Originally published in 1949, this book is concerned with the various collaborations between John Hobhouse, Lord Byron and Ugo Foscolo, which occurred around the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The text is based on documents which were previously unpublished and, in so far as possible, these documents are allowed to speak for themselves, with some additional explication where necessary. A notes section is provided at the end of the text. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Byron's poetry and Romantic literature in general.

Zawiera korespondencję Byron'a, Hobhouse'a, Foscolo i in.

BYRON IN LONDON is a collection of essays by leading authorities on Byron, charting both his life in London and his writings about the capital. Byron emerges from the different perspectives given as one of English poetry’s leading urban and metropolitan writers. Chapters are on Byron and the London boxing fraternity, Byron and the London stage, and Byron’s attitude to the newly-emerging London coterie of women writers. There is one chapter on his relationship with John Murray, his London publisher, and another on Ugo Foscolo’s life in London. Other chapters place Byron in the English verse tradition of urban writing; and nearly all make reference to the way he describes London in Don Juan.

The works of Lord Byron and his friend Sir Walter Scott had an influence on European literature which was immediate and profound. Peter Cochran’s book charts that influence on France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia, with individual chapters on Goethe, Pushkin, and Baudelaire – and one special chapter on Ibsen, who called Peer Gynt his Manfred. Cochran shows that, although Byron’s best work is his satirical writing, which is aimed in part at his earlier “romantic” material and its readership, his self-correction was not taken on board by many European writers (Pushkin being the exception), and it was the gloomy Byronic Heroes who held sway. These were often read as revolutionaries, but were in fact dead-end. It was a mythical, not a literary Byron whom people thought they had read. The book ends with chapters on three British writers who seem at last to have read Byron, in their different ways, accurately – Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats.

Ugo Foscolo's Tragic Vision in Italy and England examines an underexplored aspect of Foscolo's literary career: his tragic plays and critical essays on that genre.