William Blake, William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey,
Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt, were all sym-
pathetic toward the cause of the French Revolu-
tion, but in general, they gradually grew more
conservative in their views.
The Industrial Revolution
Concurrently, in England, the Industrial Revo-
lution was drastically changing the way goods
were produced. Hand made products created by
skilled craftsman were replaced by mass pro-
duced goods generated by machines in factories.
While this did create a working middle class, it
also resulted in the exploitation of individuals
whose rights were deemed less important than
the rapid production of cheap goods for the
profit of factory owners. Byron attempted to
use his position within the House of Lords to
speak out in favor of exploited workers.
Nineteenth-Century British
Foreign Policy
As time went on, the moderate revolutionary
party in France lost their power to a more
extreme radical group, and in 1799, Napoleon
Bonaparte seized control of the French govern-
ment and established a military dictatorship. He
abdicated in 1814, only to gain power again,
briefly in 1815, until he was finally defeated
later that year by the Duke of Wellington—the
same Duke of Wellington with whom Byron’s
one-time love, Lady Frances, became entangled.
From the rubble of the revolution and its after-
math rose, once again, a monarchy. King Louis
XVIII of France and his counterparts in Russia,
Prussia, and Austria formed an alliance that sup-
pressed liberalism throughout Europe. Byron
and his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, among
other liberals, who were typically associated
with the Whig political party, spoke out strongly
against the conservative, or Tory, British states-
men who initially cooperated with these oppres-
sive policies. In Italy, Byron experienced firsthand
the injustice of the Austrian rule over Venice;
he participated in political resistance against
Austrian rule there. By 1822, British foreign
policy tended toward more liberal politics and
supported, for example, Greece’s revolt against
Turkey. In the last years of his life, Byron
fought on the side of the Greeks in this cause,
and lost his life as part of the Greek resistance.
Romanticism became associated with the lib-
eral ideal of personal and political freedom
largely due to Byron’s devotion to the Greek
cause.CRITICAL OVERVIEWBy the time ‘‘When We Two Parted’’ was pub-
lished in 1816, Byron’s earlier work had been
fairly well received by the public and critics
alike. He and his poetry had also been bitterly
attacked by one journal in particular, theEdin-
burgh Review. Due to governmental fears of a
revolution similar to the one that had been rag-
ing in France, a country now lead by the military
dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, poetry produced
in England during this time was expected to be
somewhat patriotic. Conservative critics were
fierce in their suspicions and attacks on liberal
poets. But Byron, despite his own liberal politics,
had managed to secure the backing of a conser-
vative publisher, John Murray, and so managed
to keep his writing available for public consump-
tion. Following the success of the first cantos of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron’s literary rep-
utation suffered due to the scandals regarding
his personal life; that is, his separation from his
wife and the rumors of an incestuous affair with
his half-sister. Critics refused to distinguish
between Byron’s poetry and his personal affairs
and acted on their moral and religious outrage at
his behavior by cooling their responses to his
poetic efforts. His work, including later cantos
ofChilde Harold’s Pilgrimage, came to be viewed
as self-indulgent. Other poems from this time
period were derided for metrical irregularities
and grammatical carelessness. In general,
despite some dissenting voices praising Byron’s
experimentation with form, subject, and genre,
his work was not critically reappraised until after
his death.
Modern critics have lauded the narrative
poemChilde Harold’s Pilgrimage as Byron’s
best work, but his lyric poetry is often under-
valued, ignored all together, or studied primarily
for biographical insights. Discussing romantic
lyric poetry in his 1971Natural Supernaturalism:
Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature,
M. H. Abrams omits any analysis of Byron’s
work, stating: ‘‘Byron I omit altogether; not
because I think him a lesser poet than the othersWhen We Two Parted