When Byron sent a copy of his first publically printed volume, Hours of Idleness, 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, Works 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 Hours in the Edinburgh Review, urges Byron to “forthwith abandon poetry, and turn his talents, which are considerable, and his opportunities, which are great, to better account” (ER 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 The Satirist, or the Monthly Meteor (this summary of Clarke's review draws from my longer account of it in British Periodicals 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 (BLJ 1:136). This charge is somewhat imprecise, and the Satirist's weird quotation makes the review potent. The Satirist, 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 Edinburgh, 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” (Satirist 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 Satirist reads Hours of Idleness 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 Satirist, Byron's minority is not, as Byron himself positions it, an anteroom to lordship, but an expression of his personality. The Satirist's review mentions thirteen poems, nearly the most of any notice of Hours, while paraphrasing or, as Byron complains, quoting short phrases. In the paragraph on “On a Distant View of the Village and School, of Harrow, on the Hill,” Clarke reduces its title to “Harrow on the Hill,” collapsing the poetic distance and distorting Byron's generic signals. Such a reduction strips “On a Distant View” 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” (Satirist 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. “Harrow” 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 Satirist 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 Satirist: “This place is wretched enough...Oh! the misery of doing nothing but make Love, Enemies, and Verses” (BLJ 1:135). “This place” is where Byron encountered Hewson Clarke, and the phrase “doing nothing” echoes the Satirist'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.”

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 The Satirist, although in a footnote to English Bards, 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 The Tyne Mercury” and, once at Cambridge, “developed a lasting and fathomless enmity toward the upper class” (173). In the March 1808 issue of The Satirist, the first of an extended sequence, “The Cantab” 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 “Cantab VIII,” 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 “Art of Pleasing” (3:478). These articles drew on Clarke's experiences, though they projected his own dissipation (some of which Cyrus Redding recounts in Fifty Years' Recollections; 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 Satirist'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).

Fig. 1 The Satirist on Whig economics, manners, and morals. 
Source Citation: The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor. 1812. London, 1812. The Making of the Modern World. Gale 2009. Gale, Cengage Learning. Vanderbilt University. 04 May 2009 

In the June, 1808, Satirist, Clarke published, as part of “Cantab No. 3,” 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 Glenarvon 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]).

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).

Fig. 2 The Reformers Dinner, an illustration from The Satirist. The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor. 1809. London, 1809. The Making of the Modern World. Gale 2009. Gale, Cengage Learning. Vanderbilt University. 04 May 2009 http://galenet.galegroup.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/servlet/MOME?af=RN&ae=U3608326016&srchtp=a&ste=14

Although the Satirist does not go so far as to place the empowered Whigs in this camp, it does suggest that, just as some Cambridge scholars are best suited for merely racing around in coaches, Whigs, too, have their ideal, Platonic professions: “Mr. Sheridan ..as a mountebank, Mr. Windham admired as a conjurer, Lord Grenville celebrated as a Roman Catholic Priest, Lord Temple eminent as a stationer, Lord Petty unrivalled as an opera dancer, Mr. Walter Scott [thrown in with the Whigs either through ignorance, because of his association with the Edinburgh Review, or as wit] excellent as a compiler of nursery tales, and George Gordon, Lord Byron, a minor,...as the keeper of a bear-garden” (489). Guided by the sound echo of “Whig club” and “Whip Club,” the Satirist, as it does elsewhere, associates Whig theorizing with unregulated consumption and undisciplined governance. In its satiric voice, the article notes it can only discover “one adverse effect” of such clubs, a “want of employment to those who drive not for notoriety but for bread.” The club, however, is alert to this problem and “keeps up the spirits of desponding stage and hackney coachmen” by “frequently treat[ing] them to a ride in their dashing barouches, and giv[ing] them as much gin and bitters as they can drink.” The article turns next to the “Varmint Club,” founded by Lady Holland's son, Godfrey Webster, our student who so much admired Byron's song to his bear and whom Clarke would, in the Scourge, associate with the economic disaster of paper money, an institutionalized form of false promises and unrestrained consumption. Webster's club, again, impersonates labor, choosing to dress with “hats...never exceeding three and sixpence and...all their other habiliments...proportionally cheap.” Clarke's commentator wonders that so few ladies are attracted to these “gentlemen rat-catchers”: “We heard a lovely girl (no relation to Lord Byron) declare, that she would sooner marry a bear than a barouche driver...perhaps she wished to keep the whip and reins in her own hands” (491; figure three).

Fig. 3 Two illustrations from “Real Life in London” showing gentlemen racing carriages. (Project Guttenberg)

The following month, the review of Poems, Original and Translated appeared. The Satirist 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 Hours and “Bruin and Co.,” 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 Satirist and its victim-attackers. Who binds whom is determined by an economy of cultural production.

The Satirist, now without Clarke, would go on to review, mostly favorably, Childe Harold, several of Byron's tales, and The Waltz (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 The Giaour 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 Edinburgh Review and in the rising economic discourse, shifted the battle into a cultural war.