For a man who lived to be only thirty-six, Lord Byron tends to be featured in very long biographies. I’ve been curious about him, but maybe not to the tune of 500-plus pages. I’d seen references to Elbert Hubbard’s Little Journeys to the Homes of English Authors: Lord Byron, and since it was only a handful of pages, and not very expensive, I got a copy. As a biography it turned out to be exceedingly slim. And written with a flowery prose. In fact, you could read this easily in a day. I did learn about about Lord Byron, but in this instance the author took precedence over the subject. I knew nothing of Elbert Hubbard. A free-thinker of the turn of the twentieth century, he was born in Illinois in 1856. He was a successful traveling salesman but then started a commune called Roycroft outside Buffalo, New York.
The Roycrofters were crafters and artists living together and producing, in some cases influential, artworks. The community operated from 1895 to 1938. The buildings, which survive, are now National Historic Landmarks. Elbert Hubbard was a philosopher and artist, as well as a socialist and anarchist. It’s not surprising he took a liking to Lord Byron. One of the crafting supplies at Roycroft was a printing press. Hubbard published a series of Little Journeys, some sumptuously bound, others with paper covers, and, from experience, uncut pages. Lord Byron was volume seven, published in 1900. Roycroft continued for the remainder of Hubbard’s life, and a little beyond. Hubbard and his second wife died in the sinking of the Lusitania during World War One. His son kept the community going for another couple of decades.
American history is filled with colorful and creative individuals. All I knew of Elbert Hubbard was that he wrote a reasonably short treatment of the life of Lord Byron. Reading it I learned a bit about the other intensely curious and talented writer who’d died just over thirty years before before Hubbard was born. Byron was then still alive in memory for many. It turns out that both subject and author lived extraordinary lives. And each, in their own way, influenced larger society. And now, having read this small book, I’m inclined to plan a trip to East Aurora, outside Buffalo, to see the settlement of the Roycrofters. That’s not a bad thing to come from a brief book, not expensive, to read about a poet.