49. William Parry's The Last Days of Lord Byron
Private collection
Frontispiece by Robert Seymour to William Parry's book The Last Days of Lord Byron. Private collectionCaptain William Parry was the ‘Fire-master’ or engineer sent out by the London Greek Committee to organise Byron’s artillery in Missolonghi, and he arrived there on 5 February 1824. Byron described him as ‘a fine rough subject’, and ‘a sort of hardworking Hercules’. Parry and Byron got drunk together frequently, and The Last Days of Lord Byron provides a convincing (though ghost-written) account of Parry’s time in Missolonghi.
The illustrations were drawn to Parry’s descriptions by Robert Seymour, and the frontispiece shows Byron in Missolonghi with his second Newfoundland dog, Lyon. Parry (page 75) describes how ‘With Lyon Byron was accustomed not only to associate, but to commune very much, and very often.’
In this exhibition
- Acknowledgements & foreword
- Introduction
- Britannia: Parliament, party & the Prince
- Napoleon: Emperor, expectation & exile
- Italy: politics, patriotism & plays
- Greece: Hellenism & heroism
- Introduction to: Greece: Hellenism & heroism
- 42. Sculpted portrait bust medallion of Byron in Albanian dress by Nikolaos Kotziamanis, 1992, after Thomas Phillips’ portrait, 1813
- 43. Letter to Byron from the London Greek Committee, 8 March 1823
- 44. Letter of Metropolitan Ignatios to Mavrokordatos, in Greek, introducing Lord Byron, 1823
- 45. Manuscript of ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty- Sixth Year’, in Byron’s Cephalonia Journal, 1824
- 46. Commission giving Lord Byron charge of a group of artillery signed by Alexandros Mavrokordatos
- 47. 'View of Albanian palikars in pursuit of an enemy'
- 48. Part of a letter or memorandum from Mavrokordatos to Byron, in French, 21 or 22 March 1824
- 49. William Parry's The Last Days of Lord Byron
- 50. Leicester Stanhope's Greece, in 1823 and 1824
- 51. Divers sièges de Missolonghi
- 52. Translation of the funeral oration delivered in Greek by M Spiridon Tricoupi ... in honour of the late Lord Byron
- 53. Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution by Roderick Beaton
- Editions used as sources