“‘Pity the poor creature,’ George Eliot wrote in Daniel Deronda, who has nowhere to call ‘“home”, no one spot sanctified by early associations and affections’, but Trelawny is probably one of those rare humans who had no need of her sympathy. “
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“There is no record of any Fenton in the 23rd of Foot, no Fenton on the casualty roll from the Peninsula, no J. W. Fenton anywhere in the Army Lists, no mention in General Mina’s memoirs of his ‘chief engineer’, but there is something imaginatively stilted in this kind of determination to unpick the fictions with which so many Philhellenes like Fenton heralded their arrival in Greece. What this historical literalism ignores is not just the extent to which men and women constantly reinvent themselves, but the way in which these fictions become imaginative realities, enabling and self-fulfilling in a way for which Trelawny’s whole life provides the classic model. There was almost nobody who arrived in Greece without something to hide, some blemish on their lives, some failure to atone or disappointment to erase; hardly a Philhellene who did not need Greece more than Greece needed him. That was as true of Byron as it was of General Normann. Hastings would never have been there if he had not been struck off the Navy List. Humphreys was only in Greece because there was no commission for him in the British Army, and – sliding inexorably down into the comic world of ‘Don Juan’ – it was a chance for many to be what luck, birth, poverty or peace had denied them in their pasts; a chance for sergeants to masquerade as captains, captains as generals, Washingtons as Washingtons, parvenus and tricksters as marquises and counts.”
David Crane, Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny
Oltre Mare 