BEGUN BY BYRON?
DALLAS, R[obert] C[harles].
Sir Francis Darrell; or The Vortex: a Novel ... in four Volumes ...
London, Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown ..., 1820.
4 vols., 12mo., without the half-titles or errata slip, but with the two leaves of publisher’s advertisements at the end of volume IV; a good copy in contemporary half calf and marbled boards by T. Jones of Newcastle, with his ticket in volume I, somewhat inappropriately rebacked in blue calf, gilt.
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Sir Francis Darrell; or The Vortex: a Novel ... in four Volumes ...
First edition of an epistolary novel, the first letter of which was supposedly ‘written and given to me, some years ago, by a friend, for the purpose of inducing me to continue it’. 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 I pet some only one’. In his Recollections 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 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. As ‘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 Novels of Dallas had been published in 1813, and therefore does not include Sir Francis Darrell.
Raven, Garside and Schöwerling 1820:21.
