Literature and Politics

“As an author, I am cut to atoms by the E[dinburgh] Review”, wrote Byron to John Cam Hobhouse in February 1808 of the reception of his youthful volume, Hours of Idleness: “it is just out, and has completely demolished my little fabric of fame, this is rather scurvy treatment from a Whig Review, but politics and poetry are different things, & I am no adept in either, I therefore submit in Silence”. As an active if occasional member of the Cambridge Whig Club, Byron had anticipated a sympathetic response from the Review he thought of as a party organ. Not only were politics and poetry two very different things, however, but politics and politics were two very different things. The lack of sympathy Byron’s volume met with from the review’s anonymous author (Henry Brougham) has much to tell us not just about the Edinburgh Review’s relative independence from its publisher and its party, but about ideological divisions within the early nineteenth-century Whig party itself.