Byron’s Don Juan as a global allegory

THE DEDICATION IS ONE OF THE MOST CITED PASSAGES IN DON JUAN, YET literary critics have not fully explored its implications for the nature of Byron's social satire. It is used as evidence for Byron's disagreement with a poet like Wordsworth over aesthetic issues, or for a contrast between Byron's republican ideals and Wordsworth's growing conservatism. The Dedication, then, is treated as literary and political criticism, but what is overlooked is its specifically economic content. For Byron, Robert Southey and Wordsworth are "sellouts" in the first sense--they have compromised themselves for money: I would not imitate the petty thought, Nor coin my self-love to so base a vice, For all the glory your conversion brought, Since gold alone should not have been its price. You [Southey] have your salary--was't for that you wrought? And Wordsworth has his place in the Excise. (1) Byron then departs from this critique of poets to make a larger attack upon British foreign policy, upon the '"intellectual eunuch Castlereagh" and the Holy Alliance, the "Conspiracy or congress to be made-- / Cobbling at manacles for all mankind-- / A tinkering slavemaker, who mends old chains, / With God and man's abhorrence for its gains" (14). There is a movement from the micro-level of individual behavior, to the national level, to the international level--from Wordsworth's gold to Castlereagh's gains--and to explore this movement is to see the nature of Byron's critique of globalizing capitalism. Byron's uneasy relationship with the British economic empire is found as early as The Curse of Minerva. Although Minerva's narrator tries to fend off her curse by arguing that the plunderer of Greek ruins, Lord Elgin, was a Scot, she negates the distinction, responding that Elgin is a "lawless son / ... do[ing] what oft Britannia's self had done" (211-12). Elgin's sin is to turn sacred ruins into commerce. "Long of their Patron's gusto let them tell, / Whose noblest, native gusto is--to sell: / To sell, and make, may Shame record the day, / The State receiver of his pilfer'd prey" (171-74; author's emphasis). Hence, Minerva's analysis of the corruption of British society, and her retributive curse, is economic in nature; after a scathing critique of British imperialism, which includes the prediction of a nationalist rebellion in India, she turns to London: Now fare ye well, enjoy your little hour, Go grasp the shadow of your vanish'd power; Gloss o'er the failure of each fondest scheme, Your strength a name, your bloated wealth a dream: Gone is that Gold, the marvel of mankind, And Pirates barter all that's left behind. No more the hirelings, purchas'd near and far, Crowd to the ranks of mercenary war. The idle merchant on the useless quay, Droops o'er the bales no bark may bear away; Or back returning sees rejected stores Rot piecemeal on his own encumber'd shores: The starv'd mechanic breaks his rusting loom, And desperate roans him 'gainst the common doom. Then in the Senate of your sinking state, Show me the man whose counsels may have weight. Vain is each voice where tones could once command, E'en factions cease to charm a factious land; Yet jarring sects convulse a sister isle, And light with maddening hands the mutual pile. (259-78) In this passage we have the exact reverse of the direction that Byron's critique of society is usually assumed to take. Malcolm Kelsall briefly observes that passages in Don Juan such as 8.125, with its "demotic tone" that suggests "aristocrats ... grow great by war, and the people starve," "might be 'constructively' read with an internationalist and Marxist message." (2) Yet Kelsall does not pursue this theoretical perspective on the poem, arguing instead that the political ennui in Byron's poetry came from a man who had outlived his time: with the Whig discourse of liberation (born with the Glorious Revolution) co-opted by the Tories, who now portrayed their own party as defending Europe from the tyranny of Napoleon, Byron was backed into a corner. …