In Thomas Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron the poet produces a magazine and reads aloud an eight-stanza anonymous poem that “I consider little inferior to the best which the present prolific age has brought forth” (p. 112). Shelley speculates that the author was Thomas Campbell, and Medwin, who took a copy, remarks that he believes that the poem was composed by Byron itself. The stanzas, reprinted in the Conversations, sparked an immediate quest for the author that played out in the newspapers for several weeks; though the author was correctly identified almost immediately, controversy being controversy, doubts lingered on long after conclusive proof was brought forward.

The poem was “The Burial,” or as it is better known, “The Burial of Sir John Moore,” by Charles Wolfe (1791–1823) a young Irish poet who had recently died in poverty and obscurity. It originally appeared in the Newry Telegraph in April 1817 and was reprinted in several periodicals; Byron likely encountered it in Blackwood’s Magazine. It was first claimed for Wolfe by John Bertridge Clarke (d. 1824) writing in the Times for 27 October. But other names were put forward and a hoax was launched to father the poem upon one D. Marshall MD of Durham—a horse doctor, as it turned out. However witless their object, the hoaxers laid their plot well, naming witnesses and challenging Wolfe’s defenders; it took some days and the assistance of a Durham antiquary to identify Marshall and unravel the deceit.

The episode shows the London press at its best and at its worst: vulnerable to misguided or mischievous informants, but also capable through networks of correspondents of bringing the most obscure facts to light. In this instance the obscure facts came from Ireland where Wolfe had friends and admirers who told a moving tale of a talented writer who had abandoned literary ambitions to preach the gospels in an obscure Irish parish where he had died young of unrequited love, depression, and tuberculosis. The resemblance of Wolfe to Henry Kirke White was palpable and Wolfe’s Remains (consisting largely of pious correspondence) were duly published in 1825 and reprinted multiple times over the course of the nineteenth century. His elegy for Moore became an anthology classic.

Byron was hardly alone in admiring “The Burial of Sir John Moore,” a striking poem written upon a stirring subject. Since government bungling had been largely responsible for Moore’s heroic death at Corunna he was a particular hero to Whigs like Byron who desired to keep his memory green.

David Hill Radcliffe