While Byron and Shelley's friendship was the high point, not only of their brief lives, but also of late British romanticism, Gilmour's engagingly written tandem biography explores their early years, before they met, and the political atmosphere of the French Revolutionary era in which they grew up. Gilmour, a former editor of the Spectator
and a Conservative MP, has previously written mostly on politics and economics, but this work on the two poets has a shrewd eye for both their mythmaking and posthumous reputations. Byron and Shelley shared superficially similar backgrounds: aristocratic families, public school and Oxbridge educations, youthful radical sympathies and early travels that would prefigure exile. As Gilmour smartly shows, however, there is a vast gap between an impecunious half-Scots baron and the grandson of a rich baronet, as well as the nuances of Byron's flamboyant experiences at Harrow and Cambridge, compared with Shelley's miseries at Eton and Oxford. After Shelley was expelled from Oxford for his pamphlet "The Necessity of Atheism," there was no turning back from radical politics (which Gilmour still regards with latent Tory amusement), but with Byron, radicalism was something of a flirtation while cementing his notoriety. Gilmour ends right after Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
has caused a sensation, with Shelley only just about to start on his first important poems. A bit more foreshadowing would have made for a more substantive work. While this volume ends abruptly in 1812, its knowledgeable enthusiasm for the two bad boys of romanticism makes one hope for another volume. B&w illus. (Jan.)
