ABSTRACT
[Byron] Don Juan, I II (1819); Investigator, III (Oct. 1821), 353-360. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this review is the authoritative tone with which the reviewer openly sets out to establish an “index expurgatorious.” When one compares this confident declaration with the tentative and obsequious criticisms of Byron’s early poems by the same type of religious journal, it becomes clear that the power of the Regency aristocracy to set the social tone for Britain had been broken. The moralistic middle class is on the march toward Victorianism. With this new confidence, the Investigator attacks both the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews, demanding that Lord Byron be subjected to the same condemnation as would befall a man of lower social standing who published the same opinions.
