Byron and Scott : The Waverley Novels and Historical Engagement

Literary historians have repeatedly observed that while Scott as a poet was the first British literary lion of the nineteenth century, his fame was supplanted by Byron as a poet starting in 1812. But that is as far as they take the relationship seriously, for the two writers are traditionally thought of as very different, even as political and temperamental opposites. But in fact, the two writers met each other in 1815, liked each other, and cherished their friendship the rest of their lives. The story of their relationship in personal terms was not over.Nor was the literary relationship, this study ventures.

Scott embarked on an entirely new career in 1814, inventing the historical novel. Byron was swept away by these "Waverley novels," and in his years of exile to the Continent from 1816 on, repeatedly beseeched his publisher to send Scott's latest novels. The position here is that those novels were important to Byron's development in both literary and existential respects. Byron's historical dramas, his Don Juan, The Island, and his final fling, into the Greek Revolution, show an evolution of both the Byronic Hero and Byron himself in a context his friend Scott had opened up for him.