Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Lord Eldon's Censorship

1953; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/459864

1938-1530

Paul M. Zall,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

It well-known that Byron's poetry was the center of a great deal of suspicious attention from the Tory government which was almost continually in office during his career. David V. Erdmann has proposed that the ministry's anxiety was grounded upon the fear of a potential insurrection to be led by Lord Byron; W. H. Wick war sees the official reaction to Byron's poems as of the whole cloth of the government's antipathy to a free and virulently outspoken press. But whatever the attitude of the ministry, the only official actions taken to punish Byron for his poetry were ostensibly the result of moral rather than of political trespasses on his part. Were Byron the only author subjected to punishment on these grounds, it would be obvious that the action was politically motivated, but Robert Southey, poet laureate, received identical treatment. The nature of the penalty—refusal by Chancery to recognize literary property rights—indicates that the fountainhead of the measures taken against Byron's Don Juan and Cain , Southey's Wat Tyler , Shelley's Queen Mab , and the works of several other authors, Whig, Tory, and apolitical, lay in the moral and legal principles of the Chancellor, Lord Eldon.