IN 1856 Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, still in the blaze of her fame
as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had been published
in 1850), visited England for the second time. She had already,
during her first visit in 1853, made Lady quaintance, and
they had had some conversation and correspondence; now in 1856
Lady Byron, who was ill and believed herself to be dying, requested
Mrs. Stowe to give her a private interview on a subject of great impor-
tance. (She was then living on Ham Common, near Richmond.) A
cheap edition of Byron's works was in view; and Lady Byron, fearful
of the wider circulation of his writings, doubted whether she "had
not a responsibility to society for the truth". It was on this point
that she consulted Mrs. Stowe, for whom she had great affection and
admiration. She wished to learn from an unprejudiced person what
her duty appeared to be. Ought she to declare, at last, the truth?
( Augusta Leigh and Ada, Countess of Lovelace, were both at this
time dead.) Lady Byron in this interview imparted to Mrs. Stowe
the secret of Byron's relations with his half-sister. She gave Mrs.
Stowe "a brief memorandum of the whole, with the dates affixed";
and Mrs. Stowe, after two or three days' consideration, decided that
"Lady Byron would be entirely justifiable in leaving the truth to be
disclosed after her death, and recommended that all the facts necessary
should be put in the hands of some person, to be so published".

We have seen in Chapter XVI that in 1850 (six years previously)
Lady Byron had done this, and had mentioned 1880 as the earliest
possible date for "a discretionary disclosure". She now acquiesced
in Mrs. Stowe's opinion, but made no sort of mention of regarding
Mrs. Stowe as the person empowered to make the disclosure. She did
not die until 1860, and her will then contained the same provision as
the document of 1850.

In 1869 there appeared in England the translation of the Countess
Guiccioli's book about Byron, which was reviewed very favourably
in flackwood's for July 1869. The book contained nothing that the
world did not already know; but Mrs. Stowe cited it--and it alone
--as her reason for the action which she now immediately took. She
published in Macmillan's for September 1869, and simultaneously in

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