Greetings, attractive reader.  Today we rewind the tape to May 17, 1824 – a date that ought to be seared into the cerebellum of every self-respecting lit nerd, a day that marks not just a loss but a cultural felony so egregious it makes you want to scream into the void, or at least shotgun a bottle of absinthe in protest.  I’m talking about the incineration of Lord Byron’s diaries and manuscripts, a scorched-earth operation orchestrated by his publisher, John Murray, with the complicit nods of Thomas Moore and other so-called custodians of the poet’s legacy.  These manuscripts weren’t just scribbles and doodles…they were the raw, unfiltered synaptic firings of a man whose very name still conjures storms of passion and rebellion, a man whose life was a dirty bomb detonated in the lap of the staid Regency establishment.  And yet, in a fit of sanctimonious hand-wringing over Byron’s “scandalous” reputation (oh, the horror of a poet who dared to live as he wrote!), they torched it all, reducing to ash what might’ve been the Rosetta Stone of Romanticism.  This, dear reader, is what some have called “one of the worst literary crimes ever committed,” and they are not wrong – they’re just not loud enough.

For those of you who aren’t Initiates in the Dead Poets Society, I’ll unpack this travesty with the kind of clarity that only hindsight and a righteous fury can provide.  Byron, dead at 36, had already been buried at Westminster Abbey, his body barely cold in the ground when his supposed allies decided his legacy needed a good, old-fashioned Puritan cleansing.  The man had lived a life that was, as we have discussed here recently, a high-wire act of excess and genius – seducing half of Europe, penning verses that could make angels weep and devils blush, and generally giving a throbbing, glowing middle finger to every moralistic busybody who crossed his path.  His diaries, his manuscripts, his private correspondence were artifacts, the kind of primary-source gold that scholars would have killed for, the kind of material that could’ve given us a front-row seat to the mind of a poet who redefined what it meant to be a rock star before the term every existed.  Imagine the confessions, the unexpurgated rants, the late-night jottings of a man who once wrote, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”  Imagine the secrets, the loves, the hates, the sheer electric hum of a consciousness that burned that hot.  Now imagine it all going up in flames because a handful of pearl-clutching Victorians couldn’t handle the heat.

John Murray, the ringleader of this literary lynch mob was Byron’s publisher, a man who’d made a fortune off the poet’s words, a man who should’ve known better.  But Murray, along with Thomas Moore and the rest of the crew, decided unilaterally that Byron’s reputation – already battered by rumors of incest, sodomy, and general debauchery – needed “protection.”  Protection from what, exactly?  From the truth?  From the messy, glorious humanity that made Byron who he was?  This wasn’t protection; this was erasure, a deliberate attempt to sanitize a man whose entire existence was a fuck you to sanitation.  They burned the very essence of what made him dangerous, what made him real.  And in doing so, they robbed us, the future, of a chance to grapple with Byron on his own terms, to see the man behind the myth without the filter of Victorian prudery.

Here’s a fun mental exercise for perspective: imagine, for a moment, that someone decided to take the letters of Emily Dickinson or the journal notes of Virginia Woolf and use them to kindle a campfire.  Picture Franz Kafka’s senselessly neurotic scribblings turned to ash because someone thought they didn’t look flattering for Kafka, Inc.  The stomach churns, does it not, dear reader?  Now amplify that sense of loss and ruin until it feels properly global, because that’s what this burning was.  We’re not talking about a few stray poems or doodles on cocktail napkins.  Byron had poured himself into these volumes, and their destruction was nothing short of full-on cultural vandalism.

No one knows what was in hose diaries for sure, which is particularly maddening.  Were they full of crude jokes?  Quiet admissions of regret?  Detailed records of those countless, juicy scandals that followed him like a bad smell?  Or maybe all of the above.  Whatever we lost, if was irreplaceable, and the really sad part is that Murray, Moore, and the rest knew it.  They reportedly burned the pages in small bundles, and at least one of them admitted to sobbing during the process.  Even as they were committing this literary arson, they understood they was erasing something extraordinary.

This was a crime!  A cultural heist of the highest order, and we’re still paying the price 200 years later.  The loss of those manuscripts is a gaping wound in the body of literary history, a black hole where insight should be.  We’re left with the polished, published works, sure…Don Juan, Childe Harrold, all the hits…but what about the rough drafts, the half-formed thoughts, the diary entries where Byron might have let his guard down and shown us the cracks in his Byronic armor?  What about the letters where he might’ve spilled the tea on his lovers, his enemies, his own fractured psyche?  We’ll never know, because a bunch of stiff-collared cowards decided that posterity couldn’t handle the unvarnished truth.  And that, dear reader, is the real scandal – not Byron’s life, but the fact that we were denied the chance to fully understand it.

So here we are, on May 17, 2025, exactly 201 years after the face, and I’m still pissed.  I’m pissed because the burning of Byron’s papers wasn’t just an act of cowardice – it was an act of arrogance, a declaration that some stories are too wild, too raw, too real to be preserved.  But isn’t that the whole point of literature?  To confront the chaos, to dive headfirst into the maelstrom and come out the other side with something true?  Byron did that every goddamn day of his life, and he deserved better than to have his inner world reduced to cinders by men who couldn’t handle the fire.  So let’s raise a glass to a poet who lived without limits, and let’s curse the small-minded fools who thought they could contain him by burning his words.  This is the sort of shit that keeps me awake at night, dear reader, howling at the moon for a glimpse of what we’ll never get back.

In better and more temporally local literary news, the book is finally taking shape, emerging from its amorphous, unfocused blob form into an at least somewhat coherent structure.  Remember those deep focus pictures all the hipsters were hanging on their walls in the early-2000s?  The ones that people would stare at for some ridiculous amount of time, waiting for their eyes to “relax” and “unfocus” to the point where they could see the hidden picture?  And then when you finally saw the picture, you celebrated briefly, then you couldn’t not see it, and then you’d wonder why it took you so long to see it in the first place?  That’s what it was like the other night as I was looking over what I had written so far, when I finally saw the hidden picture.  I smiled.

Anyway, I must be getting back to it.

N.P.: “Love Me Two Times” – The Mission