Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Lord Byron Controversy

In the September 1869 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, an article was published titled The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life, written by the celebrated American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. In it, Stowe accused Lord Byron, the legendary British poet who had died four decades earlier, of having fallen "into the depths of a secret adulterous intrigue with a blood relation, so near in consanguinity that discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion from civilized society". The blood relation in question was Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh, and although Stowe refrained from naming her in the article, she left little doubt as to whom she meant. Rumours about Byron's incestuous relationship with Miss Leigh had long been circulating, but Stowe's public accusation in a reputable magazine was an entirely different matter. The article caused a huge uproar, damaging the reputations of both The Atlantic and Stowe herself. Although the issue itself sold out quickly, in the ensuing months the magazine saw its circulation plummet, losing about a third of its subscribers. Nevertheless, Stowe stood by her article, despite the widespread criticism and ridicule it provoked (especially in Britain, where Lord Byron was still considered a national literary hero). 

Stowe had written her piece in defense of Annabella Milbanke, Byron's wife. The two women first met in 1853 —Stowe was in England at the time to promote her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)— and they immediately became friends. In 1856, when Stowe returned to England, Lady Byron confided in her and shared the details of her deeply troubled marriage, including the claim that her husband had committed incest with his half-sister and fathered a child with her. Lady Byron died in 1860, and while Stowe felt the truth about Lord Byron deserved to be told, she did not act on it for years. It wasn't until 1869, when the memoirs of Byron’s former mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, were published in English —portraying Lady Byron as a cold and calculating woman and rousing more sympathy for Lord Byron— that Stowe decided to defend her friend.

Below are two letters written in connection with the Stowe-Byron controversy. The first one comes from Stowe herself and is addressed to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a friend and one of the founding contributors of The Atlantic Monthly. Stowe turned to Holmes a few months before the publication of her article, explaining her reasons for telling the story. (Incidentally, she had written for the magazine before and, along with Holmes, was one of its earliest contributors.) 

The second letter was written by Stowe's pen pal, British author George Eliot. While Eliot didn't agree with Stowe's decision to publish the article, she wrote to Stowe, not in judgment, but to offer her support and friendship. (Eliot signed her letter as M. H. Lewes. Born Mary Ann Evans, she lived with the critic George Henry Lewes; although Lewes was legally married, Eliot regarded herself as his wife and was also known in social circles as Mrs Lewes.)

Hartford, June 26, 1869.

Dear Doctor,—I am going to ask help of you, and I feel that confidence in your friendship that leads me to be glad that I have a friend like you to ask advice of. In order that you may understand fully what it is, I must go back some years and tell you about it.

When I went to England the first time, I formed a friendship with Lady Byron which led to a somewhat interesting correspondence. When there the second time, after the publication of "Dred" in 1856, Lady Byron wrote to me that she wished to have some private confidential conversation with me, and invited me to come spend a day with her at her country-seat near London. I went, met her alone, and spent an afternoon with her. The object of the visit she then explained to me. She was in such a state of health that she considered she had very little time to live, and was engaged in those duties and reviews which every thoughtful person finds who is coming deliberately, and with their eyes open, to the boundaries of this mortal life.

Lady Byron, as you must perceive, has all her life lived under a weight of slanders and false imputations laid upon her by her husband. Her own side of the story has been told only to that small circle of confidential friends who needed to know it in order to assist her in meeting the exigencies which it imposed on her. Of course it has thrown the sympathy mostly on his side, since the world generally has more sympathy with impulsive incorrectness than with strict justice.

At that time there was a cheap edition of Byron's works in contemplation, meant to bring them into circulation among the masses, and the pathos arising from the story of his domestic misfortunes was one great means relied on for giving it currency.

Under these circumstances some of Lady Byron's friends had proposed the question to her whether she had not a responsibility to society for the truth; whether she did right to allow these persons to gain influence over the popular mind by a silent consent to an utter falsehood. As her whole life had been passed in the most heroic self-abnegation and self sacrifice, the question was now proposed to her whether one more act of self-denial was not required of her, namely, to declare the truth, no matter at what expense to her own feelings.

For this purpose she told me she wished to recount the whole story to a person in whom she had confidence,—a person of another country, and out of the whole sphere of personal and local feelings which might be supposed to influence those in the country and station in life where the events really happened,—in order that I might judge whether anything more was required of her in relation to this history.

The interview had almost the solemnity of a death-bed confession, and Lady Byron told me the history which I have embodied in an article to appear in the "Atlantic Monthly." I have been induced to prepare it by the run which the Guiccioli book is having, which is from first to last an unsparing attack on Lady Byron's memory by Lord Byron's mistress.

When you have read my article, I want, not your advice as to whether the main facts shall be told, for on this point I am so resolved that I frankly say advice would do me no good. But you might help me, with your delicacy and insight, to make the manner of telling more perfect, and I want to do it as wisely and well as such story can be told.

My post-office address after July 1st will be Westport Point, Bristol Co., Mass., care of Mrs. I. M. Soule. The proof-sheets will be sent you by the publisher.

Very truly yours,

H. B. Stowe.

The Priory, 21 North Bank, December 10, 1869.

My dear Friend,— . . . In the midst of your trouble I was often thinking of you, for I feared that you were undergoing a considerable trial from the harsh and unfair judgments, partly the fruit of hostility glad to find an opportunity for venting itself, and partly of that unthinking cruelty which belongs to hasty anonymous journalism. For my own part, I should have preferred that the Byron question should never have been brought before the public, because I think the discussion of such subjects is injurious socially. But with regard to yourself, dear friend, I feel sure that, in acting on a different basis of impressions, you were impelled by pure, generous feeling. Do not think that I would have written to you of this point to express a judgment. I am anxious only to convey to you a sense of my sympathy and confidence, such as a kiss and a pressure of the hand could give if I were near you.

I trust that I shall hear a good account of Professor Stowe's health, as well as your own, whenever you have time to write me a word or two. I shall not be so unreasonable as to expect a long letter, for the hours of needful rest from writing become more and more precious as the years go on, but some brief news of you and yours will be especially welcome just now. Mr. Lewes unites with me in high regards to your husband and yourself, but in addition to that I have the sister woman's privilege of saying that I am always

Your affectionate friend,

M. H. Lewes.

Read more in this previous post about the epistolary friendship between Stowe and Eliot. 

Notes:

- Annabella Milbanke married Lord Byron in 1815, being the only woman Byron ever married. The couple remained legally married until Byron's death in 1824; they formally separated in September 1816.

- Harriet Beecher Stowe even expanded her article on Lady Byron into a full-length book, titled Lady Byron Vindicated (1870).

Source of both letters: Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled from Her Letters and Journals, by Charles Edward Stowe (1889)

Via: Project Gutenberg

Image top: Daguerreotype portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, the year her famous novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published.

Image bottom (collage): Portrait of Annabella Byron (nee Anne Isabella Milbanke) (1792-1860) by Charles Hayter, 1812; and Portrait of Lord Byron, British poet (1788–1824) by Thomas Phillips, 1813

Source of all images: Wikimedia Commons