Abstract
Most of Byron’s critics skip over ‘An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill’, understandably eager to get to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which was published only eight days later, when Byron awoke to find himself famous.1 To linger on the ‘Ode’ is to hold Byron on the threshold of fame, to capture him in a freeze frame just before his career takes off. Doing so enables us to glimpse him before it becomes clear what direction his life will take, and gives us a chance to peer behind the scenes at some of the machinery that will drive Byromania, propelling its star to the pinnacle of Romantic celebrity. Byron wrote to his political mentor Lord Holland that he was ‘apprehensive that your Lordship will think me […] half a framebreaker myself (BLJ, II, 166). In this chapter, I too am half a framebreaker. The frames that I aim to break are those chronological and conceptual frames that have led critics to ignore or dismiss the ‘Ode’. Incomplete understandings of legal definitions and parliamentary procedures have led critics mistakenly to frame the poem chronologically, representing it as a peevish comment on a completed legislative process. This characterisation is part of a conceptual frame in which Byron’s political engagement with Luddism can be dismissed as a failed effort in self-promotion, designed to launch his career in the House of Lords. These are the frames I would break.
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Notes
The phrase ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous’ was first attributed to Byron by Thomas Moore in his Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of his Life, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1830), I, 347.
As a young peer, Byron had patrician ambitions to shine in the House of Lords. He prepared himself for a career there with Speech Day orations at school, and once delayed his return to Harrow so that he could hear parliamentary speeches on Catholic emancipation (Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1957), I, 95–7).
He was a member of the Whig club at Cambridge, and took his seat in the House of Lords when he reached his majority in 1809. Before going abroad he attended seven sessions of the House (Marchand, I, 313n). Robert Charles Dallas claimed that ‘I often spoke to him of the superior and substantial fame, the way to which lay before him through the House of Lords, expressing my hope of one day seeing him an active and eloquent statesman.’ Robert Charles Dallas, Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron (1824) (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1977), pp. 189–90.
On Byron’s Speech Day oratory, see Paul Elledge, Lord Byron at Harrow School: Speaking Out, Talking Back, Acting Up, Bowing Out (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
D. N. Raymond, The Political Career of Lord Byron (New York: Henry Holt, 1924), p. 39.
The following narrative of the Bill’s progress through parliament draws on the Journals of the House of Lords, vol. 48 (London: HMSO, 1812), pp. 593–621; Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, pp. 974–9, and the discussion in Raymond, The Political Career of Lord Byron, pp. 44–5.
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: Fifteenth edition, with the last corrections of the author; and with notes and additions by Edward Christian, Esq., 4 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), IV, 5n.
‘Misdemeanor’, Thomas Edlyne Tomlins (with additions by Thomas Colpitts Granger), The Law Dictionary, 4th ed., 2 vols (London: J. and W. T. Clarke et al., 1835).
The rags were first turned into a liquid pulp. This pulp flowed onto a moving wire-mesh belt, where the water drained out of it and was sucked away, leaving a damp paper web. This passed through a series of steam-heated rollers, which dried the paper, and then between heavy calendar rollers, which gave it a smooth finish. Lee Erickson notes, ‘Since handmade paper was both harder to work with and had a greater percentage of waste because of defects in individual sheets, machine-made paper not only provided an improvement in the quality of publishing materials but also reduced the costs of printing by about 40 per cent. By 1825 over half of all paper in England was made by machine.’ Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 27.
James Moran, Printing Presses: History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 39.
The stamp tax was raised to 2d in 1789, 3½d in 1797 and 4d in 1815. It was reduced to 1d in 1836 and abolished in 1855. G. A. Cranfield, The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London: Longman, 1978), p. 89.
See A. Aspinall, ‘The Circulation of Newspapers in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), 29–43.
See Terry Nevett, ‘Advertising and Editorial Integrity in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Michael Harris and Alan Lee (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1986), pp. 149–67.
Stanley Morison, The English Newspaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. 165.
See Ian R. Christie, ‘James Perry of the Morning Chronicle, 1756–1821’, in Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Politics and Other Papers (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 334–58.
As an index of this growth, raw cotton imports quintupled between 1780 and 1800. See Asa Briggs, A Social History of England, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1983; 1999), pp. 206–7.
Frank Ongley Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934; 1969), p. 33.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963; 1965), p. 278. In what follows, I have leant heavily on Thompson’s account of the textile industry in this period, as it remains the most comprehensive and impressive. His conclusion that Luddism was always a ‘quasi-insurrectionary movement’ (p. 553) is, however, in opposition to Darvall’s earlier account, in Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England, which sees Luddism as an industrial movement without explicit political aims. The differences are discussed in Angus MacIntyre’s introduction to the second edition of Darvall’s book. Brian Bailey distinguishes midland from northern Luddites, arguing that there is ‘no shred of evidence for any political aims’ in the midlands, but that many Luddites in Yorkshire and Lancashire ‘were insurrectionary in temper’.
Brian Bailey, The Luddite Rebellion (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), pp. 145, 147.
See also E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, in his Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), pp. 5–22
Malcolm I. Thomis, The Luddites (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970).
Jeffrey W. Vail has suggested that Byron might have shown the poem to Samuel Rogers, and discussed it with Thomas Moore. Jeffrey W. Vail, The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 51.
Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1987), p. 50.
E. P. Thompson mentions the weavers’ poetry, and quotes at length from one of the ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’ ballads on pp. 322–3. In a collection of documents reprinted from the public records office, Malcolm I. Thomis provides examples of a Luddite song (pp. 1–2) and poem (pp. 55–6). See Luddism in Nottinghamshire, ed. Malcolm I. Thomis (London: Phillimore, 1972).
John Miller, ‘Songs of the Labour Movement’, in The Luddites and Other Essays, ed. Lionel M. Munby (London: Michael Katanka, 1971), pp. 115–42.
See also Kevin Binfield, Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
Cited in George Paston and Peter Quennel, To Lord Byron: Feminine Profiles from Unpublished Letters 1807–1824 (London: John Murray, 1939), p. 101.
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© 2007 Tom Mole
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Mole, T. (2007). ‘An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill’: The Embarrassment of Industrial Culture. In: Byron’s Romantic Celebrity. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288386_2
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