ABSTRACT
The ruins of Newstead Abbey provide Byron with crucial subject matter, from early poems through to the last books, the resting place, as it were, of Don Juan. The ruins, shadowed imaginatively by the spectral traces of their pre-Reformation past, provide a resonant locale for concerns which nudge their way out of these badly received, perhaps unwisely published, juvenilia and into a sequence of later major works – Childe Harold, Manfred, The Giaour, and finally the last books of Don Juan. A map of pilgrimage through these definingly ‘Byronic’ works takes us back to the beginning, as monks, friars and abbots loom and evanesce and dissolve on their way to a re-imagined Newstead.
