Byron's letters

[9] Their literary value is reflected in the huge prices collectors will pay for them; in 2009 a sequence of 15 letters to his friend Francis Hodgson was sold at auction for almost £280,000.

[10] Although in his letters Byron adapted his style and stance to his different correspondents,[11] they all share an unstudied, unliterary appearance, an "offhand eloquence", which at its best resembles the talk of a conversationalist of genius.

[14] They share the outlook on life of Byron's more realistic poems, like Beppo, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment, rather than the darkly romantic Childe Harold, Manfred and The Corsair.

With the publication of Childe Harold he became known to a new circle, the poets Robert Charles Dallas, Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers, along with his banker Douglas Kinnaird and his publisher John Murray.

[24][25] Finally, Byron's Greek adventure brought him into contact with a new circle: the rebel leader Prince Mavrokordatos, the banker Samuel Barff, and members of the London Philhellenic Committee, including Colonel Leicester Stanhope.

[27] In 1966 the American literary scholar Leslie A. Marchand, having written a magisterial biography of Byron, began work on editing his letters.

[28] The first two volumes won the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize for 1974, the judges calling it "an outstanding achievement in humane editing".

[31] In 2015 Richard Lansdown published another selection, which differed from Marchand's in being about twice the size and in attempting to cover Byron's whole life rather than just picking out the best letters.