I Awoke One Morning And Found

Byron's own account of the overnight sensation caused by the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II, on 3 March 1812. The remark was recorded in a memorandum and quoted by Thomas Moore in his Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830). The expensive first printing sold out in three days; at twenty-four, Byron found himself the most celebrated poet in England, mobbed by aristocratic admirers and inundated with fan letters. The phrase passed into the language as the archetype of sudden literary celebrity.