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This essay examines Byron’s Don Juan especially focusing on its transformation of the reception and meaning of the text from an immoral text to a radical political one. This essay is composed of two major sections. The first section (II) argues that the early cantos (the first through fifth cantos) of Don Juan do not have much that can be called “politically radical” judging from its contents alone. It is partly because the most obviously politically charged contents of the poem, the dedication and the preface to the poem, were not available to its readers when the first two volumes of Don Juan, which I call the early cantos, were published. Nevertheless, even from the first volume, this poem was treated as politically radical due to Byron’s voluntary or involuntary associations especially with such radical publishers as Leigh Hunt and William Hone. Therefore, this essay considers how the non-political contents of the poem came to be treated as politically radical and how meanings of literary works can be altered by numerous factors other than strictly literary ones. For this, Byron’s relationship with Leigh Hunt and Hunt’s advocacy of Byron’s works in his reviews are examined, and Hone’s role in the reconstruction of the meanings of the original Don Juan through his review and forgery edition are closely examined to argue that he significantly contributed to the political image-making of Byron as a radical poet. The second part (III) of the essay primarily deals with the later cantos of Don Juan (beginning with the sixth canto). Arguing that Byron’s political stance gradually began to develop into a more radical activism that he had refused for a long time, this section examines Percy Shelley’s influence on Byron’s political ideas and his poems. Reading the later cantos of Don Juan as radical political propaganda instigating fight against tyranny, this section shows that Byron and Don Juan enter a new phase.
