Lord Byron and the Novel | Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form (2025)

We argued in Chapter Three that Byron’s radical politics and poetics offered a future-anterior model that is profoundly antirealist in its disruption of the time–action–character nexus. Byron challenged the notion of deep subjectivity by effacing the line between author and character, exposed the narrative seams between cause and effect, and championed the jagged time of revolutionary event. Here, we want to look at a collection of realist novels that treat Byron thematically to address how they handle that treatment formally, at the level of narrative structure and realist technique.1 Our argument is not that only novels about Byron operate in these ways. Rather, these novels operate in such standard ways as to present baseline examples for how realist novels work to weld together time, action, and character. That some of the most influential novelists of the period spent entire novels working through the formal challenge of Byron reveals the possibility that Byron directly influenced the rise of the novel in ways that have not been fully appreciated. The books we examine in this chapter are, therefore, not the only novels one might examine to read Byron’s impact on the form, and we hope that others will continue this work by producing new readings of other novelists from the period.2 Our goal in this chapter is to be productive, not exhaustive, in our exploration of Byron’s influence on the genre of the novel. We address several novels briefly so that we can illustrate in a single chapter just how pervasive the novel’s engagement with Byron really was across the nineteenth century. By prying open the gap between structure and content, we aim here to demonstrate how a particular antirealist legacy is written into and over by Victorian realism in ways that fit what would become in hindsight the predominant novelistic mold. We have already explored some of this in Dickens; here we consider Byron’s place in this shift.

While the novels we address in this chapter are not isolated examples of the formal processes that interest us, the choice of Byron is not a random one. Indeed, our work on this book began with a question for which we did not have a satisfactory answer: why did Victorian novels for decades after his death make Byron, a Romantic poet who died in 1824, the central figure of their plots? It seemed to us that we were not just dealing with a fascination with the Byronic hero. Past studies have addressed this persistence of Byron in thematic terms, a loose amalgam of traits that forms the figure of the Byronic/Satanic hero and that we can pinpoint in a variety of media across time.3 We felt that there had to be more at work in these novels’ treatment of Byron’s political and formal legacy—and we think there is.

Our argument attempts to avoid the language of threat, challenge, reaction, subversion and containment that would have our story follow the agonistic, cause-and-effect logic of the novel’s own temporal signature—a Bildungsroman about the roman—as if the novel were itself a fictional character responding to the threat of poetry, now helpfully reduced to a single, quasi-heroic figure, Byron himself. We do sometimes represent the relationship between novel and poetry as a struggle, and authors certainly adopt agonistic language in thinking about the relationship of one genre to another, but our goal is always to return to the problem of genre and of form, the ways different works structure our understanding of time–action–character.

Once we turned to such generic rather than merely thematic issues, we could read in novels that have nothing to do with Byron the calcification of the dominant approach that still shapes our own understanding of reality: a formal approach to temporality and subjectivity that transcends any one genre. Here, in this chapter, we think it useful to examine a series of Victorian novels that function as thought experiments about the Byronic legacy, exploring the extent to which the novel engaged his revolutionary charge on a formal level. From the perspective of the novel’s eventual dominance, it can be hard to recognize the multiple ways that novels interrogated the formal alternatives found in poetry—and we do not mean just the expressivist lyric. Indeed, we cannot understand the complexity of the novel’s engagement with poetry if we accept that poetry and the novel are mutually exclusive categories. Byronic heroes are everywhere in nineteenth-century novels, but what concerns us are the structural mechanisms employed by writers to deal with the formal alternatives to the novel (and to the expressivist lyric) that we will argue in Part Three the verse-novel offered readers.

Byron was significant for the novel in multiple ways. At the simplest level, he represented a diseased figure that worked as a foil to the healthiest tendencies of realist fiction. The Byronic poet’s dreamy idealism, sexual perversity, narcissistic self-involvement, and theatricalized breakdown of the distinction between the private and the public self were seen as the constituent opposites to the novel’s realistic narratives of disciplined desire, privatized individuality, and civic responsibility. Novelists represented this opposition in their stories, as we will see, and this narrative of subversion and containment was a tool that delegitimized alternative ways of thinking about the real and our relationship to it. However, the complexity of the novel’s characterization of Byron is evidenced by the fact that up to the Romantic period it was novel reading itself that was represented as autoerotic and dangerously isolating. In other words, the Romantic poet, and particularly Byron, came to embody the most feared aspects of the novel itself, a fear legible throughout the nineteenth century as various novelistic subgenres (sensation fiction, the French novel, pornographic narratives) captured and offended the imaginations of middle-class arbiters of taste.4 Even at its simplest, then, Byron’s relationship to the novel was never one of pure “opposition,” no matter how frequently he was cast into an oppositional role. Byron was, more properly, a figure to be cured rather than cast away, for the positive aspects of Byron’s legacy (idealism, engagement, feeling, and cosmopolitanism) constitute the heart of the novel’s aesthetic and ideological project. We believe that cure took formal shape as well as thematic charge, and we offer a series of short readings to illustrate the nature and persistence of the Victorian novel’s engagement with the Byronic.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Before we get to the Victorians, let us offer a quick preview by way of the Romantic period’s most famous Byronic novel, Frankenstein. In Mary Shelley’s 1818 science-fiction landmark, begun at Byron’s rented Swiss villa and boasting three Byronic heroes, a series of framed narrations are nested around what can be termed an event: the reanimation of life and the creation of a new species.5 Victor Frankenstein imagines himself as a revolutionary who will usher in a new world without death, and, indeed, his discovery of life’s secrets plays out as a revelatory leap into the future, a “sudden light” that illuminates a truth so simple and evident that he is surprised to be the first to see it. But this scientific event, a jolt that promises to reorder the world beyond the narrative closure of death, is layered over many times by the narrative frames that contain it with all the force of optative regret. We encounter Victor, not as a young revolutionary, but as a broken and regretful man driven by remorse (“You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I—I have lost everything and cannot begin life anew” [36–7]) who offers his story to Walton as a cautionary tale: “I do not know that the relation of my disasters will be useful to you; yet, when I reflect that you are pursuing the same course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am, I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale” (38). By dividing the Byronic figure among three characters—Victor, Walton, and the creature, who mirror each other in ways too familiar to require our detailing them here—Frankenstein offers a story of radical ambition that repeats across narrative frames and cures itself of its own revolutionary energies.

Much of this curative work is handled by the narrative retrospect that settles the story into a pattern of inevitable cause and effect. Victor, for example, comes to believe that “nothing can alter my destiny” and exhorts Walton, “listen to my history, and you will perceive how irrevocably it is determined” (39). Because the irrevocable is more profound for having once been contingent, Victor focuses on moments when things might have been different:

Victor’s narration becomes one long look back at a series of decisive moments and failures to act (e.g., his refusal of the creature, his refusal to understand the meaning of “I shall be with you on your wedding-night” [236], and his refusal to create the creature’s mate). As the bodies pile up, the narrative becomes a literal chase to the death after the consequences of actions that cannot be undone.

The creature is perhaps the novel’s most interesting figure for fizzled revolution, for his very creation is an event that is then normalized through educational narrative (the scientific path taken by his creator) and personal bildung (the narrative of origins modeled on and refracted through the creature’s reading). The creature’s identification with Milton’s Satan saturates him with optative longing for the life denied him (“I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel” [137]), but does not set him on a revolutionary path.6 Indeed, the creature sees himself in realist terms as locked into both narrative and subjectivity by a series of actions that follow a strict cause-and-effect logic (“In [Victor’s] murder my crimes are consummated; the miserable series of my being is wound to its close!” [310–11]). Although his creation occludes death, he considers death as both the only and the desired telos for his story: “the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them for ever” (317).

It is left to Walton—the narrator, inset reader, and last man standing—to understand and act on the tale he has heard. While Victor never lets go of what the novel portrays as his misguided heroism and narcissistic self-regard (“You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your names adored, as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour, and the benefit of mankind. . . . Oh! Be men, or be more than men” [304]), Walton appears to understand the full realistic import of Victor’s narrative: he turns his ice-locked boat around, heads away from glory and toward safe domestic harbor, and saves his crew just in time. What seems most interesting here is how the narrative frames that disjoint the time and place of the story, exposing narrative as such, also produce the effect of continuity by staging the narrative’s reception as both action and consequence. Indeed, Frankenstein offers an inset tutorial on how to read—realistically, developmentally, and for character.

Framed narration also teaches us how not to read. In Frankenstein, as in many of the novels that explored the dangers of reading or emulating Byron (Glenarvon, Headlong Hall, Persuasion, Pelham, Vivian Grey, Venetia, Sartor Resartus, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Doctor’s Wife, Felix Holt—the list goes on and on), we are taught how reading fiction can lead us astray unless we can accept it as fiction, however “true” (je sais bien mais quand-même, I know but nevertheless). Victor Frankenstein and the creature are both poor readers. When Victor turns to “Natural philosophy” (67), he does so with the sort of credulity previously feared in readers of Gothic novels: “The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfillment of which I most eagerly sought” (69). The creature is similarly credulous in reading the poetry of Milton’s Paradise Lost: “I read it,” the creature states, “as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history” (157). Byron invited readers, by his own example, to break down the separation between fiction and reality with the goal of changing the parameters of reality itself. Mary Shelley teaches us to read the Byronic figure with suspicion so as to preserve fiction as separate from reality, even as fiction teaches us lessons about how that reality is structured. It is not a coincidence that the best examples of framed narration in the nineteenth century (Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness) are novels that engage with the legacy of the Byronic hero.

If we understand Walton as Victor 2.0, we can see that the generational plot enables a do-over narrative in which one generation lives out and recoups the “might have been” of another, learning from past mistakes and dissolving revolutionary energies. This is a structural solution to a radical problem in which the present redeems the past, and it is necessarily backward looking as it settles the past into place and creates continuous narrative. This splitting technique works through time and across generations, laterally (siblings and doubles that trigger the optative of lives not led), and structurally in nested tales that allow echoes of plot and character to reverberate across narrative frames. We will see it reverberate across the century in the Victorian examples to come.

Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus

When critics discuss Romantic ideology in Victorian novels, they often reduce Romanticism either to those characteristics that are tied to the expressivist lyric or to a single character, the Byronic/Satanic hero. Both moves obscure the influence of Romantic poetry on the structural make-up of the novel as genre. As we saw in this book’s introduction, critical habit has divided the field of experience to read lyric and narrative as incommensurate, with lyric poetry represented as subjective-kairotic-ideal and narrative as objective-chronological-real. Because Byron lost the battle for literary hegemony and was instead turned into a stick figure—a set of Romantic characteristics divorced from the structural and generic problems Byron raised for both the novel and the lyric at the start of the nineteenth century—his influence can be hard to see.

When it comes to visionary experience, transcendence supposedly disrupts narrative through “lyric’s kairos—the capture of the instant of ecstatic intensity.”7 But narratives easily accommodate, even require, such moments of transcendence, which Kermode terms the aevum and calls “the time-order of novels” (72). Kermode makes it clear that what we see here is a reformulation of Augustinian conversion narrative for the purpose of narrative and personal biography. In the Victorian period, the more common version of this narrative has us return from the moment of revelation or simply of intense personal feeling to a yet greater commitment to action in this world, a conversion narrative perhaps most influentially instantiated for the Victorians, not by a novel, but by Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and in exact opposition to Byron: “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe,”8 Carlyle exhorts. As he continues,

What is significant is the temporal signature of Carlyle’s negotiation with the eternal, which perfectly exemplifies the subordination of Augustinian conversion to a single cause-and-effect narrative of the self, with Byron as the excluded middle, what the subject must get over. What remains is a subdued call simply to do your duty.9

Carlyle thus influentially counters a Byronic approach to the act-event, substituting, especially in the Augustinian conversion narrative of Sartor Resartus, a Wordsworthian for a Byronic approach to vision and action.10 Jay Clayton, in Romantic Vision and the Novel, helpfully lays out the narrative logic of Wordsworth’s approach to visionary experience:11

We can see why this Wordsworthian conversion narrative would be attractive to Carlyle since it allows him to contain Byron’s trenchant critique of the present, which in Sartor Resartus becomes the occluded visionary moment recast as dark night of the soul. Carlyle can thus reject Byron’s insistence on a revolutionary relation to the present in favor of an ideology of work and duty.

Byron’s call to break with the current order in pursuit of militant, revolutionary action becomes in Carlyle dutiful and habitual action in the present, a position that has its political analogue in reform vs. revolution. Edward Bulwer-Lytton puts it well, writing in 1833 at almost the same time Carlyle was serializing Sartor Resartus in Fraser’s Magazine (November 1833–August 1834):

Like so many Victorians after him, Bulwer-Lytton connects Byron’s poetic sensibility with adolescence here, thus subordinating Byron’s temporal stance of the future anterior to the bildungsroman of a single life. Mentioning that Byron’s melancholic “habit of mind, so unfortunate to the possessor, is not unfavourable to poetry,” Bulwer-Lytton explains that “after a certain age we grow out of it; the soul becomes accustomed to the mill, and follows the track mechanically, which it commenced in disgust.”14

Benjamin Disraeli’s Venetia

Benjamin Disraeli, along with his good friend Bulwer-Lytton, fell under the potent spell of Byron, and nowhere more so than in their respective novels, where, as Andrew Elfenbein has shown, both authors work through their fascination with Byronic Romanticism to arrive at something characterized as a more “mature” (less queer) Victorianism.15 While Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton clearly work to reform the sexual dangers perceived in the Byronic legacy, their transformation of Byron’s political legacy had equally important—if not unconnected—effects. For Victorian authors who wished to enter Parliament and influence public opinion, as both Bulwer-Lytton and Disraeli went on to do, Byromania was a potentially dangerous preoccupation, particularly after the radical unrest in England from 1816 to 1820.16 Yet both authors turned to Byron in their novels to formulate their own understanding of political agency and historical change. Both salvage from Byronism its political momentum and press it into the service of the Victorian novel and state in a way that quells the radical potential of the revolutionary event we theorized in Chapter Three.

When Victorian novels address Byron, usually by way of some analog in a novel’s roster of characters, the de rigueur representation of sexuality and perversity is often the obverse of a discussion about politics and class. Indeed, bodily or mental perversity serves as an easy way to dismiss what is represented in the novels themselves as the threat of Byron’s radical ideology. Elfenbein has argued that, for both Bulwer-Lytton and Disraeli, suspicions about queerness “functioned as a cover, only not for their ‘true’ sexuality. Rather, reproducing the open secret of Byronism allowed them to keep in the closet not fascinating sexual secrets but the more banal ones of their social positions”;17 that is, Bulwer-Lytton was poor and Disraeli a Jew. We do not disagree, but we wonder if the pose of the laughable coxcomb which, for example, Pelham adopts to hide his real political ambitions, does not also deflect a much less banal fear—the fear of radical unrest that was behind the impetus for and restraints placed on the Reform Bill of 1832.

We can make this argument about Pelham, but we will concentrate here on Disraeli’s Venetia (1837), which, in its tale of Romantic geniuses and the women that love them offers a blueprint for the domestication of Byron’s transnational energies, the “fixing” of his radicalism and mobility as and by domestic service. The plot does much of the work: Venetia Herbert is raised in seclusion by her mother, Lady Annabel Herbert, who has separated from Venetia’s father—the poet, libertine, and radical Member of Parliament, Marmion Herbert. Marmion, who is named by Disraeli as Percy Shelley but is even more clearly a figure for Byron, follows his political convictions to America, where he backs the rebels and becomes a traitor to England, and from which he returns to melancholic exile in various European countries. Venetia falls in love with another Byronic figure, Lord Plantagenet Cadurcis, who himself becomes a famous poet, libertine, radical Member of Parliament, and melancholic exile. (He also owns an exotic menagerie, popularizes orientalism, receives cross-dressed visits from aristocratic female fans, and is praised for his dark beauty.) The four meet in Italy, where Annabel and Marmion Herbert are reunited, Venetia and Lord Cadurcis renew their love, and the two poets die together while sailing an open boat in a freak Mediterranean storm, which leaves Venetia free to marry the next Lord Cadurcis, Plantagenet’s cousin and reformist Member of Parliament, George.

Essentially, Venetia is a novel about the dangers of loving Byron. The heroine, who adores her Byronic father and only learns to adore her Byronic lover after he models himself on her father, spends much of the novel’s four hundred pages in a brain fever. Both Byrons also suffer from excessive feeling. Their melancholic worldliness—figured by sarcasm, radical politics, and relentless travel—is not the egotistical cynicism it appears to be but the wounded response of exquisite sensibility to the pains of romantic and political rejection. Raw English nerves masked as disdainful cosmopolitans, these Byrons travel the world but ultimately seek only to rest on English soil and in English arms. They care too much and, like both Romantic geniuses and Victorian heroines, must learn to discipline their passion or die trying. The book’s third Byronic figure—George, Lord Cadurcis—is short on Romantic genius but long on Victorian discipline. A man of the world, he has the open liberality of one who has traveled widely, but he replaces the high-strung sympathies of his cousin with good English common sense. He is well liked, effective if not spectacular in Parliament, and a proponent not of revolution but reform.

Disraeli claims in his opening dedication to Lord Lyndhurst that he has in his novel “attempted to shadow forth, though as ‘in a glass darkly,’ two of the most renowned and refined spirits that have adorned these our latter days.”18 He means Byron (Lord Plantagenet Cadurcis) and Shelley (who appears to be shadowed forth in the character of Marmion Herbert). However, what we are given is the splitting of Byron into two characters, a common strategy when novelists address Byron’s political legacy. Why the split? Plantagenet Cadurcis embodies the Byron represented in the period either as a coxcomb or an invalid, driven to perversity by the “constitutional principle of melancholy” (80) that inspires and is intimately associated with his poetry. (“How melancholy! Quite the poet” [217].) In response to a principle of melancholy that in Byron is structurally connected to both his ethics and radicalism, such a representation reduces him to “the spoiled child of society; a forward and petted darling” (223–4). The philosophy in Cadurcis’ poetry, which is repeatedly associated in Venetia with the danger of revolution, is dismissed as either insincere, borrowed from Marmion without proper understanding, or a product of his “absorbing egotism” (195). Marmion Herbert, on the other hand, represents those aspects of Byron’s character that were properly inspiring and revolutionary. The number of deflections required to represent this side of Byron’s character attests to the delicacy of the political subject matter, even in 1837. First, Disraeli names this side of Byron’s legacy Shelley, even though the most important details of Marmion Herbert’s life work through the most incendiary aspects of Byron’s career—unlike Byron, Shelley did not himself join a revolutionary fight.19 Second, he relocates Byron temporally and spatially to the period of the American Revolution, where he raises a regiment for the American republic and is hailed as a hero. Third, Disraeli represents this Byron as growing old and weary of his political struggles, turning away from poetry and philosophy and returning to Lady Byron. His “illusions had all vanished,” Disraeli writes, “and the result of all his profound study, lofty aspirations, and great conduct was, that he sighed for rest” (302). Plantagenet Cadurcis similarly rejects his earlier idealism and trades politics for the love of Venetia before he heads off with his doppelgänger in an open boat.

Disraeli is thus able to leave both Parliament and Venetia to George, a proper Tory who, “without a single advantage save those that nature had conferred upon him” (281), manages to succeed at the House of Commons whereas Plantagenet failed at the House of Lords: “Of all the members of the House of Commons he was perhaps the only one that everybody praised, and his success in the world of fashion had been as remarkable as in his profession” (281). We are presented with the triumph of conservative, masculine, heterosexual, Tory-led reform that enacts allegorically Disraeli’s own need to reform the radical Whig tradition that preceded him.

The generational and romantic allegory in which two dangerously Byronic figures who turn their backs on England are replaced by a third who returns home to run and reform it suggests how Venetia wants the reader to feel about Byronic cosmopolitanism and political action. The unrooted version, tied to aristocratic privilege and passionate excess, is no model at all, for it is never properly selfless or detached; its apparent disinterest is truly ungoverned interest, patriotic and idealist fervor gone bad and transcontinental. The cured version, on the other hand, brings home a sympathy forged by contact with others and in which bitterness and selfish interest take no part. George Cadurcis is a self-made man who accepts his title and lands only after having sailed the world in service to the crown and making his name as a popular Tory politician in the House of Commons, a man of the people much more fully than his radical cousin ever was. As proof of this, it is George who saves Plantagenet from an angry English mob that tries to tear him limb from limb.

It is worth taking a moment to unpack this remarkable scene, where Disraeli works out on the level of plot the victory of Tory reform over both the lower-class mob and any upper-class radical who has pretensions to lead them to revolution. Like Marmion Herbert, Cadurcis is forced to leave England, though the reason in his case is a duel fought because of Lady Monteagle, a thinly veiled analog for Lady Caroline Lamb. The public has a “fit of morality” (267) and turns against him outside the House of Lords. Cadurcis rides alone into the crowd and is attacked. While the members of the House of Lords look on helplessly, awaiting the military, Captain George Cadurcis and fellow members of the House of Commons save Cadurcis:

Once the Horse Guards arrive, “everybody ran away, and in a few minutes all Palace-yard was as still as if the genius of the place rendered a riot impossible” (271).

Instead of the revolutionary mob that the periodical reviews of the 1820s imagined Byron leading, we have instead the mob turning against a vain, ineffectual Byron. Instead of an overturning of the British parliament, we have Byron saved by the chivalrous members of the House of Commons exerting violence on the rebelling lower and middle classes not of France but the “Petty France” of Westminster. Instead of the commanding genius of Byron instilling revolution, we have the “genius of the place” rendering revolution “impossible.” As he confesses to Venetia before his marriage proposal, George is neither a genius nor a great man. But he is a steady one, and through him the novel recasts the threat of disruptive revolutionary action as gradual, developmental reform from within the current order. This swap is clearly thematic, but it is also formal, enacting a familiar narrative of generational substitution and slow change precipitated by heroic action taken at the “defining moment.”

George’s heroic act brings him a different sort of fame from the cult of celebrity surrounding his genius cousin, the pet of society and finally its exiled pariah. The revolutionary politics of Plantagenet Cadurcis and Marmion Herbert put them beyond the pale of national action. They come home to England in urns, while Lord George comes home to a title, an abbey, a wife, a seat in Parliament, and the love of the nation. If Venetia, like other novels, is an answer, then the question is: how can Whiggish—even revolutionary—politics be put into service of the conservative state? How can global politics and people be brought home to England? On its way to something like Arnoldian liberalism, the early Victorian novel salvages from Romantic poets and poetry the sweetness and light of Continental experience without the taint of European revolution. The point is to learn to appreciate, in fact to love, what is presented to the reader as a new status quo: not the wild Romantic genius of the revolutionary exile, but the dispassionate judgment of the Victorian reformer, schooled in the world but wedded to the domestic scene—a love that allows the conversion narrative to play out at a national scale.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Perhaps the most famous example of the Victorian Byronic novel, Wuthering Heights (1847) repeats many of the strategies we have already seen for harnessing the radical energies of the Byronic figure—but it also gives rein to these energies in ways that explain why Brontë’s novel has so often been considered an anomaly of sorts: “Romantic” instead of properly Victorian and more “poetic” than other novels.20 What critics generally mean by this is that the treatment of “lyrical transcendence” and “visionary experience” in Wuthering Heights troubles their idea of the novelistic as defined against these things.21 We have argued that transcendence is not only compatible with but also constituent for novelistic narrative, as for example in its guise as revelation, catastrophe, or closure. In this section, we want to think about how the desire for something beyond both propels narrative and exceeds its bounds, and we want to link this double action to the melancholic Byronic hero.

Byron’s famous melancholy was not the toothless ennui that it was often portrayed as being (then and since), but a political stance that, as we saw in Chapter Three, pursues a principle of justice that eschews the limitations of chronological time, thus challenging two key tenets of novelistic time: developmental narrative (change over time/slow reform) and the cult of the “right moment.” It is no coincidence that the models for the Byronic hero (Satan, Cain, Prometheus, the Wandering Jew, the vampire) are figures that cannot die and therefore appear to us without the anticipation of retrospection, the wait for a closure that will trace and cement a record of contingent narrative made inevitable by its ending. By offering a death plot for Byron, the novel commonly substituted a developmental narrative of Victorian mourning for the revolutionary persistence of a Byronic melancholy that refuses to let go of its lost object.

Heathcliff, of course, is the very model of the melancholic subject.22 He suffers from “monomania” (277), as Lockwood puts it, because he cannot let go of his lost object of affection, Catherine. As Heathcliff tells Nelly Dean,

Heathcliff’s obsessive love dwells in even as it occults loss, for it refuses the realistic movement of time that sheds possibilities: Catherine is still with him. This persistence of love after death is literalized in the novel’s Gothic plot, which we will get to in a moment, but first it is essential to note how Heathcliff’s melancholic attachment delinks the chronological chain of past–present–future: he has always loved her, loves her, will always love her. This is what is so “romantic” about his famously undying love—in all senses of romantic, including “anti-realistic,” because it is never end-stopped by closure. Here is a moment for which it is never too late.

Indeed, if there is an “event” in the novel in the way we have been employing the idea as an effect that exceeds its cause, it is love. We might argue that Heathcliff himself is a human event—he emerges suddenly from outside the small world of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange with neither last name nor necessitating backstory, and reorders that world beyond recognition—but it would be better to say that the love between Heathcliff and Catherine is the “uncaused cause” of the story. To read Wuthering Heights as a transcendent love story, we must accept that their love simply is. Their love has no developmental narrative, dissolves both time (“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath” [72]) and individual subjectivity (“I am Heathcliff” [72]; “it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!” [146]) and takes the idea of the “right one” to its ontological breaking point. There are decisive moments in their shared story, which it should be noted are all tied to Catherine who, it could be argued, does develop after her earlier expressions of transcendent love—she leaves the Heights for the Grange, marries Edgar Linton, and dies—but these things that have such dramatic narrative effect do not alter what Wuthering Heights offers to the reader as the unshakeable bond of a love unbounded by subjectivity or death.

Heathcliff’s melancholic attachment is felt in the novel as a generic tension between Gothic and realist elements. Long after the second generation of inhabitants at Wuthering Heights has begun an optative reboot, which ushers in the familiar narrative cure of Byronic disruption by way of moral and domestic reform, Heathcliff is still seeing ghosts. The Gothic aspects of Wuthering Heights need no rehearsal here, but we would well remember that past critics have connected the novel’s ghosts with visionary Romanticism and sublime transcendence.23 It is easy to see how the Gothic both drives plot (whose ghost is at the window? why is Heathcliff so broody?) and resists it. The two streams meet at the end of the novel, when Heathcliff’s revenge plot—a recursive drive that propels the second half of the narrative—grinds down before it can reach closure, stilled by the “unearthly vision” of Catherine and the promise of their reunion. As Heathcliff himself offers by way of narrative critique,

Heathcliff makes clear that he has not changed or reformed; but here at the “precise time,” he cannot be bothered to act. Another chronology beckons, one without a “right time” because without definite closure. He describes his approach to Catherine as the long slow down before an unreachable event horizon: “It was a strange way of killing, not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths” (249). As Heathcliff tells it, Catherine is his “universal idea,” his goal, and personal vanishing point: “I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it. They have yearned towards it so long, and so unwaveringly, that I’m convinced it will be reached—and soon—because it has devoured my existence: I am swallowed up in the anticipation of its fulfilment” (278). Here, death is figured precisely as narrative closure.

The most interesting thing about Heathcliff’s story, however, is that death is not the end of it. After he dies, the main narrative of Wuthering Heights shifts gears to dynamic character reform on its way to realistic, marital closure. The second generation of characters, Hareton Earnshaw (Heathcliff’s replacement and “son”) and Cathy Linton Heathcliff (Catherine’s daughter) are creatures of time—they change and grow. The generational story thus engages the counterfactual, as what might have been between Heathcliff and Catherine is played out in more realistic and Victorian terms by their children, who fall in love during scenes of tutored reading that will be familiar to any reader of Victorian novels as the sign of moral re-education and domesticated eros.24 But the Gothic plot of eternal love persists in their parents, and Catherine and Heathcliff are said by the locals to walk the earth as undying spirits. The novel thus gives us two generic and temporal options for how to read it: Gothic (infinity without development or closure) and realistic (development through time marked and ensured by closure). The reader’s choice is conditioned by the novel’s formal technique, in which framed narratives teach us to be vigilant about the act of narration. Lockwood, the narrator of the outer frame who relays the inset tale told to him by Nelly, is a notoriously bad reader who is unable to interpret the events before him properly and blunders his way through the novel. Nelly is biased and self-interested. Indeed, the entire narrational structure of Wuthering Heights warns us off uncritical reading.

To the extent that the novel tutors us on how to read both realism and its own ending—over and against the “idle tales” of the villagers who see the undying Heathcliff and Catherine roaming the moors—it also invites us to read against Lockwood, who has never understood any part of the story and completes the novel standing at the shared gravesite of Catherine and Heathcliff and wondering “how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (288). Since virtually everyone who has ever read Wuthering Heights can imagine such a thing, which has been key to the novel’s enduring romantic appeal, Lockwood’s final lines leave the door open to restless infinity. The narrative frames thus allow for the flickering of generic aspect that we will tie to larger problems of form in Part Three. For now, it is enough to register that the verse-novel is not the only genre that makes use of its own hybridity for narrative effect.

Our point here is not to reinscribe the separation of lyric transcendence and narrative momentum or to suggest that Wuthering Heights is a Romantic or poetic novel because it contains moments of transcendence. Novels do contain moments of transcendence. Our claim is that the melancholy of its Byronic hero takes formal as well as psychological shape—or, rather, that it structures a version of time–action–character that pulls against the developmental momentum and dynamic character of realist time. What feels remarkable about Wuthering Heights is that it does not fully reintegrate event into narrative. Heathcliff may not be a revolutionary on the Byronic model, and his melancholic dissatisfaction may not produce systemic change—indeed, he dismantles the novel’s patriarchal system only to re-establish it with himself as head—but he presents us with a surplus that closure does not fully erase.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864)

We have argued that the narratively significant closural moment of death is crucial for the novel’s structural approach to the triumvirate of time–action–character, which invites us to read backward from the moment of death to a narrative laid out as inevitably arising from choices that both express and cement character. Byron approached death (and catastrophe) quite differently, offering a formally different understanding of the act-event in which we leap forward into the future instead of looking back at the past. We think it significant, then, that so many Victorian novels stage Byron’s death over and over.

These novels treat Byron and Byronic politics as lost Romantic objects—lost, so they can be mourned and retrieved in altered form. This mourning-work transforms the insistent melancholy that drives the revolutionary potential of Byron’s future-anterior approach. Byronism lingers for Victorians in significant ways: politically as the globalism or radicalism of the Whig cosmopolitan who threatens revolution; ontologically as a theatrical, Satanic hero who resists narrative development and breaks down the separation between fiction and reality; and formally as poetic drive released from the dictates of closure. In staging the funeral of fictional Byrons, novels reform Byronism as middle-class moral engagement, naturalized bourgeois subjectivity, and realistic, often domestic, narrative—some more successfully than others. The ideal Victorian Byron is therefore both dead and alive, ready to be killed in iterations repeated across the century. Byron lends himself to this treatment because of his own peculiar relationship to death and to the dead, a melancholy unwillingness to let go of the lost object that is closely bound to his understanding of revolution.

What did Victorian readers get out of experiencing Byron’s death? What perspectives would the dead and undying form of Byron open for the reader? Our test case in this section is an 1864 novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon about a novel reader obsessed with the death of Byron that offers an extended engagement with the lost Romantic object and extracts from that engagement a refined Victorian subjectivity and a clarified domestic realism. A testimony to the power of fiction and the transformative potential of fictionalized death, the novel reframes Byron’s loss as the reader’s gain. The Doctor’s Wife is paradigmatic in that it does not just happen to kill Byron; it is driven to it by its own fictional and political investments. Killing Byron activates the potential of his figure for the Victorian novel and makes him immortal—but only in the instant of his own death25 and only insofar as it allows the reader to close her Byron once and for all.

Braddon’s heroine, Isabel Gilbert, closes her Byron only after total enthrallment to it. Isabel, the titular doctor’s wife and a consumptive reader of both Romantic poetry and Victorian novels, nurses a fantasy of being with Byron at his deathbed, living in the imagined moment of his imminent loss: “She carried her ideal world wherever she went, and was tending delirious Byron at Missolonghi . . . while the shop-man slapped the butter on the scale.”26 Isabel’s Byron is always on the brink of death, and when she meets a writer of Byronic verses, Roland Landsell, she naturally expects him to die. Roland is a “splendid Byronic creature” (138), “Byron alive again” (139), who exhibits “ennui” (127) and “morbid melancholy” (144), and who “suffered from a milder form of that disease in a wild paroxysm of which [. . .] Byron horrified society with Don Juan” (150). At the start of the novel, Lansdell travels in the wrong direction and returns from Greece, where he has been “upon a Byronic kind of tour” to ease or indulge the symptoms of a “noxious disease of our time, the fatal cynicism that transforms youth into a malady for which age is the only cure” (85).

From Isabel’s adoring perspective, Roland is “A real poet, a real, living, breathing poet, who only wanted to lame himself and turn his collars down to become a Byron” (136). He (almost) seduces Isabel away from her husband, ruins her reputation, and fills her every thought: “She knew nothing, she thought nothing, except that a modern Lord Byron was walking by her side” (139). Roland intends to die early and imagines that death will come as a relief from his ennui, failed radical political career, self-imposed exile, and disaffected Byronic poetry, which the novel quotes at some length. “I do not consider long life to be an advantage,” he says, “unless one can be warm and young forever” (176). This makes sense to Isabel: “Of course he would die young; Beings always have so died, and always must. [. . .] It would be almost better that he should break a blood vessel, or catch a fever, or commit suicide, than that he should ever live to have grey hair, or wear spectacles and double-soled boots” (176).

First, though, the novel must dispatch Isabel’s husband so the heroine’s education can happen in the space between two deaths and as a function of their difference. George Gilbert dies slowly, of typhoid. Isabel thus gets her wish to attend the deathbed of a George who loves her. But she is repulsed by George’s death, the reality of which she cannot grasp: “She needed the doctor’s solemn assurance that her husband was really dead before she could bring herself to believe that the white swoon, the chill heaviness of the passive hand, did indeed mean death” (369). Death presents Isabel with a representational crisis, and she imagines the preferable experience of second-hand death buffered by text:

George’s real body turns inside out the equation of death and immortality; his is not an absent presence but a present absence—a what, not a who—and Isabel experiences it as abjection.

Isabel turns from George’s deathbed to Roland’s, and the scene is much more literary. Roland has a deathbed conversion away from Byronism and toward Carlyle, Tennyson, and Christ, leaving his Romanticism for what the novel portrays as adult Victorianism. Between lines of In Memoriam, Roland begs Isabel’s forgiveness and asks her to “remember my wasted life” if ever “you should find yourself with the means of doing great good, of being useful to your fellow creatures” (391). Isabel leaves to pray for Roland’s recovery, and when she returns hears a “low, convulsive sobbing” and sees a woman’s form prostrate at the foot of a bed that is otherwise screened from view (395). Isabel begs to see Roland but is told “never upon this earth anymore! You must think of him as something infinitely better and brighter than you ever knew him here” (395). This, Isabel understands: “She had no need of plainer words to tell her he was dead. She felt the ground reel suddenly beneath her feet, and saw the gradual rising of a misty darkness that shut out the world, and closed about her like the silent waters through which a drowning man goes down to death” (395).

Isabel experiences Roland’s death as her own because she has a fictional relationship to it. She hears another’s sobs, sees another’s grief, and misses altogether the moment of death and the view of the body. She can, in other words, experience this death more fully—and more productively—because vicariously. This is how Romantic poets are supposed to die, supposed always already to have died, and Isabel can draw from this unexperienced experience the elixir of a compensatory Victorianism. She takes Roland’s money and place as local patron, and she becomes the reformed Romantic that Roland might have been, had he lived. Which is to say that Roland’s deathbed conversion happens to her, its witness, and as optative recovery narrative. Where once Isabel “sighed to sit at the feet of a Byron, grand and gloomy and discontented, baring his white brow to the midnight blast, and raving against the baseness and ingratitude of mankind” (72), she now builds model cottages on Roland’s ancestral land and becomes herself a model of charitable engagement and engaged, compassionate subjectivity: “Isabel’s foolish youth is separated from her wise womanhood by a barrier that is formed by two graves.” The novel poses what feels like its thesis as a question: “Is it strange, then, that the chastening influence of sorrow has transformed a sentimental girl into a good and noble woman—a woman in whom sentiment takes the higher form of universal sympathy and tenderness?” (402–3).

Much more simply and completely than in Wuthering Heights, The Doctor’s Wife substitutes a developmental narrative of Victorian mourning for the revolutionary persistence of a Byronic melancholy that refuses to let go of its lost object. Isabel Gilbert believes for much of the novel that she is doomed to die young, but she is in fact called to life, adulthood, and philanthropic, rather than revolutionary, action by the death of her modern Byron. She closes her books, accepts her duty, and gets to work.

The frequently rehearsed death of Byron in the Victorian novel performs a formal sublation that makes possible bildung itself. Byron thus occupies an inflection point that allows the novel to imagine interiority and the development of the self beyond what is characterized as an adolescent Romanticism. Victorian writers laid claim to the positive aspects of Byron’s politics—his belief in values beyond self or class interest; his cosmopolitan willingness to condemn nationalism and imperialism; his melancholic fixation over the site of trauma and ruination—in a way that supported a narrative of bildung: the self-made bourgeois subject overcoming and moving beyond the dark night of the soul on the personal level; progress and reform overcoming class antagonism on the national level. The problem with the heroic Byron who pursues a melancholy, future-anterior concept of justice outside of the novel’s form of temporality is not only that he did not follow a developmental narrative but also that he appeared a figure who could not die. In imagining Byron’s death, the Victorians counter the undead principle of justice and revolution that in Byron’s poetry resists narrative, history, progress, evolution, closure, and bourgeois subjectivity.

George Eliot’s Felix Holt

We will finish by addressing a last novel about revolutionary Romanticism—this one centered on a working-class riot and written by the master of Victorian realism. Published in 1866, the year before the passage of the Second Reform Bill, and set in 1832–3, immediately following the passage of the first one, George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical can be read as an extended essay on Byron and his revolutionary legacy for the Victorian novel. Once again, Byron is split into two: the idealism of his poetry, which the heroine Esther Lyon must learn to reject to become a responsible citizen, wife, and mother; and the skepticism of his politics, which is represented by the thinly veiled analog for Byron, would-be Radical member of parliament, Harold Transome, whom Esther must also reject. As in other novels about Byron, this one is structured around a marital choice that swaps out a radical with a reformer and that maps onto its love plot a narrative of personal and national development. But what interests us most is the way Eliot links fictional technique to a politics of slow reform as it directs our duty to the present and an inevitable future reached through a tight sequence of cause and effect.

Eliot’s ideology of duty—linked always to her theorization of sympathy as the path toward an ethical and communal life—legitimizes bourgeois ideology while disposing of both the radicalism of the lower classes and the chivalric pretensions of the aristocracy.27 The figure of Byron bolsters the middle because he represents at once the aristocratic/upper and the radical/lower class in a way that outlines the boundary on either side. Harold is the key character for this aspect of the Byronic legacy. A Hookah-smoking, “Oriental” aristocrat, he has recently returned from a long stay in Greece to enter politics on the radical side, thus fulfilling Byron’s promise that, if ever the Radical side organized itself, he would come back to England to lead the opposition.28 As with much of the rhetoric directed at Byron before and after his death, Harold represents the ineptitude of aristocratic claims to radical politics.29 Through him, Eliot not only illustrates the dual attraction and threat that the public and newspapers perceived in Byron and the other “Liberal aristocrats” (291) he imitated and then inspired but also advertises the ability of fiction to issue less biased, more accurate judgment: “Harold Transome was neither the dissolute cosmopolitan so vigorously sketched by the Tory Herald, nor the intellectual giant and moral lobster suggested by the liberal imagination of the Watchman” (109). The narrator describes Harold as a character who

To counter the exaggerated and simplistic claims from both sides of the political spectrum, Eliot paints her Harold in the detailed, discriminating, and measured strokes of fictional realism, which Eliot portrays as having special purchase on the truth and its representation.30

Much has been written about how Eliot’s particular strain of novelistic realism secures its reality effects by allowing for, even emphasizing, its fictionality.31 Felix Holt is no exception, but the political efficacy of the approach is perhaps best illustrated by taking a leap forward, out of the novel and into its future, when, in January 1868, Eliot would publish as the leading article of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine a piece called “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt.” Eliot wrote it at the request of John Blackwood, who so admired Byromaniac-turned-politician Benjamin Disraeli’s speech vindicating the 1867 passage of the Second Reform Bill that he asked Eliot to help educate working men on their new political responsibilities. The earnestness of the piece is striking, and we can read it as her answer to Byron: not truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer than mere fact.

“Felix” begins the address by calling attention to his own plain speaking and by rejecting the complimentary puffery of political speech: he will not tell working-class men that they are better or wiser than the ruling classes. He asks them to consider themselves truthfully, for “If we have the beginning of wisdom, which is, to know a little truth about ourselves, we know that as a body we are neither very wise nor very virtuous.”32 This conflation of wisdom (truthful representation) and virtue (ethical action) is key to this address—and to Eliot’s fictional method overall.33 Referring directly to the plot of Felix Holt, Eliot has Felix proceed from that “experience” to a universal truth claim about politics: “After the Reform Bill of 1832 I was in an election riot, which showed me clearly, on a small scale, what public disorder must always be” (6; emphasis ours). Fictional events, even as they are acknowledged as fictional, teach us about reality and the path to ethical action. This slide is what allows Eliot to begin with fiction and end with an appeal to put “power in the hands of the wisest, which means to get our life regulated according to the truest principles mankind is in possession of” (11).

In tutoring working-class men in the “heavy responsibility” (2) of wielding political power, Eliot/Felix emphasizes how easy and disastrous it is to choose wrongly, and how important it is to move slowly. As Felix explains, “I am a Radical; and, what is more, I am not a Radical with a title, or a French cook, or even an entrance into fine society. I expect great changes, and I desire them. But I don’t expect them to come in a hurry” (7). Prosperity and well-being must be developed in a “well-judged patient process” not a “hurried snatching,” and Felix puts the emphasis on procedure: “Can [working-class leaders] argue in favor of a particular change by showing us pretty closely how the change is likely to work?” (2). Essentially, Felix asks his fellow working men to be realistic about revolution, and it is hard to miss how he conflates aesthetic form (plain-speaking, truth-telling) with forms of political change, which are either “wise” and slow or “foolish” and abrupt. While the suffering of the working classes is “A mighty fact, physical and moral, which must enter into and shape the thoughts and actions of mankind” (10), it must be remedied through historical process and in light of the past and its structures, the “Supreme unalterable nature of things” (10).34

We are thus offered the particular form of cause-and-effect temporality that we have associated with the novel, one that insists upon order and sequence: “If the claims of the unendowed multitude of working men hold within them principles which must shape the future, it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without which no worthy, noble future can be moulded” (10). As Eliot goes on, always in the voice of Felix, “Here again we have to submit ourselves to the law of inheritance” (10). The desire for militant action is recast as childish ignorance, which we must grow out of: “To discern between the evils that energy can remove and the evils that patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness and childishness, between good sense and folly” (11). Because all present choices condition the future of the nation and its children, “with all their tremendous possibilities,” a full consideration of the optative pathways opened and constrained by our decisions is necessary. Felix warns: “Do anything which will throw the classes who hold the treasures of knowledge. . . . into the background, cause them to withdraw from public affairs, . . . and you do something as short-sighted as the acts of France and Spain” and “injure your own inheritance and the inheritance of your children” (8). The only wise and safe way forward is “not by any attempt to do away directly with actually existing class distinctions and advantages . . . but by the turning of Class Interests into Class Functions or duties” (5). That is, each to their own work in service of the common good. This sort of incremental reform that leaves basic systems in place is represented as organic national growth—“the wonderful, slow-growing system of things” (5)—and its assumption that “The nature of things in this world has been determined for us beforehand” (6) clearly has a familiar narrative stamp: the end is a time before the beginning.

Eliot’s “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt” applies narrative principles to political change—indeed, draws from fictional principles the very “unalterable nature of things.” It also pulls “mighty fact” from what is both obviously and intentionally a fictional set up. In speaking through the fictional character of Felix, Eliot underlines not just the suspension of our disbelief but also our recognition that we only ever temporarily suspend our disbelief. We are invited, in other words, to perform the classic maneuver of psychoanalytical fetishism: I know very well that Felix is not real but nevertheless I will act as if a real Radical were speaking to me. In fact, we cannot help but be struck by the separation between the real Eliot and the fictional Felix, for when Eliot writes to working-class men about their political enfranchisement in the voice of her spokesman for the working class, she is neither working-class, male, nor able to vote. And yet, it is the very fact of Felix’s fictionality that here allows Eliot to speak with all the force of conviction and truth. Aesthetic realism thus finds truth in the rhetorical power of fiction itself.

We should remind ourselves how very different this is from Byron’s own procedure, which, as we saw in Chapter Three, drew its power from his conflation of real and fictional selves, its disruption of slow time building from past causes to necessary future effects, and its refusal of realism’s triumvirate of time–action–character. It will come as no surprise, then, that when we return to Felix Holt from its own future, we see that its working-class hero and model for political engagement reclaims Byronic ideals (radicalism, deep feeling, and selfless sacrifice for others), while rejecting the accompanying revolutionary politics (extreme skepticism in all worldly forms of government, self-consciously stylized performativity, and melancholy dedication to justice). Felix has renounced wealth and dedicated himself to work for social justice; he feels the misery of the masses “like a splinter” in his mind. He declares, “I care for the people who live now and will not be living when the long-run comes. As it is, I prefer going shares with the unlucky.” His care for them, however, takes the long-run course, and he urges his fellow workingmen to have patience:

That “right way” is not to wield the “ignorant” and “wicked” power of revolution but to sway the public through moral behavior (“the greatest power under heaven is public opinion—the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honorable and what is shameful”). This is what Felix himself tries to do when a drunken riot breaks out on election day and he attempts to lead the “dangerous mass” away from violent action and toward their better selves. He fails and is charged and convicted of manslaughter, but the reader pardons him even before the courts do because realistic narration gives us truer evidence of his ethical purpose, deep feeling, and selfless action than can be offered in a court of law.

Felix, then, is no Byron—so that he can be a better sort of political idealist. While Felix must allow that he is sometimes melancholy over the injustices of the world, he is careful to distinguish himself from the self-dramatizing Byronic version of the same:

Felix similarly sets himself apart from “gentlemen like your Rénés, who have no particular talent for the finite, but a general sense that the infinite is the right thing for them” (258). Rather than pine after the ideal and transcendent, which, despite the reference here to Chateaubriand, is in Felix Holt strongly associated with Byronic poetry, Felix vows “Not to waste energy, to apply force where it would tell, to do small work close at hand, not waiting for speculative chances of heroism, but preparing for them” (287). He describes his own personal development toward the goal of serving others and working for justice without thought of personal gain as being responsive to the historical present. He tells Esther that, “My course was a very simple one. It was pointed out to me by conditions that I saw as clearly as I see the bars of this stile” (258). There may be a pun here, for what Eliot offers instead of revolutionary idealism is the style of the realist novel, which seeks to represent the full force of the historical conditions directing us on a particular future course. Eliot conflates the aesthetics of realism with the ethics of the real, while acknowledging the tactic as at once a suspension of disbelief (we do not, in fact, see a turnstile before us) and an acknowledgment of fictionality itself as “truth.” That truth turns out to be the ideology of collective duty represented by the not-so-Radical Felix Holt and spoken by the Reverend Rufus Lyon: “True liberty can be nought but the transfer of obedience from the will of one or of a few men to that will which is the norm or rule for all men. . . . [S]o will it be in that crowning time of the millennial reign, when our daily prayer will be fulfilled, and one law shall be written on all hearts, and be the very structure of all thought, and be the principle of all action” (151).

Our point here is not that Felix—or Eliot for that matter—misses the mark by not being Byron. We do not mean to judge the novel and its political investments by a Byronic yardstick. But we are interested in how often Byron is invoked to be discarded as a model at once foolish and reckless. And when considered from the long, historical view of novelistic sequence—realist time—the revolutionary leap into the future does seem reckless, blind, and capable of producing the “fatal shock . . . to this society of ours” (Eliot, “Address to Working Men,” 6) that Eliot/Felix warned against and Byron in fact desired. The closest we get in Eliot to that reckless leap comes at the end of, not Felix Holt, but Daniel Deronda, another novel in which the heroine learns deep subjectivity and the promise of reform (“it shall be better” [882]) around the inflection point of a Byronic hero.35 But while Gwendolyn Harleth develops character through an acceptance of the irreversibility of time and action (“It can never be altered” [762]), Deronda, the character she might have loved in the counterfactual world closed off by actual choices, actions, and events, exits England and the novel to lead a political revolution in the “East.” In its transcendent vision of messianic Zionism—problematic in many ways and still connected strongly to the historical, ancestral past—we have something that approaches a future-anterior call to action in the present:

This vision of/from the future belongs to Mordecai, Daniel’s dying brother-in-law and soulmate, whose theories of metempsychosis challenge the very notion of discrete character, and whose theories of transcendent nationalism put him somewhere beyond the fringe of reform politics.36 More than Daniel, the character specifically associated with Byron, Mordecai is the novel’s Romantic and its champion of lost causes: “Shall he say, ‘That way events are wending, I will not resist?’ His very soul is resistance, and is as a seed of fire that may enkindle the souls of multitudes, and make a new pathway for events” (585-6). This half of the novel’s double-plot structure has sometimes been seen as less successful and well-made than the novel’s more recognizably Victorian plot, with its remorseless embrace of the “Actual” (430).37 As Daniel puts it to himself, echoing Gwendolyn’s words and encapsulating the logic of what we have been calling novel time, “‘It can never be altered—it remains unaltered, to alter other things’” (762).