When Byron sent a copy of his first publically printed volume, , to his ineffectual guardian, Lord Carlisle, the elder poet evaded an assessment of the poems by writing his thanks in advance of (and perhaps entirely in lieu of) reading the poems. Carlisle assured Byron that however the public and reviewers received the volume, Byron “will stand better with the world than others who only pursue their studies in Bond St. or at Tatershall's” (Byron, 1:138) Poetry, Carlisle suggests, may not be actual labor, but it is better than dissipating consumption on Bond Street, a high-end shopping district, or horse racing and gambling at Tattersall's. This tepid response, with its emphasis on the “studies” of other aristocrats, underscores Carlisle's frustration with Byron's indifference to his studies at Cambridge. Henry Brougham's review of in the urges Byron to “forthwith abandon poetry, and turn his talents, which are considerable, and his opportunities, which are great, to better account” ( 9: 286). Like Carlisle, Brougham raises the issue of the public perception of aristocratic labor, a subject that provoked both class-based and party-affiliated responses that ranged from anger to amusement. Reviews, both positive and negative, registered the issue, which was signaled not only by the title's emphasis on “idleness,” but the Preface's insistence on Byron's status as a poetic dabbler. Byron's public performance, thus, is refracted through competing understandings of the relationship between class privilege and forms of labor, both working-class and professional.

Among the most virulent of the reviews was the notice by Hewson Clarke, who was at Cambridge at the same time as Byron, in the first issue of (this summary of Clarke's review draws from my longer account of it in 142-6). Probably suppressing a personal knowledge of the identity of the reviewer, Byron's main complaint about the review, expressed to Elizabeth Pigot, is that “my censor only quotes two lines from different poems” to support his position ( 1:136). This charge is somewhat imprecise, and the 's weird quotation makes the review potent. , emphasizing the name's absence from the annals of accomplishment, quotes six times (once in the possessive case) the full denomination of the author announced on the title page: “George Gordon Lord Byron, a minor” (1: 77-81). This repetition (of a pseudo-trimeter line of amphibrachs, with strong caesuras emphasizing the rhythm) asserts the mannered construction not only of the poetry, but of Byron's self-conception. As Jerome Christensen has noted, Henry Brougham, writing several months later in the , exploited the tension between Lordship and minority (21-23), and, like Hewson, queried the relevance of either to poetic production.

Clarke's review begins, “There certainly must be a wonderful charm in the name of author, and a prodigious desire in men to see their own works in print, or what could have induced George Gordon Lord Byron, a minor, to have favoured the world with this collection of poems” ( 1:77). Drawing on his own experience as a young author, Clarke adumbrates the method of the “wonderful charm” in which “print” becomes a mirror in which men can “see” their works—and work—materialized, yet such sight can be a delusion. Using the charmed “name of author” to undercut the awkward amalgam that identifies Byron particularly, the reviewer insists on his right to regulate excess and authenticity. The reads as self-exposure that confirms Byron's inability to produce and not as his record of the poetic process of transforming idle moments into verse: if Byron had not published, “no human being would have guessed the quantity of time he had spent in doing nothing.” For the , Byron's minority is not, as Byron himself positions it, an anteroom to lordship, but an expression of his personality. The 's review mentions thirteen poems, nearly the most of any notice of , while paraphrasing or, as Byron complains, quoting short phrases. In the paragraph on Clarke reduces its title to collapsing the poetic distance and distorting Byron's generic signals. Such a reduction strips of its ironic perspective and represents, as the poem's central point, Byron's notion that “he spoke better than Mossop, and acted better than Garrick” ( 1:78). In context, the poem's point is that such sensations of fame occur by confusions of scale—mistaking (even while cognizant of the mistake) the school auditorium for Drury Lane and thereby mishearing the conventions of applause: While, to swell my young pride, such applauses resounded, I fancied that Mossop himself was outshone ... fir'd by loud plaudits, and self adulation, I regarded myself as a Garrick reviv'd. (18-23)The comparison with Mossop creates a fantasy of fame that the poem discounts but which the review attributes to Byron. Byron saw, in Clarke's review, the fragility of his public self, because the redeployment of his words altered his character and exposed his anxieties about, and commitments to, that character. is, in part, a meditation on the mechanism of the “wonderful charm” of authorship, in which applauses are reiteratively resounded, both seductive and treacherous, yet Clarke insists that Byron is oblivious to and enthralled by this “charm.” Byron read the review within a few weeks of its appearance and wrote to Elizabeth Pigot about it on October 26, 1807. The letter compares Cambridge to Southwell, before discussing the : “This place is wretched enough...Oh! the misery of doing nothing but make Love, Enemies, and Verses” ( 1:135). “This place” is where Byron encountered Hewson Clarke, and the phrase “doing nothing” echoes the 's accusation of Byron's idleness. But Byron's “doing nothing” is supplemented— stylized—by his making “love, enemies, and verses.” The asymmetrical meanings of “making” as applied to each of the nouns gives it triple meaning, and signals the serial nature of Byron's own construction as a form of valid labor, of continual and varied “making.”

From its inaugural issue, in which it skewered , both reviewed Byron's work and injected sightings of Byron into its social commentary. Spurred in part by personal animosity between Byron and Hewson Clarke, these references often played on private information, and functioned to expose Byronic nonchalance as a façade for ambition and privilege, thereby producing a competing version of Byronic celebrity to that produced by Byron. The collaborative production of Romantic celebrity, particularly with regard to Byron, has been productively explored by Tom Mole and Eric Eisner in his first chapter, note 6 of which provides a useful bibliography of critical approaches to fame. When Byron published the next edition of , retitled , in 1808, he dropped the appellation “a minor” as well as the Preface and several poems. The , nonetheless, revives the title in its review of the newer volume, and continues to refer to him as “George Gordon, Lord Byron, a Minor.” The review invents the title for [] (3:82). Further insisting on the durable trace of , this review discusses—and quotes at varying lengths—six of the poems omitted from the . While Byron's career flees from , the maintain its centrality to Byronism, even after Clarke had left the journal, because of its affinity with the journal's construction of the Whig aristocracy as enablers of fictitious labor. In the March, 1808 number, the publishes a correspondent's praise, which begins “Health to the Satirist! Whose daring hand/Scourges the rampant follies of the land” (2: 7). Almost certainly written by Clarke, the poem associates the 's attacks on idle poetry with its repudiation of the “All the Talents” government led by the Whig Lord Grenville. Framed by two articles— and —that demonstrate the connections between economic activity and personal perceptions and experiences, the poem, with guiding footnotes, references Mr. Satirist's many cuts from prior reviews, political and poetical. In contrast to the characters of the surrounding articles, the poem argues for a consistency in the that runs contrary to contemporary society. He “Gives to each author's work strict review:/ Whether a Lord step forth, whose ,/ Display, midst petty wits, his minor powers” (2: 8). The “petty wits” invoke the scene of Cambridge elites who scorned Hewson Clarke and clustered around Byron. In the May, 1808 number, the compiles snippets that review ranging from the 's “this is very ingenious Idleness” to the 's “This Minor certainly is a minor poet at present; and will, we think, at any age continue to be so.” It concludes by quoting the on “the noble Minor's volume,” whose Ossianic poetry is “stupid and tiresome” (335).

Hewson Clarke, as a sizar at Emmanuel College had, at least potentially, to work for his reduced expenses. He would have been among the poorer students, and, in considering himself a writer, would have recognized Byron as a local rival. Byron, by contrast, affected a complete indifference for Clarke, except in his character as a writer in , although in a footnote to , Byron notes that Newcastle, “the town in whose markets he [Clarke] had sold meat, and in whose weekly journal he had written, deserved better treatment” than it is given in Clarke's later writing (124), a comment that registers, and personalizes, Clarke's class politics. Ben Wilson notes that Clarke worked as “an errand boy at a chemists” while writing “satires for ” and, once at Cambridge, “developed a lasting and fathomless enmity toward the upper class” (173). In the March 1808 issue of , the first of an extended sequence, appeared; it ran until its ninth number in February, 1809, and represented itself as debunking the myth of Cambridge maintained “by the visionary retrospections of its departed members” (2:42). In both “Lord B—“ (with his bear) and Mr. Hewson Clarke” appear, the former rescuing his “chere amie” from a fire and the latter completing his (3:478). These articles drew on Clarke's experiences, though they projected his own dissipation (some of which Cyrus Redding recounts in ; 1: 245-6) onto others, as when another student harasses his patron for funds. In the first number, he sets the intellectual standard: “A student generally comes to the university with a sufficient knowledge of the classics, and if he be not ruined by the dissipation of the place, he may easily retain it” (2:43). Throughout, especially as it is highlighted by the 's Tory leanings, the series connects college dissipation with Whig ambitions, and underscores the problems of aristocratic labor, which is associated with the Whigs' indolence as a party indifferent to workers but mired in the abstractions of political economy (see figure one).

In the June, 1808, , Clarke published, as part of a parodic “Student's Memorandum-Book,” which begins with an editorial introduction dividing Cambridge students into three groups: “the studious, the idle, and the profligate” (364). The time of the first is spent examining Newton, of the second in “doing nothing,” and that of the “profligate in drinking, wh[orin]g, betting, &c, &c.” This language locates Byron among the idle, and more, makes him representative of a social class for whom idleness constitutes character. The memorandum book covers roughly a week in the life of the profligate student, Sir G W, that is, Sir Godfrey Webster, Lady Holland's son (whom Lady Caroline Lamb would satirize in along with Lord Byron, for much the same reasons if with only a shadow of the passion; like Buchanan, his pseudonym in Glenavron, Godfrey “only came alive while driving at top speed through town, or conversing with famous pugilists” [ Wilson 176]).

On Monday, G.W. wakes at noon with a “D[amne]d headache,” an in medias res opening that hints at epic struggles the prior night. Later that day, he meets up with “Hell Fire Dick,” one Richard Vaughan, whom Robert Dighton painted in (1808) and Egan applauded in . The driver of the Cambridge Telegraph, Hell Fire Dick was, according to Francis Grose's 1811 , “the favorite companion of the University fashionables, and the only tutor to whose precepts they attend.” According to Lewis Benjamin, “it was a fad of many beaux to dress as stage-coachmen and to imitate their conversation and habits,” even going so far as to drive private vehicles to “pretend to deliver parcels” (a practice to which Byron alludes in his 1813 [1: 206-7]). Our Student, then, unwilling to perform labor, instead chooses to imitate it; his being is constituted by a satirical relation to work, both his own (as a nascent Whig propagandist) and that of others. The next day, the student receives bills for “whips, dogs, etc. etc.,” and for six “interviews” with “Fanny W[e]lls” Despite his being broke, the last of these is easily handled—he sends her wine and a broach, but for the other debts, he must write his guardian, to whom he argues that his “tutor knows it is proper for me to have the wherewith to be in a genteel way,” and that requires ready money. On Wednesday, he stumbles across the Dean of his College, who gives him “an imposition out of some stuff or other called the Rambler.” As Clarke himself had published the , a deliberate echo of Johnson's , when at Cambridge, Webster's literary ignorance is aligned with his idleness and his Whig perspective. Instead of reading Johnson, Webster is taken by “Devilish funny caricatures” and a “d[amne]d clever thing” by Lord Byron, , which the idle poet sings to an adoring audience of young men: Sad Bruin, no longer in woods are dancing, With all the enjoyments that Love can afford: No longer thy consorts around thee are prancing, Far other thy fate—thou art slave to a Lord! How oft when fatigued, on my sopha reposing Thy tricks and thy pranks rob of anguish my breast; Have power to arouse me, to keep me from dosing, Or, what's the same thing, they can lull me to rest. But when with the ardours of Love I am burning I feel for thy torment, I feel for thy care; And weep for thy bondage, so truly discerning, What's felt by a LORD, may be felt by a BEAR! (368) A footnote points out that the bear is “a great favorite of his Lordship's” and, “if report say true, he has been seen to hug it with all the warmth of fraternal affection!" Byron told Elizabeth Pigot about his bear in the same letter he complained about the . Nicholas Joukovsky provides a sketch of the literary career of Byron's bear: On 26 October 1807, he announced in a letter to Elizabeth Pigot: "I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame Bear, when I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do with him, and my reply was 'he should sit for a Fellowship.' ... This answer delighted them not." [ I: 135] The bear, who naturally created a sensation when Byron walked him on a chain in Cambridge, was eventually rusticated to Newstead Abbey after having embraced one of his Lordship's fellow students a little too warmly. He later gained a wider notoriety through Hewson Clarke's articles in —which included a burlesque poem, —and through Byron's attack on Clarke in the Postscript to the second edition of (1809). Byron's curious notion that [Thomas Love Peacock's] Sir Oran Haut-ton was inspired by his bear was recorded by Thomas Medwin in 1821 or 1822 and published in Medwin's in 1824. Graham Chainey provides an account of the known facts and legends about the bear (126-9). Once master of his own domain of “consorts,” the bear is now “slave to a Lord.” Such slavery, a subjugation of labor to lordship, imputes to Byron and his fellow students an indifference to the bear's—or any laborer's—rights. The second stanza equates the bear's pranks with Byron's own poetry, equally likely to arouse and to lull to sleep. The had, in both its reviews of , indicated the dullness of Byron's work and its soporific effect. In the final stanza, the juvenile Byron makes the great discovery of sympathy: the bear's enslavement to him is parallel to Byron's enslavement to love. Of course, this is once again a misunderstanding of the laboring class, as the bear's subjugation is inflicted upon it, while Byron's is merely a stylistic choice of his, evident in the conventionality of his poetry.

In the July, 1808 issue, an article mockingly defends the “Whip and Varmint Clubs,” clubs of mostly students who dash around in their coaches and “may achieve great advantages to their country, by breaking the necks of a few of the useless mortals who are merely fruges consumere nati,” that is, those born only to consume (figure two).

The following month, the review of appeared. The was one of the few journals to review both versions. Clarke asked pardon for again intruding on the public “this eccentric minor poet;—but stay, ladies, stay, 'tis a truly harmless Lord, now—he is without his Bear, and is himself muzzled” (3: 78). This review divides Byron into two corporate entities, the minor Lord who produced and the somewhat wiser, though no more poetic, construct, disciplined by the periodicals which are given credit for Byron's deletions in the new edition. In the December issue of 1808, a correspondent named “An Alarmist”—consistent in tone with Hewson's Clarke's work, and probably his—writes Mr. Satirist a “Warning”; it begins: “Are you mad, or have you as little feeling for yourself as you have for other people?..you have almost flayed your victims...till they have roared with the smart, and almost gone mad with pain...you had better look about you, Mr. Satirist, [to] escape in your whole skin.” On one hand, this parodies the corporate body, which has no “skin” but only a surface of paper. But it also plays on the exchange of madness and lashing between the and its victim-attackers. Who binds whom is determined by an economy of cultural production.

The correspondent declares, “I go nowhere now, indeed, but I hear you abused” (3: 467). This is hyperbole, increasing the presumed clout of by making it the object of universal recognition, and to prove his case, he relays an impromptu, overheard conversation about the journal. A trio of a “gentleman in black,” a “sullen, male novelist,” and a “fine woman with very prominent beauties” agree, as the woman puts it, they must “join our forces to crush these fellows, or we shall positively be all Gothicized;” their anxiety—and therefore the 's boast—is the control of a public image, to the extent that the novelist can no longer sell his work. As the conversation turns to defending the utility of Criminal Conversation (without which, a new interlocutor injects, “what would be the use of a pretty wife?”), another man then makes this appeal to a thus-far silent interlocutor: “ ‘You are an author, my Lord,' added he, turning to a man who was hanging on the arm of a tall masculine woman, that looked like a Holland frow; ‘suppose you were to take them in hand, and write them down.'” Noting that he is “just now going to Spain,” he replies he might do something “ ‘when I am half-seas over. I and my bear will be a match for them' exclaims [the] minor peer. ‘...And as for what they say of me, I don't care a d[amn].'” The man in black replies, with unintended irony, “Why, surely, it is not possible for them to libel you” (470). This might represent some rumored knowledge of the forthcoming in which Byron would skewer Hewson Clarke; Byron's letters reflect an anxiety about whether the secret of his poem would hold. In it, he wrote: There [that is, at Cambridge] Clarke, still striving piteously 'to please', Forgetting doggerel leads not to degrees, A would-be satirist, a hired buffoon, A monthly scribbler of some low lampoon, Condemn'd to drudge, the meanest of the mean, And furbish falsehoods for a magazine, Devotes to scandal his congenial mind; Himself a living libel on mankind. Clarke responded to these verses (and a postscript equally vicious) in with, as Peter Quennell put it, "a long, virulent and ill-informed discursion upon the poet and his entire family," to which Byron's immediate response was to institute a libel suite which he ultimately did not pursue (28). Soon after this, Hewson Clarke, who never received his degree from Cambridge, left and edited , in which he wrote a libel that sufficiently infuriated Byron that he devised a challenge (that apparently went undelivered). Hobhouse was intended to be Byron's second. In 1811, Hobhouse wrote that he "hope[d] Hewson Clarke" would be pared like one of the Magi—I never heard any thing so horrid as his scurrility"( Graham 72). In response to , Clarke, in the March 1811 , accused Byron of being “illegitimate descendant of a murderer” (1:191), prompting Byron to seek legal counsel regarding a law suit for libel, though that was quickly abandoned (Byron, 226).

The , now without Clarke, would go on to review, mostly favorably, , several of Byron's tales, and (though probably without knowing Byron wrote it) before it folded in 1814. But the figure of “idleness” as the propensity of lordship was easily reinvoked, and constituted, for the journal, a recurrent critique. The reviewer of concludes by suggesting that, while Byron is “reveling in all the sensual and intellectual luxury which the successful sale of Newstead Abbey has procured for you, you little think of the privations to which you have subjected us, unfortunate Reviewers; compelled...to subsist for a week on half our usual allowance of ‘broth and bullock's liver' in order to afford the expensive publication of 41 octavo pages of a ‘rivulet of text flowing through a meadow of margin'” (13 [n.s. 3]: 88-9). Even as the Tories reasserted governmental control with the establishment of the Regency, the Whig intellectual power, articulated in the and in the rising economic discourse, shifted the battle into a cultural war.

To conclude, I want to glance briefly at one final article. When Henry Pye died in 1813 and the office of Poet Laureate fell vacate, the following application was made to the Lord Chamberlain: “Having many hours of idleness upon my hands, and being an adept at versification, it would not be unacceptable to me to try the experiment of writing the Laureate Odes” (13 [n.s. 3]: 246) The author's rationale was that “Being in politics between a Whig and a Jacobin, the subject of our Sovereign's praise will have so much of the Romaunt in my eyes, as sufficiently to resemble that species of composition in which I am most successful.” Signed simply “ Byron,” the signature is in marked contrast to the next applicant, who ends, I am, My Lord, With the utmost gratitude, Respect, and admiration, Your Lordship's Most obedient, devoted, And very humble servant, W. Wordsworth. This parodic Byron argues the value of the Laureateship will be to “kill the ennui by which I am devoured”; he maintains that “Wine I now loath—money I detest—praise is irksome to me—and the world only one dull round of apathy and misanthropy.” Just as the earlier Byron of positions poetic production as a form of self-amusement, this Byron positions the laureateship as appropriate for him, precisely for his indifference to its rewards. By comparison, Wordsworth's sample poem is a montage of various poems, remarking: Sack and a salary are “there, Few visions have I seen more fair;” and “My heart leaps up when I behold An office rear'd on high:” and concluding: The child is father of the man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by” Sack and Salary. These two applications are among the “twelve” that the denotes as the best among the thousands made. Among the applicants were Walter Scott and Robert Southey. Walter Scott's letter is among the most financially astute: “I begin to be afear'd that the Booksellers will soon think meet to retrench in the purchase of my ballads,” so “I submit my claims to your judgment, as a Candidate for a hundred pounds sterling per annum, and a butt of good sack,...on condition of furnishing a certain quantum of rhyme, at which your Lordship may have heard I possess great alacrity.” This is a great image of the competitive marketplace of fame, matching Scott, Southey, Byron, and others against one another. It is, alas, like the fabulous image from the 2002 that begins Tom Mole's book on Byron's fame, of girls screaming at his poetry readings (xi; presumably to Ringo's back beat). Neither happened. Caroline Lamb's reaction to Byron, so often reproduced as hysterical, seems an apt stand-in for these imagined fans. Clara Tuite's provides a nuanced account of that encounter which "does not subordinate Lamb to Byron's version of their affair or to Byron's canonical authorial power" (61) and so complicates psychological models by demonstrating a complex rhetoric of fame. There was, of course, no application process for the Poet Laureate, but in imagining it, the constitutes poetry as a professional market, allied tightly with other government offices. Its proposal is to form a committee of the twelve best, to replace the single laureate (and divide the emolument evenly among them to curtail expenses). When Walter Scott received, to his declared surprise, the offer of the Poet Laureateship, he declined and, with apologies, wrote Southey that he had hinted to Croker that Southey should take up the laurel. Of course, the closest Byron came to the laureateship were his satires on and of Robert Southey. But Mr. Satirist, if making up the scene, caught the emerging dynamic of the literary marketplace, and—caught in it as he was, with his own journal on the financial ropes—recognized the need, the gain, even the inevitability of bringing the poets—even Lord Byron who had refused the profits of his first works—into its sphere. Such competition provided both a ready comparison and a proxy for the political skirmishes between Whigs and Tories. Although any literary contact between Byron and Clarke seems to have petered out, in the back of John Agg's , a two canto poem published as if by Byron, are a list of works published by Johnson (see figure four).