The Eighteenth Century, vol. 50, nos. 2–3 Copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved. Radical Moral Authority and Desire: The Image of the Male Romantic Poet in Frontispiece Portraits of Byron and Shelley Gerald Egan University of California at Santa Barbara In 1832, eight years after the death of Byron, his literary executor and friend Thomas Moore, under the auspices of Byron’s long-time publisher John Murray, produced a seventeen-volume authoritative edition of the poet’s work entitled The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life. Contemporary readers who opened the first of the volumes encountered a frontispiece portrait that has become an emblematic image not only of Byron but of a particular type of Romanticism. The original from which the engraving was copied is a portrait painted by the Scottish painter George Sanders in 1807–8 (fig. 1), a painting commissioned by Lady Byron to commemorate her son’s planned departure on his Grand Tour of the continent. The family portrait includes colorful and spe- cific details suggesting Byron’s status as a young British nobleman: the Union Jack, a family servant, boats purposefully arranged to carry Byron to sea. The frontispiece reproduction, a steel engraving executed by the well-known Lon- don engraver William Finden (fig. 2), contains no such details. In the engraving, the solitary young Byronic figure, seemingly bereft of family or social affilia- tion, stands silhouetted against a shoreline. The background against which he is demarcated—the moss-covered boulder on which he rests a hand, the billow- ing clouds at once inviting and darkly ominous, the distant ship facing away from the shore, prepared to sail into the mist—represents in 1832 a recognizably “romantic” landscape, an image of the exotic world beyond Britain that Byron had encountered in his personal travels and depicted in his poems. In the 1832 engraving, which as frontispiece is the gateway into an edition that proffers to a generation of British readers the authoritative “Byron” (the works, the letters, the journals, and life), the private family portrait of 1808 has effectively been transformed into a public and symbolic portrayal of poetic genius. For comparison I turn to another portrait and its reproduction as the fron- tispiece to an authoritative edition, the 1819 Amelia Curran watercolor of Percy Shelley (fig. 3) that was reproduced twenty years later for the 1839 Collected