What the Victorians Made of Romanticism by Mole Tom;

Author:Mole, Tom;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 21. Statue of Byron by R. C. Belt, Hyde Park, London.

Photo by the author.

The need to embed a literary pantheon within a more general one also influenced the statue’s final location in London’s Hyde Park. As with the Thorwaldsen statue in the library of Trinity College and the Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens, this monument’s location is essential to understanding its meaning. As early as 1858, The Times, discussing a statue of Edward Jenner, had insisted on the importance of placing statues in an appropriate relation to each other. While medical men were deserving of statues, “we would not see them placed in ridiculous juxtaposition with men whose careers and merits were entirely different from their own” because “certainly it cannot be desirable to group together inconsistent figures.”54 The committee first wanted to put the Byron statue in Green Park, but the Queen denied permission to do so.55 Next, they considered a site at the bottom of St. James’s Street, while Disraeli suggested a site at the top of the street, on Piccadilly.56 The local Parish Church Council denied this site on the grounds that it would narrow the roadway.57 The committee also talked about the Embankment and Holles Street (Byron’s birthplace), but rejected these sites as respectively “prosaic” and “inconvenient.”58 The statue was finally erected in Hamilton Gardens, near Hyde Park Corner, in 1880.59 This location was significant, because it placed Byron in close proximity to the fountain endowed by Marian Mangan Brown, designed by Thomas Thornycroft, and installed in 1875 (fig. 22). This fountain was twenty-four feet high and featured marble statues of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as bronze figures of the muses of Tragedy, History, and Comedy.60 The Byron statue was installed less than five hundred feet from the poetry fountain, and each was visible from the other. The same Red Mansfield stone was used for the base of both. Placing Byron close to this recently unveiled monument helped to extend its cluster of poetic giants into modern times.

If Britain was becoming a large-scale, distributed version of the pantheon that was once imagined in Westminster Abbey, it now had two Poets’ Corners. One, as I showed in the last chapter, occupied the area around Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh; the other occupied the east side of Hyde Park in London. And like the original Poets’ Corner, both of these were constructed not by a long tradition of commemorating recently deceased poets but by a fairly rapid sequence of retrospective installations. Baedeker’s 1885 guide to London directed Hyde Park’s visitors to the “handsome Fountain by Thornycroft, adorned with figures of Tragedy, Comedy, Poetry [sic], Shakspeare [sic], Chaucer, and Milton, and surmounted by a statue of Fame. In Hamilton Gardens, a little further to the S[outh],” the guide continued, “is a statue of Lord Byron.”61 Similarly, Baedeker’s 1887 guide to Edinburgh situates the Scott Monument in relation to surrounding statues: “To the E[ast] of the Scott Monument is a statue of Livingstone (d. 1873), the African traveller; to the W[est] are statues of Adam Black, a prominent citizen, and John Wilson.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.