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1807Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'
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1811Jane Austen letter
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1811Guide to fashion and etiquette
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1815Alphabet books
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1815Soldier's letter: Battle of Waterloo
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1816Jane Austen, Persuasion
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1817P B Shelley, 'Ozymandias'
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1817Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy
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1818Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
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1818Coleridge's notes on Shakespeare
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1819Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale'
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1819Lord Byron, Don Juan
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1821Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
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1824Grammar for children
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1825Yorkshire dialect
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1825Punctuation for children
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1826Anti-slavery poem
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1827Diary description of London
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1829Execution of a 12 year old boy
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1835Modern Flash Dictionary
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1837Dickens, Oliver Twist
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1837London dialect in Dickens
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1838Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
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1842Browning, Dramatic Lyrics
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1843Dickens, A Christmas Carol
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1846Lear's Book of Nonsense
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1847Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
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1847Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
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1848The Communist Manifesto
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1850'How do I love thee?'
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1852Poverty and the workhouse
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1854Poor Letter H
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1854'The Charge of the Light Brigade'
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1855Get your ‘air cut!
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1855Cookery for the poor
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1857Mary Seacole's autobiography
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1857Mary Seacole newspaper article
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1858Nursery rhymes
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1860Florence Nightingale letter
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1860Coal mining
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1860The Woman in White
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1861Mrs Beeton
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1861Mrs Beeton's Christmas
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1861Melodrama: East Lynne
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1862Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
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1864The Queen's English
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1866Letter from Charles Darwin
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1867Text message poetry
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1871George Eliot, Middlemarch
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1872Music Hall
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1875Victorian fashion
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1875Freakshow posters
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1876Street sellers
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1878Invention of the telephone
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1878Illusionists and conjurers
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1879Oxford English Dictionary
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1883Afrikaans novel
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1885Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
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1886Anglo-Indian dictionary
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1886Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
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1887Circus poster
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1888Jack the Ripper murders
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1888Match Girls Strike
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1891Babu English
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1891Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
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1894Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
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1895H G Wells, The Time Machine
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1898English 'down under'
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Intro
Famously described as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, the poet Lord Byron caused a sensation when he published the first instalments of Don Juan in 1819. A long satirical poem, divided into sections called ‘cantos’, Don Juan is based on the legend of the famous womaniser. However, Byron’s Don Juan is not the seducer, but the seduced. From his origins in Seville, Don Juan travels across Europe, facing shipwreck, starvation and slavery, and succumbing to the charms of numerous women on the way. The poem is written in ottava rima, a rhyming pattern used in Italian comic verse, and contains a number of lengthy and provocative digressions in which Byron insults his fellow poets and comments upon social conditions in England. Don Juan runs to over 16,000 lines, and was uncompleted on Byron’s death in 1824. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling describe it as both ‘unfinished and unfinishable … it would have gone on as long as Byron did.’
Stanza 221, the penultimate stanza in the poem’s first canto, is an example of Byron in characteristically mischievous mode in a direct address to the reader, taking his leave and promising not to try the reader’s patience. This technique of ‘breaking the frame’ of the text can be seen as prefiguring later developments in narrative as writers experiment with their authorial role and direct the reader’s response.
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