"Dan Phoebus takes me for an auctioneer": Byron's Nostalgic Sketch of Newstead in Don Juan 13, the Picturesque, and Real-Estate Auctioneering Puffery. Issue 6 (1st November 2016) - Mozer, Hadley J.
ABSTRACT: Byron's sketch of Norman Abbey in Don Juan 13.55–74 has traditionally been read as an unapologetically nostalgic reminiscence of Newstead Abbey, the ancestral estate that Byron loved and lost. I complicate this reading, focusing on the opening stanzas in which Byron exaggerates the picturesque and on the concluding squib in stanza 74 in which Byron compares himself to an "auctioneer" for having cataloged the beauties of the abbey so extensively, retroactively troping his picturesque sketch of Newstead as only so much real-estate auctioneering puffery. I argue that Byron's framing device significantly ironizes the sketch of Newstead by bringing it into apposition with two kinds of related "cant" used to describe landscape during the period—i.e. the picturesque and real-estate auctioneering puffery. Along the way, I situate stanza 74 within the context of Romantic-era auctioneering and auctioneering satire, Byron's hitherto unexplored relationship with the auctioneer George Henry Robins, and Byron's three attempts to auction off Newstead with the firm of Farebrothers. Ultimately, I find Don Juan 13.55–74 to be both a nostalgic reminiscence of Newstead and a self-satirizing spoof of nostalgic reminiscences in which poets advertise their emotional attachments to the landscapes of their past.