ABSTRACT
Calvinism can, of course, be deployed in literary terms to account for the gloom of the Byronic heroes, predestined to damnation, for the endurance and perseverance of the Promethean protagonists, and for the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of those doubled or doppelgnger characters of the late dramas, such as Lucifer in Cain and Caesar in The Deformed Transformed. As Bernard Beatty has pointed out, it thanks largely to Lady Byron that Calvinism has also been used biographically to account for many anti-social or anti-matrimonial traits in Byron. Many commentators have pointed out Byron's attraction to Roman Catholicism, usually referring to Walter Scott's prediction that Byron would die a Catholic, and to Byron's half-flippant, half-serious letters of March 1822 to Thomas Moore. Fitzpatrick also characterises Byron's vision as paradoxically dual', although he goes one further in seeing elements of three systems in play in Byron's work: deism, Calvinism and Catholicism.
