ABSTRACT
Napoleon Bonaparte died on St Helena on 5 May 1821. Reports of his death, reproduced from London and Paris newspapers dated 5 and 7 July respectively, first appeared in Galignani’s Messenger, 1987 (9 July 1821) 1–2 and 4. According to the Times, 11290 (5 July 1821) 2 the news had reached London on 4 July. Claire, staying in Livorno at the time, noted the cause — reported in similar terms in an extract from the New Times printed in the 9 July issue of Galignani’s Messenger — in her jnl entry for the 16th of that month (and so must have known before then that he had died): ‘The Signor Duci comes in the Evening & relates the arrival of official intelligence that Buonaparte died of cancer in the stomach on the 5th of last May; the same disease which destroyed his father’ (Claire Jnl 242). The title indicates that Napoleon’s death was communicated to S. by word of mouth rather than from a printed source and that the poem was occasioned immediately rather than, as allowed for by Donald H. Reiman (MYRS iii 85), written at some later point — possibly at Byron’s prompting — before 11 November, when it was sent with Hellas to Ollier for publication. He may have heard the news during one of the visits he made to Pisa from Bagni di San Giuliano on 7, 11, and 15 July (Mary Jnl i 373–4). The position of the rough, untitled draft of the poem in Nbk 19 (in ink on pp. 206 rev. — 202 rev.) is compatible with a date of composition around such a time. In the reversed direction of the nbk as it is now paginated, the draft follows a blank page then a blank stub after The Boat on the Serchio (Longman iv 350–68, no. 406) which was composed between late June 1821 and the middle of the following month (see headnote). The leaf of which only the stub remains may, Nora Crook suggests, have been used for a first attempt (BSM xii p. lii, 368).
