Don Juan by Lord Byron: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Don Juan
📖 Click to Read the Opening Pages Online Preview
Canto I, stanza seven: Byron turns from the epic poets to his own method and promises to begin with the beginning.
I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one; Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan— We all have seen him, in the pantomime,24 Sent to the Devil somewhat ere his time.
That is the whole excerpt: one stanza of eight lines, from ‘That is the usual method, but not mine’ to the promise to begin at the beginning. Nothing else is quoted, and the story proper begins in the stanzas after it, with Juan’s father and mother in Seville.
Download Full EPUB1819
Epic poem
~130,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 7.2 hours
Standalone
Seville and Cadiz; a small island in the Cyclades; the slave market and seraglio at Constantinople; Suwarrow’s camp and the walls of Ismail; Catherine’s Petersburg; and an English country house, Norman Abbey, in the autumn.
Seventeen cantos, grouped into nine parts
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.96 MB (EPUB) · 1.91 MB (AZW3) · 1.26 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #18762 · Standard Ebooks
Don Juan is a comic epic in seventeen cantos, written in ottava rima and published in parts between 1819 and 1824, the last canto left unfinished. Its hero is not the hardened seducer of the old Spanish story but a handsome, passive, good-natured boy, shipped out of Seville after a scandal and then carried from shipwreck to slavery to war to the Russian court and at last to an English house party. Around that thin thread of story the narrator talks: about love, war, marriage, poetry, money, despotism and his own dislike of cant. The result is less a plot than a running argument with everything the poem touches.
The poem’s reputation was made by its talk. Juan goes through a shipwreck in which the crew draw lots and eat his tutor, an island idyll that ends with the girl’s death, a Constantinople harem, the storming of Ismail, and the drawing rooms of London, and at every turn the narrator stops to argue, joke or digress. The Wikipedia article on Don Juan sets out the cantos, the publication in parts and the controversy they caused. Byron never finished the poem, and the last canto breaks off in the middle of a scene. — The text is available via Project Gutenberg #18762 and Standard Ebooks.
Don Juan by Lord Byron: Summary, Voices & Forms
This page offers a summary and analysis of Don Juan, with the seventeen cantos set out in nine groups, the story of each range described, and the voices and forms that carry it, the narrator, the ottava rima stanza and the mock-epic machinery, named and explained as they come up. Lord Byron began the poem in the autumn of 1818 and was still at work on a seventeenth canto in the spring of 1823. The first two cantos appeared together on 15 July 1819, and the rest followed in parts until 1824. The cantos are numbered only, and the summaries keep to those numbers, so the page can be read beside a copy rather than instead of one. The edition prints an editorial Introduction, a preface to Cantos VI to VIII, the dedication to Southey, two epigraphs, and the poem itself. Its reputation has never rested on the plot, which is slight, but on the voice that tells it.
Canto I is domestic comedy. Juan is born in Seville to Donna Inez, a learned and managing mother, and Don José, a careless father who dies while a divorce suit is still in the courts. Inez brings the boy up on expurgated classics and keeps him from everything else, and at sixteen he is drawn into an affair with Donna Julia, the wife of a man of fifty. The husband’s midnight search of the bedroom, the shoes found on the floor, the fight on the stairs and the scandal that follows are played for farce, and Juan is shipped off to Italy to mend his morals. Canto II wrecks the ship, starves the crew into drawing lots, and lands Juan half dead on a Greek island, where Haidée finds him. The machinery is Homer’s and Virgil’s; the uses it is put to are not. The text is at Project Gutenberg #18762. For the epic model being tilted, see Paradise Lost.
Cantos III and IV turn the idyll into a tragedy. Haidée’s father Lambro, a Greek pirate and slave dealer, comes home to find his house full of feasting and his daughter living with a stranger; Juan is cut down and taken, Haidée dies after twelve days, and the poem follows the slave ship past the Troad to the market at Constantinople. Cantos V and VI are set in the seraglio, where Juan is bought for the Sultan’s fourth wife, dressed as a woman and asked whether he can love; he refuses, and the pair of cantos ends with the Sultan’s visit and the order that the slaves be brought to her. Cantos VII and VIII go to war: Suwarrow’s assault on Ismail, the slaughter inside the walls, and Juan carrying a wounded Turkish child out of it. The gear changes from farce to pathos inside a stanza, and the narrator notes the change without excusing it. The text is the Standard Ebooks edition. The wandering hero has a Greek predecessor in The Odyssey.
Cantos IX and X move Juan to Petersburg, where Catherine takes him as a favourite and then sends him west with a secret commission when his health fails. He travels with Leila, the child he saved at Ismail, through Poland, Prussia, Germany and Holland, and lands at Dover to find London dirtier and stranger than he expected. Cantos XI and XII are the poem’s long look at English society: the highwaymen on Shooter’s Hill, the round of presentations and balls, the marriage market, the talk about money, and the placing of Leila with Lady Pinchbeck. Cantos XIII and XIV remove the story to Norman Abbey, the Gothic house of Lord Henry and Lady Adeline Amundeville, where a party of peers, wits and bores assembles and the poem settles into country-house comedy. The satire is at its densest here, and its target is less vice than the way a whole class spends its days. The rest of the Poetry & Epics shelf is free as well.
Cantos XV and XVI turn supernatural. Adeline advises Juan to marry, a young Catholic heiress called Aurora Raby is introduced and coolly left out of the list of brides, and the Abbey’s legend of the Black Friar is sung to a harp. That night Juan meets the friar in the gallery; the next night he follows it, puts out a hand, and finds the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke inside the cowl. Canto XVII is a fragment of fourteen stanzas: it begins with orphans, wanders into a defence of free inquiry and the treatment of Galileo, and returns to the morning after the ghost, where Juan looks worn and her Grace looks cold. Then the text stops. Nothing is settled and no moral is drawn, which is the poem’s last joke at the expense of epics that end. The fragment is printed as the poem’s end, and readers have always had to supply the rest.
Historical Context
Byron began Canto I in the autumn of 1818, and dated the dedication from Venice on 16 September 1818. The first two cantos were published together on 15 July 1819, the next three on 8 August 1821, and the later ones, after John Murray had declined them, through John Hunt: Cantos VI to VIII on 15 July 1823, IX to XI on 29 August, XII to XIV on 17 December, and XV and XVI on 26 March 1824. The editorial Introduction gives these dates, and notes that the publication of the later cantos was spread over several months. Byron was still at work on a seventeenth canto in the spring of 1823. The poem was written across five years and several cities, and the gaps between the parts explain the changes of tone between the cantos.
The preface Byron wrote for Cantos VI to VIII names his source for the siege: a French work called the Histoire de la Nouvelle Russie. It also says that some incidents given to Juan really happened, and that the saving of the infant was the actual case of the Duc de Richelieu, then a young volunteer in the Russian service and later the founder of Odessa. The same preface turns aside to the Marquis of Londonderry, dead by his own hand, and argues that a minister who could not speak English had no claim on public mourning. It ends with two quotations from Voltaire, which make the point that measured language is a cover for loose manners rather than evidence of strict ones.
The first issues were doubly anonymous, with neither author nor publisher named on the title page, and the reviewers treated the poem as a scandal: the Introduction lists notices in Blackwood’s, the British Critic, the British Review, the Examiner, the Literary Gazette and the Monthly Review, and quotes Byron writing to Moore that the poem was meant to be ‘a little quietly facetious upon everything’ and was perhaps ‘too free for these very modest days’. The dedication to Southey, dated from Venice, is a separate attack printed at the front of the volume, aimed at the laureate and the Lakers. The poem itself keeps the quarrel going, mocking the Quarterly and the British Review. The political world it moves in is the one that fought at Ismail and then settled into the Regency: Suwarrow, Potemkin and Catherine on one side, Castlereagh and Wellington on the other. The satire is written from inside the class it describes.
Voices & Forms
- The narrator: The ‘I’ of the poem, older than his hero and fonder of talking than of narrating. He claims to have no plan, breaks off in the middle of a scene, answers reviewers, and turns a shipwreck into a paragraph on the digestion. He is a persona rather than a transcript: he says he was bred a moderate Presbyterian and is half a Scot by birth.
- Don Juan: Handsome, good-natured and almost entirely passive. He is sent away, sold, bought, dressed as a woman, given despatches and moved from house to house by other people’s decisions; his one long resistance is to Gulbeyaz, and it dissolves when she weeps. He is more often looked at than looking, and the poem’s standing joke is that this is the legendary seducer.
- Haidée: Lambro’s daughter, who finds Juan on the beach and keeps him in a cave. She has no mother, no books and no scruples, and the poem calls her Nature’s bride: her love is given without vows and without arithmetic. When her father returns she dies in twelve days, pregnant and speechless, and the island is left desolate.
- Ottava rima: The eight-line stanza the poem is written in, three rhymes alternating and a closing couplet. It suits the poem because the couplet can turn a description into a joke, or a joke into a judgment, in two lines. The narrator calls it the octave’s chime and apologises to Aristotle for the liberties it takes.
- The digression: The poem’s real engine. A canto begins with a shipwreck and ends with an essay on fame; a feast in a pirate’s hall makes room for a Greek patriotic song; a dinner party turns into a treatise on cookery and the gout. The digressions are not interruptions of the story so much as the place where the satire happens.
- The mock-epic machinery: Invocations, a promised twelve books, a catalogue of heroes, a descent to the underworld promised and never delivered, and a hero compared, at the height of a battle, to an ass. The classical furniture is all present and all slightly wrong, which is how the poem measures its own pretensions against Homer’s. It is also the poem’s way of saying that the old stories no longer fit.
Core Themes
- Love, appetite and the body: The poem runs on appetite and refuses to separate love from hunger. Julia’s affair begins in a summer bower and ends with a pair of shoes; Haidée feeds Juan before she loves him; the starving crew draw lots for his tutor and eat him; Gulbeyaz offers love in a palace and is answered with a speech about freedom; Catherine’s favour is a reward for a despatch. The body keeps interrupting the sentiment, and the narrator treats the interruption as the truth of the matter rather than as a lapse from it. The vocabulary for all of it is the same, and that is part of the argument: love and hunger are one subject, and the soul is described in the language of the stomach.
- War and glory: Ismail is the poem’s centre of gravity and its hardest test. Suwarrow drills his men, promises them plunder, and writes ‘Glory to God and to the Empress’ with bloody hands while the town burns; the narrator measures the bulletin against the dying and finds the drying up of a single tear worth more than seas of gore. Wellington comes in for the same treatment in Canto IX, with his pensions and his ‘best of cut-throats’. The one action the poem unequivocally approves is Juan’s rescue of a child, which is also the one action that gains him nothing. The narrator has seen a battlefield and says so, and the anger is that of a witness rather than a theory; the pity is reserved for the people the bulletin leaves out.
- Society, marriage and hypocrisy: England gives the satire its largest target. London is a marriage market, a round of dinners and a machine for manufacturing reputations; Adeline is correct, admired and cold; her house party is made up of bores and bored; the county family is managed for elections; the newspapers print departures and deaths in the same column. The poem’s charge against the English is not that they are wicked but that they are managed, and that they call the management morality. The Duchess and the clergyman are funny for the same reason: both are all surface, and the surface is believed. Byron’s own class is the subject, and the poem is candid that the satire is written from inside the house it describes.
- Digression, opinion and the poem’s own truth: The poem argues as it goes and makes the argument part of the story. The narrator begins by rejecting the epic convention of plunging in the middle, promises twelve books and delivers sixteen and a fragment, and repeatedly breaks off to say what he thinks of critics, poets, medicine, cookery, philosophy and death. He insists that he has no plan and that his story is true, and both claims are jokes that also happen to be accurate: the digressions are the poem’s method, and the truth it tells is a moral one about the world rather than a factual one about its hero. Readers who want the story are asked to take the opinions as part of it, and the poem is frank that this is a liberty it means to keep taking.
- Freedom and tyranny: The political argument runs from the dedication to the last canto. Southey is mocked as an apostate laureate, Castlereagh as a ‘tinkering slave-maker’, the Holy Alliance as an impious alliance; the Greek song in Lambro’s hall asks what is left of the men who fought at Marathon, and the narrator answers that he wishes men free ‘as much from mobs as kings’. The Russian court is a despotism dressed as splendour, and the English liberty Juan admires is undercut within a page by four highwaymen on Shooter’s Hill. No position is left standing for long, including the poet’s own. The result is a temper rather than a programme, and the poem is careful to show that its own side is no cleaner than the other. Nobody in it is converted, and the narrator does not pretend to be.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Don Juan?
The download is the whole poem: the editorial Introduction, the preface to Cantos VI to VIII, the dedication to Southey, the two epigraphs, and all seventeen cantos down to the point where the last one stops. Nothing is summarised in place of itself, and no canto has been shortened. The text is the Standard Ebooks edition, set from the Project Gutenberg #18762 transcription, and the canto numbering is printed as the edition gives it. The Introduction is printed in full, and it sets out the publication history in detail.
The nine groups in the summaries follow the cantos in order, so a passage found in one of them can be looked up in any edition that prints the same numbering. The poem’s own divisions are kept and no canto has been given a title. Where a canto breaks off, the summary breaks off too, including the unfinished seventeenth, which stops in the middle of a breakfast scene and leaves the poem’s last question open. No scene is named that the poem does not stage, and no line is quoted that is not in the text.
The files come in three formats with the same text and the same canto breaks. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle, by USB or through Send to Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices read best. None of them needs an account, and nothing in the downloads is locked, watermarked or time limited. The three files are generated from the same source, so a passage found in one is in the same place in the others.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text of Don Juan is set from the Project Gutenberg transcription, with the Introduction, the preface, the dedication and the canto numbering printed as the edition gives them.
- Seventeen cantos, unbroken Every canto from the first to the unfinished seventeenth, in the order and numbering of the edition, with no canto abridged and no scene replaced by a summary.
- The apparatus of the edition The editorial Introduction, Byron’s preface for Cantos VI to VIII, the dedication to Southey, and the two epigraphs, including the Shakespearian lines about cakes and ale.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the canto breaks intact and nothing to install beyond the reader you already use.
- Paradise Lost, the epic whose machinery Byron borrows to mock — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Odyssey, the wandering hero Juan is measured against — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Poetry & Epics — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Canto & book summaries
The poem is seventeen cantos, numbered only, and the nine groups that follow keep that order: pairs of cantos from the first to the sixteenth, and the seventeenth by itself because it stops after fourteen stanzas. Nothing has been given a title it does not carry in the text. Each summary covers a whole range and stops at its close, so the page can be read beside the poem without running ahead of it. The pairs are a convenience of the summary, not a division in the poem, and the seventeenth is given its own place because it is so short.
- Canto I–II — Seville, the shipwreck and the island: Juan is born in Seville, educated by a learned mother, and caught at sixteen in Donna Julia’s bedroom. The scandal sends him to sea; the ship sinks, the crew draw lots, and Juan swims to a Cyclades island, where Haidée hides him in a cave. The poem alternates domestic farce with the epic manner it is mocking.
- Canto III–IV — The father’s return and the slave market: Lambro comes home to a feast, hears his daughter called a mistress, and has Juan cut down and taken. Haidée dies after twelve days; Juan, chained in a slave ship, passes Troy and is sold at Constantinople. The idyll ends and the poem turns to the slave trade without a word of sermon.
- Canto V–VI — The seraglio: In the slave market Juan is bought for Gulbeyaz, the Sultan’s fourth wife, dressed as a woman and asked whether he can love. He refuses; the Sultan visits and takes him for another girl. Juan is lodged with Dudù, whose dream of a golden apple wakes the harem, and Gulbeyaz orders the two slaves brought to her.
- Canto VII–VIII — The walls of Ismail: Juan escapes with Johnson, two of the harem women and a eunuch, and joins Suwarrow’s army before Ismail. The assault is described in detail, the town is sacked, and Juan saves a Turkish girl of ten. He is sent to Petersburg with the despatches; the glory of the bulletin is measured against the dead.
- Canto IX–X — Petersburg and the journey west: Catherine receives the despatch, notices the messenger, and makes Juan a favourite. He lives at court until illness sends him abroad with a secret commission and the rescued child, Leila. The journey crosses Poland, Prussia, Germany and Holland and ends with the first sight of London from Shooter’s Hill.
- Canto XI–XII — London: Juan is robbed on Shooter’s Hill, presented at court and taken up by society. The poem gives its long account of balls, visits, match-making and money, and Leila is placed with Lady Pinchbeck. The English are shown as a managed people, and the canto closes promising political economy.
- Canto XIII–XIV — Norman Abbey: The scene moves to Lord Henry and Lady Adeline Amundeville’s Gothic house, filled with peers, wits and bores. Adeline is correct, beautiful and cold; the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke begins to flirt with Juan; Aurora Raby is barely noticed. A game of billiards starts the trouble.
- Canto XV–XVI — The Black Friar: Adeline advises Juan to marry and draws up a list of brides, leaving out Aurora. The Abbey’s ghost is sung to a harp, and that night Juan sees a cowled friar in the gallery. He follows it the next night and finds the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke inside the hood. The legend is left as a joke.
- Canto XVII — the fragment: The last canto begins with orphans, wanders into an argument for free inquiry and the treatment of Galileo, and comes back to the morning after the ghost. Juan looks worn, her Grace looks pale, and the stanza stops in the middle of the breakfast. Fourteen stanzas are all there are.
Don Juan: Frequently Asked Questions
What is Don Juan about?
Is it a version of the old Don Juan legend?
Who does Juan meet?
What is ottava rima, and why is it used here?
Why was the poem thought immoral?
How does the poem end?
Is the narrator Byron?
How do I read the free downloads?
Part of: Poetry & Epics · 1810s
