Byron is one of the first international successes of the literature industry. From the Renaissance on, sculptors and painters could get into the big money in any of the richer economies of Europe; throughout the 18th century, musicians poured out of Germany, Austria and Italy. But writers, because of the language barrier, had to wait for a large leisured readership, as well as for the late 18th-century boom in the printed word, which included among its manifestations the rise of the literary review.

By the 1800s opportunity called, and Byron was there to answer. Part of his extraordinary success can be put down to luck: he was good-looking, and a lord, and he wrote in English, a language which was already, for non-literary reasons, on the way up. But Byron also had the right gifts, a quick, strong intellect and a forceful turn of phrase. He had an unprecedented flair for getting his sexual presence into his writing. And he had a curious rootlessness that simplified his image for the international audience. He wasn’t from Edinburgh or Ayr, Grasmere or Olney; instead of writing about such provincial places, he could set his poems all over Europe. Byron had no family, no estate, no tenants, no predetermined niche and thus no followers to lead to anywhere in particular. This was an admirably unencumbered inheritance for a media hero.

The trouble about Byron’s prodigious success is that posterity has found it synthetic. His reputation plummeted in England shortly after his death and has remained relatively low since. One reason the Victorians had for disliking him – the flagrant sexual impropriety of both his life and his writings – now, if anything, works in his favour; another characteristic, worldliness, remains a liability. We have taken to demanding idealism, especially from poets, and nothing fails like success. Byron lived at a time when literature was not merely booming as an industry: it was also developing a rhetoric to obscure the fact that it was an industry. Money-making was what the vulgar nine-tenths of the population got up to, that silent majority which Matthew Arnold dubbed the philistines; Arnold’s articulate minority, the intellectuals, were supposed to live for culture and high seriousness. Byron’s approach to literature is as embarrassing in the 20th century as it was in the 19th because it is cynical. Even if his career didn’t give the game away, his words about what should have been his vocation would do it: ‘I do think ... the mighty stir made about scribbling and scribes, by themselves and others – a sign of effeminacy, degeneracy, and weakness. Who would write, who had anything better to do?’

Leslie Marchand’s great edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals, now complete with the publication of an index, brings Byron the man and Byron’s story to the fore. Byron has certainly not emerged from Marchand’s labours as a vulgar careerist: on the contrary, the letters have been acclaimed as letters, the prose as prose, and Byron’s personal charm and intelligence seem harder than they once did to resist. Admirably, Marchand also makes them available to what ought to be a wide readership, in a new one-volume selection. Both the Selected Letters and the index volume include Marchand’s 36-page anthology of snippets from the 11-volume edition, a testimonial to the poet’s wit and, if not wisdom, at least cleverness and variety. Among these quips, however, are enough demystifying observations on the arts, painting as well as literature, to remind us that Byron’s favourite form of his favourite sport was swimming against the tide. Marchand has immensely enlarged our knowledge of Byron the man, but some of the elucidations may be plunging critics of Byron the poet into further disarray.