The Stowe-Byron Controversy

I read Twitter a lot, you know, as one does, and a couple of months ago I saw a viral tweet that made me think, I must know more.

It was by the journalist Sarah Jeung.

It said, People keep asking for my opinion on cancel culture, and the only thing I have to say is that the Atlantic was nearly destroyed in 1869 by thousands of subscription cancellations over an article by Harriet Beecher Stowe insinuating that Lord Byron effed his sister.

Then there was another tweet.

The best part of this saga being that he most certainly did.

Like I said, I had to know more.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willip Haskin.

Every episode we take on a cultural question, a habit, or idea, crack it it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

150 years ago, Lord Byron and Harriet Beecher Stowe collided in the pages of The Atlantic.

The resulting smashup endangered an August American publication, altered the reputations of two of the most famous in their time authors that have ever lived, and most lastingly, besmirched the less famous woman at the story center.

At issue were so many of the topics that are still consuming us today.

Civility, celebrity, feminism, fairness, fake news, and bad literary men.

Also, it's hella juicy.

So, today, on decodering, what did cancel culture look like in the 1860s?

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There are three major players in this story.

The romantic poet Lord Byron, his wife Lady Byron, born Annabella Milbank, and the American author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

I'm going to begin with Lord Byron because, in addition to being the oldest of the three, his gargantuan celebrity and its incredible longevity are the stage upon which all of this plays out.

One way to see this whole incident is as a referendum on the shifting meaning of Byron, a poet whose most lasting legacy was not his poetry, but himself.

He's had this incredible cultural impact, possibly more than any other figure among the Romantic poets, but not for his poetry, for his persona.

Laura Miller is Slate's book critic.

And people who have never heard of him are basically still in love with him, whether they're reading Regency romance novels or Twilight.

Byron was born George Gordon Byron in London in 1788.

His father, a womanizer and gambler nicknamed Mad Jack, died when Byron was three, leaving his second wife and son without much money.

Byron, who was born with a malformed foot of which he was very conscious, was raised in Scotland.

But when he was 10, he unexpectedly inherited the family title, becoming a lord.

Byron lived an outsized life and there is a bounty of gossipy facts about him.

Like, forbidden from bringing his dog to Oxford, Byron brought a small bear.

He once described Wordsworth as Turdsworth.

He was very handsome and personally kicked off a craze for the open-collared shirt and a knotted neckerchief.

The details of his diet were widely known.

He would sometimes drink vinegar to maintain his figure.

He was voraciously omnisexual, betting men and women.

To cite just one parforth the course example, he claimed himself to have had liaisons with over 200 women during a visit to Venice.

It's easy to slot Byron into the framework of modern celebrity.

What he ate, what he wore, who he was beefing with, who he was sleeping with.

And that's not a coincidence.

He created that framework.

Byron, he was really the first true celebrity.

The first person whose primary claim to fame was just

himself, was just this persona that he created and that he conveyed in this poetry.

This persona first made its appearance in Child Harold's Pilgrimage, a travel poem that Byron wrote while he was on a grand tour of Europe in the years after university.

When the first two cantos were published in 1812, they made Byron an overnight sensation.

I awoke one morning and found myself famous, he wrote.

In the poem, the protagonist, Harold, like Byron, visits Portugal and Spain, Albania, and Greece.

He is angsty, naughty, alluring.

Here's how Byron describes Harold early in the poem.

While om in Albion's Isle, there dwelt a youth who ne in virtue's ways did take delight, but spent his days in riot most uncouth, and vexed with mirth the drowsy ear of night.

Ah, me, in sooth, he was a shameless white, sore given to revel and ungodly glee.

Few earthly things found favor in his sight, save concubines and carnal company, and flaunting wassilers of high and low degree.

This type of character has a name, of course, the Byronic hero.

You know, we just take for granted now the idea of the brooding, tormented loner hero who

breaks rules and is a genius, and

no one really understands him, but he follows his own

instincts,

even though it causes him this tremendous pain.

Byron really invented that persona.

He didn't just invent it, he embodied it, inspiring two centuries' worth of copycats.

So, like every sort of James Dean, every bad boy, especially every vampire hero, because actually the first vampire story was based on Byron.

The first real vampire story, even before Dracula, was a story that was written by Byron's doctor, who like so many people at the time was completely obsessed with Byron.

This obsession, which began after the publication of Child Harold's Pilgrimage, was called, even at the time, Byromania.

His picture was everywhere.

His looks were copied and lusted after.

One of his poems sold 10,000 copies in a day.

And his every move was widely gossiped about.

And there was so much to gossip about.

Take the most famous of his many affairs with Lady Carolyn Lamb.

She's the person who described Byron as mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

At this point, more famous than almost any line of his own poetry.

When things were going well between the two of them, she sent him a thatch of blood-tinged pubic hair.

But they were not always going well.

At one point, you know, they were at some social event and she smashed a bottle and gouged her wrists with the broken glass in this very theatrical suicide attempt because he wasn't paying enough attention to her.

All of this was happening during the Regency, right before the Victorian era.

But at the particular moment that he was active was a time that was sort of notable for a sort of laxity of public morals.

You know, you could do it.

You could fool around.

But you were expected to maintain a certain level of decorum.

Now, he outraged public morals, nevertheless.

He did this with an accumulation of scandal, capped by one particularly outrageous outrage.

Even by the standards of the regency, it was like a hot mess.

Like incest was like a little too far for them, even.

Yeah, most definitely.

Okay, so now though it's still the early 19th century, we're getting to the part of Byron's life that would become, 50 years later, the contentious subject of the brew haha at the Atlantic.

We're getting to Byron's incestuous relationship with his half-sister, a woman named Augusta Lee.

Augusta Lee was the child of Lord Byron's father, Mad Jack, and his first wife.

She was five years older than Byron, and the the two didn't meet until he was almost a teenager.

They got to know each other well only after Byron returned from his grand tour of Europe in 1811.

At some point in the years after this, Byron and Augusta, who was already married, began to have an affair, one he would describe as the most enjoyable love affair of his life.

In May of 1814, and this is still the height of Byromania, Augusta Lee gave birth to a daughter named Medora, who was believed by Augusta Lee, Medora, and Byron himself to be Byron's child.

Upon seeing the baby for the first time, Byron wrote a letter to his close confidant, Lady Melbourne, one of the most powerful women of the Regency era, expressing relief that she was not deformed.

It is not an ape, he wrote.

And yet, while all of this was going on, Byron was exchanging letters with a quiet, bright, mathematically inclined young woman named Annabella Milbank, the woman, actually, who coined the phrase Byromania after observing its effects in others.

Miranda Seymour is the author of In Byron's Wake, The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron's Wife and Daughter.

Annabella Milbank was an potentially incredibly wealthy and rather brilliant young woman from the north of England.

She was regarded as a tremendous catch.

Annabella had already turned down five proposals when she met Byron at a party at Lady Melbourne's.

Lady Melbourne was also Annabella's aunt.

Byron, who didn't dance because of his foot, noticed Annabella not dancing as well.

He was so intrigued that despite barely knowing her, he made an odd, offhand, not entirely serious proposal of marriage through Lady Melbourne.

Annabella declined, but the two began writing letters to one another.

We all know Byron as the most wonderful letter writer.

They just rattle on, saying every kind of shocking thing and having fun.

But in his correspondence with Annabella, Byron changed character.

He started imitating Annabella and managed to write letters that were actually remarkably boring.

And he kept up writing remarkably boring letters about deeply worthy subjects like, I think, Italian poetry and religion and so on and so on for a whole two years.

From Annabella's perspective, then, Byron did seem to be tameable, someone she was already reforming.

When he finally proposed again, she accepted immediately.

She was in love.

Though Byron professed a desire to be tamed, his motivations were more complicated.

He desperately needed to cover up this incestuous relationship with his half-sister and the child that they believed to be theirs.

And he also was in desperate need of money.

There was also the fact that Lady Melbourne was very, very supportive of the match.

Now, Lady Melbourne, who was tremendously fond of Byron, was horrified by the story, which Byron told her her almost as a boast.

And she said, you cannot put your name at risk in this way.

Your reputation will be ruined and you must, must, must get married.

Annabella and Byron were married in January of 1815.

As a harbinger of what was to come, he told her that day she would find she had married a devil.

Lady Byron did not know from the outset about his relationship with his sister, who was very friendly towards Annabella.

But at some point she became aware of it.

When Augusta Lee stayed with the Byrons, Byron would shoe Annabella upstairs early in the evening.

Bad as that was, it wasn't the worst of it.

Byron flaunted his ongoing affairs and threatened violence.

When Lady Byron became pregnant, she would lock herself in her room while Byron was raging for fear that she'd miscarry.

Towards the end of her pregnancy, she became convinced Byron was going mad and took preliminary steps to have him committed.

It was just a dreadful year in Byron's life.

He'd lost a lot of money.

He was in a very nervous state.

And she'd left because she really feared for her life.

Byron, when he was in one of his moods or fits, was a very frightening character indeed.

In December of 1815, Annabella gave birth to their daughter, Augusta Ada.

Yes, named after his sister Augusta Lee, who would grow up to be known as Ada Lovelace, the woman now famous in her own right for being the first to imagine a thinking machine, the computer.

One of the reasons Annabella had Ada study math was in the hopes of counteracting her father's moody nature, even though Ada barely ever met him.

Byron last laid eyes on her when she was a newborn, because in January of 1816, Annabella left Byron.

They had been married for a little over a year.

The end of Byron's marriage was scandalous, but it was only one of the strikes against him.

Others included his liberal politics, his bisexuality, his attempts to sodomize both his wife and Carolyn Lamb, and of course, the incest.

Altogether, it was enough to push Byron out of England.

Not that he didn't want to go.

Letters from this period show that he was eager to get away from his marriage, his country, his expenses, and the scrutiny.

In 1816, he set sail for Europe, and though he didn't know it then, he would never come back.

At the time, he played up the tragedy of his parting.

He wrote a poem about his angst at having to leave his country, his wife, and child.

But the public wasn't really buying it.

There's a cartoon from the time, drawn by George Crukshanks, of Byron on a small boat, forlornly waving to Annabella and and Ada on the shore, even as he stands amidst bottles of alcohol, three bosomy women hanging off of his body.

The public view was very, very cynical about Byron's departure, and sympathy at that time was entirely 100% with his wife.

Byron's adventurous life continued in Europe.

He may have been a little disgraced, but he was still regarded as a singular poetic genius, and it's not like bad behavior was off-brand for him.

He wrote more cantos of of Child Harold's pilgrimage and his best-regarded work, Don Juan.

He continued to have affairs.

He had another illegitimate child with a young woman named Claire Claremont.

That's a whole other unseemly rabbit hole if you're looking for one to go down.

And a more stately, multi-year relationship with the Italian countess Teresa Giucioli, who will reappear later in this saga.

He also became more and more involved in the movement for Greek independence, eventually going to Greece to fight the Turks.

In 1824, at the age of 36, 36, while fighting for the cause, he died in Misalenghi.

In death, his reputation was restored.

The fact of Byron's death in this noble cause that caused an overnight sensation and complete change of view about Byron.

Despite everything that had happened between them, Annabella, still known as Lady Byron because the two never officially divorced, spent the rest of her life looking out for his legacy, including financially supporting Augusta and Medora Lee.

Annabella remained

devoted to Byron until the day she died.

She paid off all his debts after he died.

She bought land in Greece because she knew Byron loved Greece.

She set up schools in Greece in his memory.

She did a great, great deal to honor him.

And that's where we're going to leave the Byrons for right now, to head to America and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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Harriet Beecher Stowe is the other major figure in the story.

And though she was otherwise not at all like Byron, she was also extraordinarily famous in her own lifetime.

Stowe was born in New England in 1811, the sixth of 11 children, to a family that was the equivalent of American religious and intellectual royalty.

Devout and fiercely abolitionist, she wrote the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published in 1852.

The book, about a Christ-like slave named Tom, made the abominations of slavery a concrete injustice to millions of white people who had previously thought about it only abstractly.

It became the best-selling book of the 19th century.

Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 10,000 copies a week when it was published in book form.

100,000 copies by the end of the first year in this country.

A million and a half copies in England the first year.

Joan Hedrick is the author of Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Life.

She was invited to go on an anti-slavery tour of the British Isles

after the book was published, and she was just fettered at crowds of 2,000, 3,000 people in Glasgow and London and so forth.

Queen Victoria came to

see her.

It was,

yeah, she was truly an international phenomenon.

On Stowe's second trip to Europe in 1856, she had an extended audience with Lady Byron.

Stowe had grown up reading and admiring Byron's work.

Meeting his wife and grandchildren would have been a thrill in and of itself.

But Lady Byron, in the years since her separation from Byron, had become serious about a number of causes, including abolition.

Despite both being reserved women, they had an intense personal connection.

She was very, very, very smitten, I think is the right word by Lady Lady Byron.

She had almost

like a girlish reaction.

She felt this throbbing feeling

from the interview with her, like she was almost infatuated by her.

The bond between the two was so strong that Lady Byron shared with Stowe the details of her harrowing marriage to Byron, including his relationship with Augusta Lee.

I mean, she just had an extraordinary emotional response to her.

Her intelligence,

her range of knowledge, and the fact that she was this injured woman who told her her story personally.

After this encounter, the two women stayed in touch, wrote letters, saw each other at least one more time, and then in 1860, Lady Byron died.

At the time of her death, despite the past scandals, she was a well-regarded woman.

Miranda Seymour, Lady Byron's biographer, again.

The widowed Lady Byron died in 1860, immensely revered.

She was regarded as almost a saint.

And that's how things stayed until 1868.

That year, Byron's former lover, Countess Teresa Giucioli, published her memoir.

I mentioned Teresa earlier.

She had a long affair with Byron after he left England for good.

Theresa set out

the idea that Annabella had killed Byron with her coldness.

She had been so cold-hearted, she had not understood his great love for his sister.

nothing said about incest here mind but just you know the great love for his sister

and

she was a cold-hearted miserable woman who should never have been married to a wonderful man who was in fact hold your breath completely celibate only went to bed with women when they threw themselves at him because he was such a gentleman Well, you would think a book like that would just, you know,

fall over a small cliff and never be seen again.

but it was published during a summer when there wasn't much news going on and the gentlemen of the press fell upon it with absolute delight it's at this point when lady byron is under attack from teresa ducioli and the press that harriet beecher stowe feels called upon to defend her friend stowe's intentions in doing so were good but they were not entirely disinterested stowe's fame was on the wane the civil war was over it was the middle of reconstruction and she was almost 60.

her most most recent novel had been badly reviewed.

It would be ungenerous to say that she was simply looking for a way back into the spotlight.

But she did see in Lady Byron a righteous means of doing just that.

In defending Lady Byron, she could do two things at once.

Stand up for her friend and once again align herself with a surging moral cause.

This time, the one for women's rights.

Women really expected that after the Civil War, you know, they would be granted the right to vote, too.

Joan Hedrick, Stowe's biographer again.

And they started

agitating in public

around the issues of sexuality and divorce.

So this is the context where sexuality was now being discussed publicly.

Stowe also had just read Mills On the Subjection of Women.

and written a couple of people about how this had just opened her eyes.

So she's thinking about women's rights now.

In other words, words, the moment when Stowe wrote her piece was not entirely unlike our own.

The world was changing rapidly and there was a new, feverish attention being paid in some quarters to the mistreatment of women.

And here was this legendarily libidinous male writer whose prolific sexual shenanigans had long been part of his towering reputation, despite his abhorrent and menacing behavior towards his own wife.

Stowe sees all of this and she thinks she can do something about it.

She can bring this immoral man to account and do right by her friend and herself in the process.

But the problem is, she's not, she's such a novice at this.

You know, she hasn't really got a very well-worked out philosophy of women's rights.

She's just sort of fallen into this suddenly.

So,

what she thought would be, I think, the Uncle Tom's cabin of women's sexual slavery, it just didn't work out that way.

In fact, it backfires spectacularly.

In 1869, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a piece defending Lady Byron for the Atlantic Monthly.

The Atlantic, which is the same Atlantic that is still publishing today, was founded in 1857 in Boston with the ambition to be a first-class literary magazine and exponent of the American idea, a kind of American ideal.

The mission statement, included in its first issue, was signed by the likes of Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, and Stowe.

Famous, popular, a moral beacon, and embodiment of exactly the noble and literary American values that the Atlantic itself aspired to represent, Stowe was one of the publication's star writers.

The piece she wrote for the magazine about Lady Byron is still, to this day, a fun read.

Beecher Stowe begins by synopsizing and dismissing the claims of Teresa Giucioli's book, which she says is rousing up new sympathy for Byron and doing its best to bring the youth of America once more under the power of the brilliant, seductive genius from which it was hoped they had escaped.

Byron was a bad habit she thought America had kicked, but now he's back and she's going to help kick him out again.

She shares all of Byron's misdeeds while highlighting Lady Byron's immense class and forbearance in remaining quiet about his sins, which include incest.

The paragraph in which she takes a decades-old open secret about Byron and his half-sister and deems it fit to print reads as follows.

He fell into the depths of a secret adulterous intrigue with the blood relation, so near in consanguity that discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion from civilized society.

It was immediately apparent to the acting editor-in-chief, the writer William Dean Howells, that this piece was potentially explosive.

Howells consulted a number of people about whether or not he should run it.

Some told him no.

The doctor and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

told him yes, basically saying he should do it for the clicks because it will, quote, attract considerable attention.

Howells' position was further complicated by Stowe's star power.

As one of his colleagues joked, with the ring of truth, he might have felt like he couldn't say no to her.

And Howells also came to think, as Stowe did, that this, telling the truth about Byron's misdeeds, was the righteous thing to do.

He wrote soon after, quote, the world needed to know just how base, filthy, and mean Byron was in order that all glamour should be forever removed from his literature.

In other words, the art could not be separated from the artist, and they ought to both go down.

In September of 1869, The Atlantic publishes the true story of Lady Byron's life.

Whatever the complicated motivations for printing it, a combination of moral outrage and wanting to make a splash, wanting to tell the truth about Byron while keeping Harriet Beecher Stowe happy, the piece is received, and this is an understatement, very badly.

So it created an uproar, and there was a a howl from England.

Susan Goodman is the author of Republic of Words, The Atlantic Monthly and its Writers, 1857 to 1925.

It was seen as being so distasteful and people saw it as

a move on the Atlantic's part to make money by publishing something that was sensational.

And so that was considered tawdry.

The Atlantic Monthly was widely seen seen to have published out-of-bounds, poorly sourced, dirty laundry about a poetic genius.

The piece was riddled with factual errors, and this gave readers a further excuse to dismiss it.

One of those errors had to do with the dates of the Byrons' marriage.

Stowe made it seem as though Annabella had married Byron knowing about the incest, and this turned people against her.

What kind of woman would accept that?

Only a vile one.

The fact that Byron was dead, instead of as it might now, making the whole thing less contentious, only made it more so.

He wasn't alive to defend himself.

But there are also plenty of ways in which the piece's reception sounds familiar.

Now as then, people might wonder if consensual incest was really any of our business.

And like us, they looked to famous people to take sides.

And they did.

The feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton defended the piece, but she was in the minority.

Far more were outraged about it, including Charles Dickens, who wrote, quote, wish Mrs.

Stowe was in the pillory.

All the back and forth about the scandal, all the hot takes published about it, basically, were gathered into a book, the print version of an explainer, called the Stowe-Byron controversy.

And then, of course, there were the cancellations.

The magazine began to hemorrhage readers who struck their subscriptions en masse, even though there doesn't seem to have been an organized campaign to do so.

They lost about a third of their, you know, subscribers.

They had about 45,000 subscribers and they lost 15.

This is more than just financially calamitous.

You know, it damaged their reputation, took away their moral authority.

I think that when people read The Atlantic

this is probably true today when people read The Atlantic or the New York Review of Books, they feel

l uh as though that can it ma that somehow that's a sign of how smart they are or how cultured they are.

You know, it c it confers something.

And so

when The Atlantic

didn't live up to that ideal that people had, which was in part a reflection of who they wanted to be, then they, you know, broke their connection to the magazine.

It didn't reflect their values any anymore.

The Atlantic and Stowe were asking people to rethink Byron.

And rethinking a particularly beloved celebrity was also not something people wanted to do then any more than they want to do it now.

It's one of those things where people just didn't really want to believe it.

Laura Miller again.

They were just in love with him.

They were in love with what he represented, the sort of Promethean figure, the grandeur.

And, you know, he was such a slut, and he was so unkind to his wife.

And, you know,

he was bad according to Victorian ideals, which is basically what she was saying.

But the value of someone like Byron in particular, because I think he represented all of the transgressive impulses that people couldn't allow themselves to express.

So they needed him even more.

If you think about the true story of Lady Byron's life as a boulder tossed into a lake, the effect on the Atlantic is the big splash, immediate, obvious, dramatic.

But the Atlantic survives the impact, basically by washing their hands of the whole thing.

They just let it blow over, basically.

Susan Goodman, who authored a book about The Atlantic again.

Howells didn't get fired.

He blamed Harriet Beecher Stowe,

you know, for

exaggerations, let's say.

Howells would actually go on to become the editor-in-chief of the magazine, which slowly built its subscriber base back up.

Stowe, for her part, was completely blindsided by the reaction.

She just could not believe the reaction of the American press.

Joan Hedrick, Stowe's biographer, again.

She never thought that they would disbelieve her story, which she heard directly from Lady Byron, but instead they just decided that Lady Byron was insane or had a diseased mind or, you know.

And of course they accused Stowe of being prurient and

taking this sensational story and dragging it before the public.

And

some said, even if this is true,

you shouldn't

say it in public.

But instead of backing off, Stowe digs in.

She turns the piece into a book, The Vindication of Lady Byron.

There is also, at that point, a defense of her decision to write the piece in the first place.

She never regained the kind of stature that she once had.

She probably would have continued to lose it anyway, but this didn't help.

Still, when Stowe dies in her 80s in 1896, this is a minor ripple, a footnote in the story of the woman who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Ultimately, the story's most tidal repercussions, the people knocked flat by the wave kicked up by this boulder of a brouhaha, are the dead ones, Lord and Lady Byron.

Since their separation, Lord and Lady Byron's reputations had become something of a zero-sum game.

When one was up, the other had to be down.

In the years immediately after Lady Byron's death, she had been on top.

But Stowe's piece and the works it was responding to turned this upside down.

Miranda Seymour again.

One of the most interesting things about the response to Harriet's book is that Byron was completely restored as a kind of angel.

To be clear, she is talking here about his persona, not his poetry.

Though Byron's work was wildly esteemed in his lifetime, by the time all of this is happening, his poetry has become something of an afterthought.

And this mess doesn't change that.

It just gives gives his persona a hard polish.

That was the beginning of a whole new

passion for Byron, the great figure, the noble man, the injured husband, above all, which is his new role, the injured husband.

And that role carried him well into the 20th century.

For Byron to be an injured husband, he has to have a cruel wife.

The thing about Lady Byron is that she seems to have become later in life, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a prig.

Abstemious, controlling, a proud, goody two-shoes.

It's nothing that bad, and certainly nothing that excuses Byron's behavior towards her.

But then, as now, it's nothing that fun.

She's just a deeply unromantic figure, surrounded by these deeply romantic figures who didn't always speak kindly of her.

Byron insulted her in his poetry.

Her daughter Ada resented some of her controlling ways, even as she assiduously kept her mouth shut.

In the years right before and after her death, this wasn't really held held against her.

She had her critics, but she was a very respectable, devout, well-behaved woman.

She was, in a lot of ways, a very good Victorian.

But when Stowe's article comes out, people don't just defend Byron.

They go on the offensive.

They latch onto Lady Byron's self-regard, the complaints about her, and warp her into a malevolent killjoy with an anti-artistic temperament who is out to get Byron.

This noble and wonderful woman, who overnight almost, it seems, had been turned turned into a woman who was being described as I didn't know Clytemnestra and the wickedest woman in England and the fact that there was no incest they all the main thing they wanted to say was there was no incest this was all a delusion of Lady Byron's mind

and that idea was pushed relentlessly in book after book after book Lady Byron was cast as cold uptight heartless prudish and vindictive, the wet rag to Byron's swaggering genius, out there besmirching his name.

His every flaw was forgiven, her every flaw was magnified.

And this remained the predominant conception of her for more than a century.

In other words, Lady Byron, the least powerful, least famous, and sure, least charismatic participant in this whole contra attempts, is the only one who was, in the contemporary sense, canceled.

As I was working on this piece, I kept thinking about something that Laura Miller, Slate's book critic, said to me about Romanticism.

We still live in the sort of emotional and cultural soup of Romanticism.

And so, if I were to describe it to you, it would be like I was describing what we live in now.

If we have an idea of like the individual genius or the importance of gut feelings over reason

or

the

imperative for self-fulfillment.

All of those things are romantic ideas that were basically formulated during the Romantic movement, but we just kind of take them for granted because we don't really remember what the world was like before the Romantic movement.

This whole story underscores this.

We're still swimming in the same soup, still working with the same archetypes, asking the same kinds of of questions, fighting the same kinds of fights, fascinated by the same sorts of things.

I mean, imagine if something similar were to happen right now.

If a respectable outlet were to run a piece alleging misdeeds about a famous man based only on the words of the victim herself.

Now, as then, the whole thing would be an enormous attention-consuming to-do.

There would be pieces about the place of open secrets in our culture, outrage that the outlet's frenzy for attention had led it to run such bad reporting, questions about whether it was fair to judge a previous era by the standards of a new one, and debates about the merits of the accusations themselves.

Are they real?

Are they really that bad?

Should they have been shared?

Has this whole thing gone too far?

All of this would be capped by a lot of fretting about how we're now supposed to relate to the bad man at the center of the story, even if, after the dust settles, he goes on pretty much as he was.

I'm not saying everything is the same.

We are now in a moment when Stowe's basic position that there is a moral reason to expose the bad deeds of famous men is ascendant and blaming the victim, though it happens too much, is more generally understood to be an evil unto itself.

But you only have to think of the recent Michael Jackson documentary or the Kavanaugh hearing to see we're not so far away from all of this.

Even if, in 1815, Byron stands didn't have the ability to swarm Lady Byron's Twitter account, making death threats.

Still, if you're looking for a little reassurance that things have changed, you can find it in the fact that ours is the age that finally took a harder, better look at Annabella Milbank.

It's only relatively recently, well into the 2010s, that biographies like Miranda Seymour's have much more meticulously done what Harriet Beecher Stowe tried and failed to do 150 years ago: restore the reputation of the flawed, by which I mean the human, woman married to a much more famous man.

You know what they say?

Better uncanceled late than never.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed and Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.

It was produced by Willip Haskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to June Thomas, Gabriel Roth, and Sasha Leonard.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you in a few weeks.

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