ABSTRACT
Hobhouse's Recollections have been invaluable in the construction of the Byron believed by most Byronists to have been the 'real man'. Not only are they the memoir of one of Byron's two closest friends, but they are also the highly lucid production of perhaps the most eloquent of Byron's prose memoirists. The space they devote to Hobhouse's recollections of Byron is moderate — Hobhouse had after all plenty of other topics to discuss — and they possess none of the whiff of commercialism that would have been so repugnant to Byron himself. There was simply no question of Hobhouse having had a financial motive in publishing his memoirs of Byron: the Recollections were published decades after Byron's death, and at a time in Hobhouse's career when he could afford a degree of carelessness of the impact they might have on his standing in public opinion. The lucidity of his memoir, in other words, is matched by its candour.
