SOURCE: Graham, Peter W. “England in Don Juan.” In Don Juan and Regency England, pp. 125-56. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

In the following essay, Graham illustrates the ways in which Byron set Don Juan against the mores of Regency England and argues that the poem was written both for and from the viewpoint of the “cultivated man.”

If the world is the aggregate of all that is dynamically affective, then the cultivated man will never succeed in living in just one world.

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

The last three essays have shown several pragmatic reasons not to put “just one world” into literature if that one world is one's own, several different ways of telling English truths but telling them slant. In Letters from England, Southey assumed a Spanish mask that safely distanced him from his pronouncements on the mother country and also gave his opinions at...