Lord Byron’s Paper War: Reading the Ravenna Journal

This essay offers a full-length study of the journal that Lord Byron kept in Ravenna between 4 January and 27 February 1821. It examines the oddity of the journal’s conclusion, specifically Byron’s decision to extend the journal beyond the end of his notebook to two extra pages before abandoning it. The essay argues that to understand why this occurs we need to pay attention to Byron’s extensive reflections on paper within the journal itself, and to examine its interrelated themes of proliferation, ephemerality, durability, and scarcity. Focusing on the “paper consciousness” exhibited by Byron concerning poetic fame and an anticipated war, the essay demonstrates that Byron often thought of the operations of fortune as being represented by the behaviour of mark-bearing paper, and contends that his anxieties about the uncertain fate of paper recorded in the journal extended to the fate of the journal itself.