Lord Byron

English poet

• Born: January 22, 1788
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: April 19, 1824
• Place of death: Missolonghi, Greece

Byron wrote satirical and lyrical poetry of the highest order, and his life seemed, to many of his contemporaries, to be the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit of Romanticism. His figure of the “Byronic hero” became vastly influential in nineteenth century European culture.

Early Life

Born George Gordon, Lord Byron had an aristocratic heritage on both sides of the family. On his father’s side, the Byrons had long been known for their eccentricity, and Byron’s father, Captain John Byron, led a wild and reckless life, squandering the family wealth. He died when the poet was three, having separated from his wife the previous year. The poet’s mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight, was descended from one of the most notable families in Scotland.

Until 1798, the young Byron lived with his mother in Aberdeen, Scotland, but on the death of his great uncle, the notorious “Wicked Lord,” he became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, and he and his mother moved to Newstead Abbey in England, the traditional family seat. Byron was schooled at Harrow and Cambridge, where the personality that would entrance so many soon became apparent: generous and openhearted, ambitious and idealistic, self-willed, but with an almost feminine quality of softness and sentimentality.

Byron also had the advantage of being strikingly handsome; his fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked, “so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw… his eyes the open portals of the sun—things of light, and for light.” Byron’s classic, almost Grecian beauty was flawed only by a deformed right foot, which embarrassed him throughout his life, and a tendency to become overweight, which he combated by strict dieting and exercise.

Byron’s literary career was launched when, after privately printing two volumes of verse anonymously, he published Hours of Idleness (1807) and a highly successful satire about contemporary writers, English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers (1809), which went through four editions in three years. In 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords, and for a number of years he anticipated a career as a statesman.

In spite of Byron’s early success, however, his restless spirit was seeking to escape from the increasingly dissolute life he was living in London. He always sought new experiences and felt strongly the lure of foreign climes. In July, 1809, he embarked on a tour of Europe with his lifelong friend John Cam Hobhouse. They visited Portugal, Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Albania, and Greece, which was then under Turkish rule, and later traveled to Ephesus and Constantinople. Athens in particular made a deep impression on Byron, and his two years of traveling gave him a cosmopolitan outlook that shaped his future life and attitudes. He always preferred the spontaneity and freedom of life in the Mediterranean lands to what he saw as the restraint and hypocrisy of English upper-class society.

Byron’s travels also gave him a virtually inexhaustible supply of literary material. It was from his experiences on this first European tour that he wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , and it was the publication of this work in 1812 that first brought him widespread fame.

Life’s Work

With the overwhelming success of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron became celebrated in the social circles of fashionable upper-class London. Women in particular were fascinated by the handsome, sensitive, and apparently melancholy poet of noble birth; his romantic wanderings in Greece made him mysteriously attractive. For his part, Byron was always ready to cultivate women friends and lovers. He could not, he said, exist without some object of attachment, and he always felt more at ease in the company of women. In particular, he became involved with the impulsive and unstable Lady Caroline Lamb, and for several months during 1812 they carried on an indiscreet, passionate, and tempestuous affair.

Byron’s fame, popularity, and literary reputation continued to grow between the years of 1812 and 1815, following the publication of his “Oriental” verse tales: The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), which sold an unprecedented ten thousand copies on the day of publication, and Lara (1814). Each of these romances contained the famous figure of the “Byronic hero,” a restless and moody wanderer, an outcast from society, who possessed a lofty disdain for conventional values and for the common run of humankind.

Byron’s personal life during this period remained tempestuous. In part to free himself from the now unwelcome and frequently absurd and vindictive attentions of Caroline Lamb, he entered into a marriage with Annabella Millbanke, an intelligent, serious-minded young woman who was in every way the opposite of Caroline. The marriage, however, proved short-lived and disastrous. Byron, worried by financial difficulties, drank heavily and went into wild rages. Annabella, pregnant with their child, could not cope with his erratic behavior and was also deeply shocked by her discovery of Byron’s incestuous relationship with Augusta, his half sister. The brother and sister had been brought up separately but had spent time together during 1813, and Byron always felt at ease in Augusta’s supportive and undemanding company. Annabella convinced herself that Byron was insane, and they separated in January, 1816, exactly one year after their marriage.

During 1816, Byron’s fortunes in England began to decline. Rumors regarding the nature of his liaison with Augusta were widespread, and he found himself a social outcast. In April he left England, never to return. Traveling to Switzerland, he met in Geneva another poet in exile, the young Percy Bysshe Shelley . It was the beginning of a famous friendship. Shelley was accompanied by his future wife Mary Godwin and Claire Claremont, a young girl who had forced her attentions on Byron in London and who was now pregnant with Byron’s child.

During his four-month stay in Geneva, Byron wrote more stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as well as two of his most popular and accomplished works, the dramatic monologueThe Prisoner of Chillon (1816), which was inspired by his own visit to the castle at Chillon, and the drama Manfred (1817), Byron’s version of the Faust legend.

By October, 1816, Byron and his friend Hobhouse had moved on to Italy, visiting Milan and Rome (his impressions of which formed the core of the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) and settling in Venice. Italy was to be Byron’s home for seven years. Having sold Newstead Abbey, he was able to clear his debts and enjoy a comfortable income, and his years in Italy were to be some of the most productive of his life.

In the fall of 1817, Byron wrote the light satire Beppo: A Venetian Story (1818), which in form and tone served as a prelude to his masterpiece, the mock-heroic epic Don Juan (1819-1824, 1826), which he began in July, 1818. He was to continue working on it intermittently for the next five years; the ottava rima verse form that he adopted was ideally suited to the easy, colloquial style that came naturally to him and in which he was best able to express himself. The poem had a controversial impact in England. Byron’s publisher called it “outrageously shocking,” and many readers were offended by its bawdiness. During this period Byron also wrote a masterful satire directed toward his fellow poet Robert Southey, The Vision of Judgment (1822).

In Italy Byron continued to indulge his sensual and romantic nature, entering into numerous love affairs with local women. In particular, he formed a liaison with the nineteen-year-old Countess Teresa Guiccioli, who had recently married a man forty years her senior. Byron became her cavalier servante, or sanctioned lover. It was to be his last passionate affair.

Through his involvement with Teresa’s nationalistic family, the Gambas, Byron became involved in the movement to free northern Italy from Austrian rule. He became a member of the Carbonaria, a secret revolutionary society, and was regarded by the Austrian authorities as a dangerous subversive. When the Gambas were forced to move to Pisa in 1821, Byron went with them, where he was reunited with Shelley and his friends, and they were joined by the colorful adventurer Edward John Trelawny, and the writer Leigh Hunt and his family. The “Pisan circle” dissolved in 1822, when the Gambas were expelled from the state of Tuscany, and Shelley was drowned. Byron, still with Teresa, moved on to Genoa, his fourth and last residence in Italy.

Byron was becoming bored and dissatisfied with the directionless drift of his life and longed for active involvement in a great cause. By 1823 he had decided to travel once more to Greece, in order to aid the Greeks in their war of independence against the Turks. He made large amounts of money available to the Greeks, and on July 15, with his small group of friends and servants, he sailed to the island of Cephalonia, one of the Ionian islands under British protection. There he assessed the political situation, before sailing for Missolonghi on the Greek mainland in November, where he was greeted enthusiastically by the local population.

In Missolonghi, Byron kept five hundred Albanian warriors under his pay, and he planned to lead an assault on the Turkish garrison at Lepanto. The planned action never materialized, however, and as the months passed, Byron felt increasingly depressed at the apparent failure of his mission. He had not succeeded in bringing together the quarreling Greek factions; he could not even trust his own soldiers; and his health, already weakened by years of excessive dieting, was deteriorating. On April 10, he contracted a fever, and he died nine days later. There was mourning throughout Greece for the loss of the English lord who had embraced their cause as his own, and the news of his death, according to the London Magazine in August, 1824, “came upon London like an earthquake.”

Significance

Byron’s name will forever be associated with the cause of Greek freedom. Not only his efforts in life but also the wave of feeling that swept through Greece at his death helped to galvanize and unite the Greek people. To this day, Byron is a national hero in Greece; almost every town has a street named for him, and his statue stands at Missolonghi.

Byron’s literary achievements are many. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called him “the greatest genius of our century,” and the Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini truly said that Byron “led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe.” Byron’s work, and the myth surrounding his name, became a pervasive influence throughout nineteenth century European culture. He has never belonged to England alone, nor did he ever wish to belong solely to the country of his birth. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, for example, was translated forty-one times and appeared in ten different languages in the nineteenth century.

In France, novelist Honoré de Balzac, painter Eugène Delacroix, and composer Hector Berlioz were inspired by Byron’s work. In Russia, novelist Fyodor Dostoevski, poet Alexander Pushkin, and composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky all felt Byron’s spell. Throughout Europe, countless minor writers, now forgotten, took up Byronic attitudes and adopted Byronic themes. In his poetry and his life, Byron seemed to embody the restless and rebellious spirit of the Romantic age. The mysterious and aloof “Byronic hero,” impatient of convention and scorning established authority, endorsed the kind of self-assertive individualism that the age found attractive.

Although Byron’s standing as a poet has fallen lower than that of fellow Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Shelley, and John Keats, Don Juan stands untouched as the most amusing long poem in the English language, and many of Byron’s short lyrics stand comparison with the best.

Bibliography

Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Byron. Edited by Jerome J. McGann. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. The most comprehensive one-volume edition of Byron’s poetry and prose. Includes complete text of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, as well as other poems and plays, and selections from Byron’s incomparable letters.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Byron’s Letters and Journals. Edited by Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973-1982. Byron’s letters were always witty, irreverent, and highly entertaining, written quickly and without inhibitions. They mirror his many-sided personality and the charm of his conversation.

Crane, David. The Kindness of Sisters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. A study of Byron’s reputation after death, exploring bitter and conflicting accounts by the wife he divorced and the sister he seduced.

Eisler, Benita. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Eisler maintains Byron’s poetry has been eclipsed by his oversized image as a literary bad boy, freedom fighter, and sexual adventurer. She seeks to present a more balanced view of her subject by analyzing his poetry in addition to recounting the events of his life.

Jump, John D. Byron. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Intelligent and circumspect introduction to Byron’s life and works. Emphasizes the social and historical context of his work and the cultural and intellectual tradition in which he stands.

Longford, Elizabeth. The Life of Byron. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. Concise, slightly romanticized, but factually accurate biography.

MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. A biography that re-examines the life of the poet in the light of MacCarthy’s assertion that Byron was bisexual, a victim of early abuse by his nurse.

Marchand, Leslie A. Byron: A Portrait. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. The best one-volume biography, condensed from Marchand’s own three-volume biography of Byron (1957). Well documented, judicious, and highly readable.

Parker, Derek. Byron and His World. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Concise, attractively presented pictorial life, with illustrations of Byron, his associates, and the places associated with his name.

Peters, Catharine. Byron. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2000. A brief overview of Byron’s life, one in a series of popular “pocket” biographies.

Quennell, Peter. Byron in Italy. New York: Viking Press, 1941. Detailed study of Byron’s career in Italy, from 1816 to 1823. Also attempts to give an account of the Romantic movement, as a cultural force that exercised a major influence on the nineteenth century.