Traveling on Shaky Ground: Childe Harold I and II and the Beginning of Byronic Knowing

Abstract

Although he himself suggests otherwise in Don Juan, with Byron it is not so simple to begin with the beginning. Is that beginning English Bards and Scotch Reviewers? Hours of Idleness? When the topic is Byron and philosophy, however, it seems safe to assert that the beginning is Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, Cantos I and II. Seasoned by travel in unknown lands, tried by the deaths of those close to him, and a practiced politician by the time of their publication, the Byron of Childe Harold’s first cantos was an altogether different man from the author of English Bards, and Harold’s first portion heralds an important moment of origin: the first exercise of Byron’s mature thought. Recent scholarship has illuminated complexities and subtleties that reveal Harold I and II as an insightful and iconoclastic political document; these same complexities mark the start of Byron’s investigations into the process of knowing.¹ Persistently subverting the ideas and assertions it at first seems to uphold, the poem marks the beginning of Byron’s investigations into the concept of knowledge, simultaneously engaging with, testing, and extending Enlightenment philosophy to draw conclusions of its own.

I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

— Byron to Francis Hodgson, 4 December 1811