# Is "Don Juan (Cantos I and II)" by Lord Byron a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Don Juan (Cantos I and II) by Lord Byron (Thomas Davison, printer, for John Murray; neither author's nor publisher's name printed in the book, 1819) is identified by: First edition, published 15 July 1819 with neither Byron's nor Murray's name printed anywhere in the volume, a deliberate anonymity driven by the poem's scandalous content. Because Murray's name did not appear in the book, he had little legal recourse against the unauthorized reprints that quickly followed.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition, published 15 July 1819 with neither Byron's nor Murray's name printed anywhere in the volume, a deliberate anonymity driven by the poem's scandalous content
- Issued in a handsomely printed, more expensive issue alongside a smaller, cheaper issue of the same setting; contents comprise only Cantos I and II, with some 1,500 copies produced of the initial printing
- Byron's dedicatory verses attacking Poet Laureate Robert Southey by name were withheld from this and every other edition published in Byron's lifetime at Murray's insistence, and reached print only in an 1832-33 posthumous collected edition
- Publisher imprint reads Thomas Davison, printer, for John Murray; neither author's nor publisher's name printed in the book
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Lord Byron |
| Publisher | Thomas Davison, printer, for John Murray; neither author's nor publisher's name printed in the book |
| Year | 1819 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Poetry |
| Key point | First edition, published 15 July 1819 with neither Byron's nor Murray's name printed anywhere in the volume, a deliberate anonymity driven… |
| Book-club edition exists? | — |

## Points of issue
First edition, published 15 July 1819 with neither Byron's nor Murray's name printed anywhere in the volume, a deliberate anonymity driven by the poem's scandalous content. Issued in a handsomely printed, more expensive issue alongside a smaller, cheaper issue of the same setting; contents comprise only Cantos I and II, with some 1,500 copies produced of the initial printing. Byron's dedicatory verses attacking Poet Laureate Robert Southey by name were withheld from this and every other edition published in Byron's lifetime at Murray's insistence, and reached print only in an 1832-33 posthumous collected edition.

## Is this the true first?
Because Murray's name did not appear in the book, he had little legal recourse against the unauthorized reprints that quickly followed. Murray himself later published Cantos III-V (1821) but then refused the increasingly controversial later cantos, which Byron placed instead with the publisher John Hunt, who issued Cantos VI-VIII, IX-XI, and XII-XIV in 1823 and Cantos XV-XVI in 1824. A first edition of the complete poem is therefore a set spanning two different publishers' imprints across several years, not a single uniform Murray edition.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
Nineteenth-century and later collected editions combining all sixteen cantos of Don Juan under one later title page and a uniform binding are convenient reading texts but are not first editions of any individual canto installment, and none of these prints the Southey dedication as it would have appeared in 1819.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Don Juan (Cantos I and II)* by Lord Byron a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/don-juan-cantos-i-and-ii
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.