Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt”, London, John Murray, 1853. 8vo (13x20.5cm), pp. xvi, 311, [1], richly illustrated with 32 steel engravings depicting places and scenes mainly of Greece. Contemporary binding: blue leather paneled in gilt, with decorations in gilt on edges and along the inside cover edges. Spine with raised bands and decorations in gilt. Front cover detached, rubbed, lower part of spine shaken. Inside in very fine condition.

Byron’s Childe Harold popularized a view of Greece as not merely a site of classical splendour but of a downtrodden present and a problematic future. This new focus for interest in Greece quickly found its place in the emerging, and closely interlinked, ideologies of Romanticism in the arts and liberalism and nationalism in politics. Byron, who had been lukewarm about the prospects for Greek independence in 1812, belatedly discovered in the Greek Revolution of 1821 an outlet whereby the liberal/nationalist politics of his poetry could be transformed into political action. (Beaton Roderick, 2010)