Reading Group Session: Lord Byron, 'Darkness' (1816), 26 November 2020

 'All hearts were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light': The Byronic Hero and Cultural Apocalypse: Reading Group Session

Between June and November 1816, the Romantic poet Lord Byron hired a mansion, the Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva. 1816 became known as the ‘year without a summer’, due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Parts of Europe were cloaked with ash and debris, which transformed the environment into a sombre landscape. This natural disaster prompted a prophecy by an anonymous Italian astronomer that the world would end on 18 July, and caused widespread panic and loss of religious faith. During this turbulent summer, Byron was joined in Geneva by his physician, John William Polidori, his fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley’s companions Claire Clairmont and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who was soon to be Shelley’s wife. Their stay in the villa is most remembered for the ‘ghost story competition’, in which Mary famously suffered the ‘waking dream’ that would inspire her novel Frankenstein (1818). However, it was during this period that Byron wrote one of his most haunting and apocalyptic poems: ‘Darkness’. In this poem, Byron does not merely imagine the effects of armageddon upon the Earth, but also draws striking parallels between the desolate landscape and the deterioration of the human psyche. In this reading group session, we will consider the relationship between Byron’s dark vision and the state of humanity following successive periods of political, as well as natural disasters. Can we interpret this poem as a comment upon the past horrors of the French Revolution, the present socio-economic crisis following the Napoleonic Wars, or even the future of an increasingly industrialised world? Finally, we will address whether there is any hope implicit within the empty ‘universe’ that both terrifies and captivates the Byronic speaker.

We welcome participation from staff and postgraduate students from all disciplines, institutions and historical eras, particularly those with research interests in the reciprocal relationship between commerce and culture.

For reading materials and the Zoom link, please email: northeastcommerce2019@gmail.com