Lord Byron

Lord Byron (born January 22, 1788, London, England—died April 19, 1824, Missolonghi, Greece) was a British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe, making him one of the first great literary celebrities. With Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, he was a major figure among the second generation of English Romantic writers. Renowned as the “gloomy egoist” of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), he created a new archetype of literature (and, eventually, pop culture): the brooding, rebellious “Byronic hero.” For modern readers, however, he is more generally esteemed for the satiric realism of Don Juan (1819–24), which recounts the adventures of the famed fictitious Spanish libertine.

Early life, family, and sexuality

Byron was the son of the handsome and profligate Captain John (“Mad Jack”) Byron and his second wife, Catherine Gordon, a Scots heiress. After her husband had squandered most of her fortune, Catherine Byron took her infant son to Aberdeen, Scotland, where they lived in lodgings on a meager income; the captain died in France in 1791.

George Gordon Byron was born with a clubfoot and developed an extreme sensitivity to his disability. (Some modern experts think that he had spina bifida, a congenital condition of the spine that causes a range of neurological and muscular symptoms, including unequal development of the limbs, wherein one leg may be shorter than the other.) In 1798, at age 10, he unexpectedly inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle William, the 5th Baron Byron. His mother proudly took him to England, where the boy fell in love with the ghostly halls and spacious ruins of Newstead Abbey, which had been presented to the Byrons by King Henry VIII.

After living at Newstead for a while, Byron was sent to school in London, and in 1801 he went to Harrow, one of England’s most prestigious schools. In 1803 he fell in love with his distant cousin Mary Chaworth, who was older and already engaged, and when she rejected him she became the symbol for Byron of idealized and unattainable love. He probably met Augusta Byron, his half sister from his father’s first marriage, that same year. Their passionate relationship, the true nature of which is not agreed upon by scholars, would cause much scandal for Byron later in life.

Indeed, after he became a celebrity, Byron aroused as much curiosity for his sexual adventures, both real and rumored, as for his poetry. It is certain that he had romantic attractions to both women and men from a young age. However, any same-sex relationships he pursued involved social and legal risks, as homosexuality was illegal in England. Byron’s views on women were undoubtedly affected by a fraught relationship with his mother, who had a volatile temper, and by his nurse sexually abusing him when he was about 10. (Another important consideration is that his unpublished memoirs were burned immediately after his death by a circle of friends and family, leading to centuries of speculation about what they revealed about his love life.)

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Education, budding eccentricity, and first poems

In 1805 Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he piled up debts at an alarming rate and indulged in the conventional vices of undergraduates there. Already prone to grandiose gestures and eccentricity, he became known on campus for keeping a pet bear, which he acquired to protest the rule against students keeping dogs at college. Byron reasoned that the rule said nothing about keeping other animals. Throughout his life he kept many unusual pets, including monkeys, tropical birds, a squirrel, and a fox. Indeed, he cultivated a dramatic public image and was especially preoccupied with his physical appearance and his weight. At Trinity he began a lifelong habit of fasting, dieting, and other dubious practices of the time (such as ingesting Epsom salts or vinegar) to keep his weight down.

The signs of Byron’s incipient sexual fluidity became more pronounced in what he later described as “a violent, though pure, love and passion” for John Edleston, a chorister at Trinity who was two years younger than him. Byron often idealized Edleston in his poems and letters, as he would the other young men (and women) to whom he became attached. In 1806 Byron had his early poems privately printed in a volume titled Fugitive Pieces, and that same year he formed at Trinity what was to be a close, lifelong friendship with John Cam Hobhouse, who stirred his interest in liberal Whiggism.

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Byron’s first published volume of poetry, Hours of Idleness, appeared in 1807. A sarcastic critique of the book in The Edinburgh Review provoked his retaliation in 1809 with a couplet satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he attacked the contemporary literary scene, including first-generation Romantics William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and writers with whom he would become friends, such as Thomas Moore and Matthew Gregory Lewis. This work gained him his first recognition.

Coming of age and first cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

On reaching his majority in 1809, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords and then embarked with Hobhouse on a grand tour of the European continent. They sailed to Lisbon, crossed Spain, and proceeded by Gibraltar and Malta to Greece, where they ventured inland to Ioánnina and to Tepelene in Albania. In Greece Byron began Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he continued in Athens. In March 1810 he sailed with Hobhouse for Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), visited the site of Troy, and swam the Hellespont (now Dardanelles) in imitation of the mythical Greek lover Leander. Byron’s sojourn in Greece made a lasting impression on him. The Greeks’ free and open frankness contrasted strongly with English reserve and hypocrisy and served to broaden his views of men and manners. He delighted in the sunshine and the moral tolerance of the people.

Byron arrived back in London in July 1811, and his mother died before he could reach her at Newstead. Then in October Edleston died from consumption. Byron took these losses hard, saying of his mother, “I had but one friend in the world, and she is gone.” He paid tribute to Edleston in Childe Harold and mourned him in the Thyrza cycle of poems, which use a feminine name in the title to mask the male speaker’s same-sex love interest.

In February 1812 Byron made his first speech in the House of Lords, a humanitarian plea opposing harsh Tory measures against riotous Nottingham weavers. At the beginning of March, the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were published by John Murray, and Byron “woke to find himself famous.” The poem describes the travels and reflections of a young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands.

And now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart,
And from his fellow bacchanals would flee;
’Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start,
But pride congealed the drop within his e’e:
Apart he stalked in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolved to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;
With pleasure drugged, he almost longed for woe,
And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below.

Besides furnishing a travelogue of Byron’s own wanderings through the Mediterranean, the first two cantos express the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. In the poem Byron reflects upon the vanity of ambition, the transitory nature of pleasure, and the futility of the search for perfection in the course of a “pilgrimage” through Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece. Its titular figure, Childe Harold, was the first Byronic hero.

Celebrity and marriage: “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know”

In the wake of Childe Harold’s enormous popularity, Byron was lionized in Whig society. The handsome poet was swept into a liaison with the passionate and eccentric Lady Caroline Lamb, and the scandal of an elopement was barely prevented by his friend Hobhouse. Lamb would eventually publish the Gothic romance novel Glenarvon (1816), a thinly veiled account of their affair that further contributed to Byron’s notoriety. Even more famously, in her journal she summarized him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” (Byron’s future wife would use a different expression for her husband’s celebrity: “Byromania.”) Lamb was succeeded as his lover by the social reformer Lady Oxford (Jane Elizabeth Scott), who encouraged Byron’s radicalism.

During the summer of 1813, Byron allegedly entered into intimate relations with his half sister Augusta, now married to Colonel George Leigh. He then carried on a flirtation with Lady Frances Webster as a diversion from this dangerous liaison. The agitations of these two love affairs and the sense of mingled guilt and exultation they aroused in Byron are reflected in the series of gloomy and remorseful Orientalist verse tales he wrote at this time: The Giaour (1813); The Bride of Abydos (1813); The Corsair (1814), which sold 10,000 copies on the day of publication; and Lara (1814).

Seeking to escape his love affairs in marriage, Byron proposed in September 1814 to Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke. The marriage took place in January 1815, and Lady Byron gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada, in December 1815. From the start the marriage was doomed by the gulf between Byron and his wife. He considered her unimaginative and humorless, and she accused him of being abusive. Indeed, during their marriage Byron openly engaged in affairs and heavy drinking and amassed more debt. Prone to both rages and tenderness, he was alternately verbally cruel and affectionate. After initially nicknaming Annabella “the princess of parallelograms” (because of her aptitude for math), he later branded her a “moral Clytemnestra” in reference to the legendary Greek figure who murdered her husband, Agamemnon, in collusion with her lover. About this time Byron was producing remarkably sentimental (as well as classically Romantic) works. In 1815 he published the collection Hebrew Melodies (1815), noted for its enduring first poem, “She Walks in Beauty.”

In January 1816 Annabella Byron left her husband to live with her parents, amid swirling rumors centering on his alleged incestuous relations with Augusta Leigh and his bisexuality. The couple obtained a legal separation. Wounded by the general moral indignation directed at him and deeply in debt, the poet went abroad in April 1816, never to return to England or see his infant daughter again.

Creative productivity during the “haunted summer of 1816”

An admirer of Napoleon, Byron commissioned a replica of the military coach used by the general at the Battle of Waterloo. With his personal physician, John Polidori, Byron traveled to Switzerland and settled at Geneva, near Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley), who had run off together (Percy Shelley was married to another woman at the time) and were living with Claire Clairmont, Godwin’s stepsister. Byron had begun an affair with Clairmont in England, and her determination to continue the relationship was the main reason this group of iconoclasts landed together in Switzerland. Byron rented a villa in the village of Cologny, and Shelley, Godwin, and Clairmont settled in a smaller home nearby. About this time (or possibly earlier, in England) Clairmont became pregnant with Byron’s child. As in his marriage, Byron often treated Clairmont with contempt. Polidori fared no better with his employer.

Yet the summer was creatively fruitful for many members of the group. In Switzerland Byron wrote the third canto of Childe Harold (1816), which follows Harold from Belgium up the Rhine River to Switzerland. It memorably evokes the historical associations of each place Harold visits, giving pictures of the Battle of Waterloo (whose site Byron visited), of Napoleon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and of the Swiss mountains and lakes, in verse that expresses both the most aspiring and most melancholy moods. It also contains moving references to his daughter Ada, “sole daughter of my house and heart.” A visit to the Bernese Oberland provided the scenery for the Faustian poetic drama Manfred (1817), whose protagonist reflects Byron’s own brooding sense of guilt and the wider frustrations of the Romantic spirit doomed by the reflection that man is “half dust, half deity, alike unfit to sink or soar.”

Famously, Byron proposed a ghost story contest to his friends in Cologny, as they gathered in his villa to take refuge from the cold and stormy weather. (A major volcanic eruption in what is now Indonesia in 1815 had produced a “year without a summer” in 1816.) The contest resulted in Godwin penning what became the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Polidori writing “The Vampyre” (1819), a story about an aristocratic vampire who resembled Byron.

(Read Britannica’s article about the “haunted summer of 1816.”)

Byron in Italy: Beppo and Don Juan

At the end of the summer the Shelley party left for England, where Clairmont gave birth to Byron’s daughter Allegra in January 1817. (At Byron’s insistence, Clairmont relinquished the child to him; he would allow her to see Allegra on only a few occasions.) In October 1816 Byron and Hobhouse departed for Italy. They stopped in Venice, where Byron enjoyed the relaxed customs and morals of the Italians and carried on a love affair with Marianna Segati, his landlord’s wife. In May 1817 he joined Hobhouse in Rome, gathering impressions that he recorded in a fourth canto of Childe Harold (1818). He also wrote Beppo, a poem in ottava rima that satirically contrasts Italian and English manners in the story of a Venetian ménage à trois. Back in Venice, Margarita Cogni, a baker’s wife, replaced Segati as his mistress, and his descriptions of the vagaries of this “gentle tigress” are among the most entertaining passages in his letters describing life in Italy. The sale of Newstead Abbey in the autumn of 1818 for £94,500 cleared Byron of his debts, which had risen to £34,000, and left him with a generous income.

In the light, mock-heroic style of Beppo Byron found the form in which he would write his greatest poem, Don Juan, a satire in the form of a picaresque verse tale. The first two cantos of Don Juan were begun in 1818 and published in July 1819. Byron transformed the legendary libertine Don Juan into an unsophisticated, innocent young man who, though he delightedly succumbs to the beautiful women who pursue him, remains a rational norm against which to view the absurdities and irrationalities of the world. Upon being sent abroad by his mother from his native Sevilla (Seville), Juan survives a shipwreck en route and is cast up on a Greek island, whence he is sold into slavery in Constantinople. He escapes to the Russian army, participates gallantly in the Russians’ siege of Ismail, and is sent to St. Petersburg, where he wins the favor of the empress Catherine the Great and is sent by her on a diplomatic mission to England.

The poem’s story, however, remains merely a peg on which Byron could hang a witty and satirical social commentary. His most consistent targets are, first, the hypocrisy and cant underlying various social and sexual conventions and, second, the vain ambitions and pretenses of poets, lovers, generals, rulers, and humanity in general. Yet Don Juan was never finished; Byron completed 16 cantos and had begun the 17th before his own illness and death. In Don Juan he was able to free himself from the excessive melancholy of Childe Harold and reveal other sides of his character and personality—his satiric wit and his unique view of the comic rather than the tragic discrepancy between reality and appearance.

Involvement in Italian and Greek freedom struggles and death in Missolonghi

Shelley and other visitors to Byron in Italy in 1818 observed that he had gained weight, with hair long and turning gray, looking older than his years, and sunk in sexual promiscuity. But a chance meeting with Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, who was 19 years old and married to a man nearly three times her age, reenergized Byron and changed the course of his life. Byron followed her to Ravenna, and she later accompanied him back to Venice. Byron returned to Ravenna in January 1820 as her cavalier servente (gentleman-in-waiting). He also won the friendship of her father and brother, Counts Ruggero and Pietro Gamba, who initiated him into the secret society of the Carbonari and its revolutionary aims to free Italy from Austrian rule. In Ravenna Byron wrote The Prophecy of Dante; cantos III, IV, and V of Don Juan; the poetic dramas Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain (all published in 1821); and a satire on the poet Robert Southey, The Vision of Judgment, which contains a devastating parody of that poet laureate’s fulsome eulogy of King George III.

Byron arrived in Pisa in November 1821, having followed Countess Guiccioli and the Counts Gamba there after the latter had been expelled from Ravenna for taking part in an abortive uprising. He left his daughter Allegra to be educated in a convent near Ravenna, where she died at age five the following April. Clairmont never forgave Byron for their daughter’s death, and in later years (she died in 1879) she bitterly renounced the “free love” ideology that she and others of the group in 1816 had lived by, calling Byron and Percy Shelley “monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery.”

In Pisa Byron again became associated with Shelley, and in early summer of 1822 Byron went to Leghorn (Livorno), where he rented a villa not far from the sea. There in July the poet and essayist Leigh Hunt arrived from England to help Shelley and Byron edit a radical journal, The Liberal. Byron returned to Pisa and housed Hunt and his family in his villa. Despite Shelley’s death by drowning on July 8, the periodical went forward, and its first number contained The Vision of Judgment. At the end of September Byron moved to Genoa, where Teresa’s family had found asylum.

Byron’s interest in the periodical gradually waned, but he continued to support Hunt and to give manuscripts to The Liberal. After a quarrel with his publisher, John Murray, Byron gave all his later work, including cantos VI to XVI of Don Juan (1823–24), to Leigh Hunt’s brother John, publisher of The Liberal.

By this time Byron was in search of new adventure. In April 1823 he agreed to act as agent of the London Committee, which had been formed to aid the Greeks in their struggle for independence from Turkish rule. In July 1823 Byron left Genoa for Cephalonia. He sent £4,000 of his own money to prepare the Greek fleet for sea service and then sailed for Missolonghi on December 29 to join Prince Aléxandros Mavrokordátos, leader of the forces in western Greece.

Byron made efforts to unite the various Greek factions and took personal command of a brigade of Souliot soldiers, reputedly the bravest of the Greeks. But a serious illness in February 1824 weakened him, and in April he contracted the fever from which he died at Missolonghi on April 19. Deeply mourned, he became a symbol of disinterested patriotism and a Greek national hero. His body was returned to England and, refused burial in Westminster Abbey, was placed in the family vault near Newstead. Ironically, 145 years after his death, a memorial to Byron was placed on the floor of the abbey.