ABSTRACT
The 1810s saw the appearance of a huge number of imitations, parodies and continuations of Byron’s earlier work, of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in particular. Citing a few titles gives us a flavour of these efforts: Prodigious!!! or Childe Paddie in London (1818), Childe Albert: or The Misanthrope (1819) and Childe Harold in the Shades: An Infernal Romaunt (1819). However, few examples of good, critical parody are to be found in this body of work. Worth the combined efforts of these anonymous parodic book-makers is a much shorter but more critically engaged effort, Thomas Love Peacock’s ‘There is a fever of the spirit’, 1 published in Nightmare Abbey (1818). Peacock’s roman a clef features a Byronic persona, Mr Cypress, who is given to delivering such misanthropic effusions as this:
I have no hope for myself or for others. Our life is a false nature: it is not in the harmony of things: it is an all-blasting upas, whose root is earth, and whose leaves are the skies which rain their poison-dews upon mankind. We wither from our youth: we gasp with unslaked thirst for unattainable good: lured from the first to the last by phantoms – love, fame, ambition, avarice – all idle and all ill – one meteor of many names, that vanishes in the smoke of death. 2
