BEGUN BY BYRON
DALLAS, R[obert] C[harles.]
Sir Francis Darrell; or The Vortex: a Novel ... in four Volumes ...
London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820.
Four volumes, 12mo; without the half-titles or errata slip, but with the two leaves of publisher’s advertisements at the end of vol. IV; small wormtrack to first few leaves of vol. I; else a good set in contemporary half calf with marbled sides by T. Jones of Newcastle, with his ticket to vol. I, somewhat inappropriately rebacked in blue calf, gilt; corners worn; bookplate of Robert J. Hayhurst.
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Sir Francis Darrell; or The Vortex: a Novel ... in four Volumes ...
First edition of this epistolary novel by a friend of Byron, the first letter of which was supposedly written by him and given to Dallas (1754–1824) ‘for the purpose of inducing me to continue it’.
The Vortex is Dallas’s metaphor for metropolitan society; the Gothic story centres on the unexplained stabbing of its eponymous hero, a reformed rake who now writes in warning to a younger companion. After an early life spent partly in Jamaica and North America, Dallas returned to England, turned author, and acquainted himself in 1808 with the young Byron; Dallas’s sister was married to Byron’s uncle, and he corresponded with the poet extensively between 1808 and 1811.
In his Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron, Dallas later recounted receiving from Byron ‘two folio sheets of paper, accompanied with the words “Now, do you go on” ... it stands the first letter in my novel of Sir Francis Darrell’. The letter in question propounds ‘Sir Francis Darrell’s’ views on women. ‘For my part, I regard them as a very beautiful but inferior animal ... I look upon them as grown-up children, but like a foolish mamma, am always the slave of some only one. With a contempt for the race, I am ever attached to the individual, in spite of myself’.
As Byron’s ‘literary agent’ he arranged for the publication of English Bards with James Cawthorn (1809), and, by placing the first two cantos of Childe Harold with John Murray, began Byron’s long, if erratic, association with that house. Byron gave him the royalties for that volume, and later those for The Corsair.
Upon Byron’s death, Dallas prepared for the press his truncated Recollections of Byron, ending in 1814, with related correspondence and an important group of letters addressed by Byron to his mother during his eastern travels, which the poet had given to him. Forestalled in this project by an injunction obtained by Byron’s executors, Hobhouse and Hansom, Dallas died shortly before his book saw the light.
A seven-volume Miscellaneous Works and NovelsSir Francis Darrell.
Raven, Garside, and Schöwerling 1820:21.
