George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron
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"Byron" redirects here. For other uses, see Byron (disambiguation).
"Lord Byron" redirects here. For others who have held this title, see Baron Byron. For Virgil Thomson's opera, see Lord Byron (Thomson).
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788–19 April 1824), commonly known as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Among Lord Byron's best-known works are the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The latter remained incomplete on his death. He is regarded as one of the greatest European poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English speaking world and beyond. Lord Byron's fame rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured extravagant living, numerous love affairs, debts, separation, allegations of homosexuality and martial exploits. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization the Carbonari in its struggle against Austria, and later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a febrile illness in Messolonghi. His daughter Ada Lovelace, notable in her own right, collaborated with Charles Babbage on the analytical engine, a predecessor to modern computers. NameByron had two last names (in addition to his title) but only one at any given time. He was christened George Gordon Byron in London. Gordon was a baptismal name, not a surname, to honour his maternal grandfather. In order to claim his wife's estate in Scotland, Byron's father took the surname Gordon. Byron was registered at school in Aberdeen as George Byron Gordon. At age 10, he inherited the English family title, becoming George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron of Rochdale. When his mother-in-law died, her will required that he change his surname to Noel in order to inherit half her estate. He was thereafter George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron. He then signed himself "Noel Byron". Wentworth was Lady Byron's eventual title; her surname before marriage had been Milbanke. Early life
Byron was born in London, the son of Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and his second wife, the former Catherine Gordon, heiress of Gight in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. His paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral John "Foulweather Jack" Byron and Sophia Trevanion.[1] At the age of 10, George inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle, the "wicked" Lord Byron. His mother proudly took him to England.(John Byron had circumnavigated the globe and was the younger brother of the 5th Baron Byron, known as "the Wicked Lord".) From birth, Byron suffered from talipes of the right foot, causing a limp, which resulted in lifelong misery for him, aggravated by the suspicion that with proper care it might have been cured.[citation needed] He was christened George Gordon at St Marylebone Parish Church, after his maternal grandfather, George Gordon of Gight, a descendant of King James I. This grandfather committed suicide in 1779. Byron's mother Catherine had to sell her land and title to pay her father's debts. John Byron may have married Catherine for her money and, after squandering it, deserted her.[citation needed] Catherine moved back to Scotland shortly afterwards, where she raised her son in Aberdeen. On 21 May 1798, the death of his great-uncle made him the 6th Baron Byron, inheriting Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, England. Byron only lived there infrequently as the Abbey was rented to Lord Grey de Ruthyn among others during Byron's adolescence. He received his early formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he remained until 1805. He represented Harrow during the very first Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lord's in 1805; a match that has been played every year since. After school he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge. While not at school or college, he lived, in some antagonism, with his mother at Burgage Manor in Southwell, Nottinghamshire.[citation needed] While there, he cultivated several important early friendships with Elizabeth Pigot and her brother, John, with whom he staged two plays for the delight of the community. During this time, with the help of Elizabeth Pigot, who copied many of his rough drafts, he was encouraged to write his first volumes of poetry. "Fugitive Pieces" was the first, printed by Ridge of Newark, which contained poems written when Byron was only fourteen. However, it was promptly recalled and burned on the advice of his friend, the Reverend Thomas Becher, on account of its more amorous verses, particularly the poem "To Mary".[citation needed] "Pieces on Various Occasions", a "miraculously chaste" revision according to Byron, was published after this.[citation needed] "Hours of Idleness", which collected many of the previous poems, along with more recent compositions, was the culminating book. The savage criticism this received—anonymously, but now known to be the work of Henry Peter Brougham—in the Edinburgh Review prompted his first major satire, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers".[citation needed] While at Trinity, he met and shortly fell deeply in love with a fifteen year old choirboy by the name of John Edleston. About his "protégé" he wrote, "He has been my almost constant associate since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him for ever."[citation needed] Later, upon learning of his friend's death, he wrote, "I have heard of a death the other day that shocked me more than any, of one whom I loved more than any, of one whom I loved more than I ever loved a living thing, and one who, I believe, loved me to the last."[citation needed] In his memory Byron composed Thyrza, a series of elegies, in which he changed the pronouns from masculine to feminine so as not to offend sensibilities.[citation needed] Travels to the EastFrom 1809 to 1811, Byron went on the Grand Tour then customary for a young nobleman. The Napoleonic Wars forced him to avoid most of Europe, and he instead turned to the Mediterranean. Correspondence among his circle of Cambridge friends also makes clear that a key motive was the hope of homosexual experience.[2] He travelled from England over Spain to Albania and spent time there and in Athens. While in Athens he had a torrid love affair with Nicolò Giraud, a boy of fifteen or sixteen who taught him Italian. In gratitude for the boy's love Byron sent him to school at a monastery in Malta and bequeathed him seven thousand pounds sterling—almost double what he was later to spend refitting the Greek fleet.[citation needed] For most of the trip, he had a travelling companion in his friend John Cam Hobhouse. On this tour, the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were written, though some of the more risqué passages, such as those touching on pederasty, were suppressed before publication.[3] Beginning of poetic careerAs previously mentioned, some early verses which he had published in 1806 were suppressed. He followed those in 1807 with Hours of Idleness, which the Edinburgh Review, a Whig periodical, savagely attacked. In reply, Byron sent forth English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), which created considerable stir and shortly went through five editions.[citation needed] While some authors resented being satirized in its first edition, over time in subsequent editions it became a mark of prestige to be the target of Byron's pen.[citation needed] After his return from his travels, the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published in 1812, and were received with acclaim.[citation needed] In his own words, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous."[citation needed] He followed up his success with the poem's last two cantos, as well as four equally celebrated Oriental Tales, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara, which established the Byronic hero.[citation needed] About the same time began his intimacy with his future biographer, Thomas Moore. Political careerByron eventually took his seat in the House of Lords in 1811, shortly after his return from the Levant, and made his first speech there on 27 February 1812. A strong advocate of social reform, he received particular praise as one of the few Parliamentary defenders of the Luddites.[citation needed] He was opposed to the established religion.[citation needed] These experiences inspired Byron to write political poems such as "Song for the Luddites" (1816) and "The Landlords' Interest" (1823). Examples of poems where he attacked his political opponents include "Wellington: The Best of the Cut-Throats" (1819) and "The Intellectual Eunuch Castlereagh" (1818).[citation needed] Note: "The Landlords' Interest" will not be found in any Byron anthology; it is Canto XIV of "The Age Of Bronze" (1823). Affairs and scandalsImage:Byronshouse266.JPG
Byron's house in Southwell, Nottinghamshire
Ultimately he was to live abroad to escape the censure of British society, where men could be forgiven for sexual misbehaviour only up to a point, one which Byron far surpassed. In an early scandal, Byron embarked in 1812 on a well-publicised affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron eventually broke off the relationship, and Lady Caroline never entirely recovered, pursuing him even after he tired of her. She was emotionally disturbed and lost so much weight that Byron cruelly commented to her mother-in-law, his friend Lady Melbourne, that he was "haunted by a skeleton."[4] She began to call on him at home, sometimes dressed in disguise, at a time when such an act could ruin both of them socially. One day, during such a visit, she wrote on a book at his desk, "Remember me!" As a retort, Byron wrote a poem beginning: "Remember thee!" and ending "Thou false to him, thou fiend to me." As a child, Byron had seen little of his half-sister Augusta Leigh; in adulthood, he formed a close relationship with her that has widely been interpreted as incestuous.[5] Augusta had been separated from her husband since 1811 when she gave birth on 15 April 1814 to a daughter, Elizabeth Medora Leigh. The extent of Byron's joy over the birth has been construed as evidence that he was Medora's father, a theory reinforced by the many passionate poems he wrote to Augusta. Eventually Byron began to court Lady Caroline's cousin Anne Isabella Milbanke ("Annabella"), who refused his first proposal of marriage but later accepted. They married at Seaham Hall, County Durham, on 2 January 1815. The marriage proved unhappy. He treated her poorly and showed disappointment at the birth of a daughter (Augusta Ada), rather than a son.[citation needed] On 16 January 1816, Lady Byron left him, taking Ada with her. On 21 April, Byron signed the Deed of Separation. Rumours of marital violence, adultery with actresses, incest with Augusta, and sodomy were circulated, assisted by a jealous Lady Caroline.[citation needed] In a letter, Augusta quoted him as saying: "Even to have such a thing said is utter destruction & ruin to a man from which he can never recover." After this break-up of his domestic life, Byron again left England, as it turned out, for ever. He passed through Belgium and up the Rhine; with his personal physician, John William Polidori he settled at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in the summer of 1816. There he became friends with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin. He was also joined by Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he had had an affair in London. Byron initially refused to have anything to do with Claire, and would only agree to remain in her presence with the Shelleys, who eventually persuaded Byron to accept and provide for Allegra, the child she bore him in January 1817.[citation needed] At the Villa Diodati, kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of "that wet, ungenial summer", over three days in June the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including "Fantasmagoriana" (in the French edition), and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's to produce The Vampyre, the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre.[citation needed] Byron's story fragment was published as a postscript to Mazeppa; he also wrote the third canto of Childe Harold. Byron wintered in Venice, but in 1817 he journeyed to Rome; returning to Venice he wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold. About the same time he sold Newstead and published Manfred, Cain, and The Deformed Transformed. The first five cantos of Don Juan were written between 1818 and 1820, during which period he made the acquaintance of the Countess Guiccioli, who soon separated from her husband. It was about this time that he received a visit from Moore, to whom he confided his autobiography, which Moore, in the exercise of the discretion left to him, burned in 1824.[citation needed] Byron and the ArmeniansIn 1816 Byron visited Saint Lazarus Island in Venice where he acquainted himself with Armenian culture through the Mekhitarist Order. He learned the Armenian language from Fr. H. Avgerian and attended many seminars about language and history. He wrote "English grammar and the Armenian" in 1817, and "Armenian grammar and the English" (1819) in which he quoted samples from classical and modern Armenian. He participated in the compilation of "English Armenian dictionary" (1821) and wrote the preface where he explained the relationship of the Armenians with and the oppression of the Turkish "pashas" and the Persian satraps, and their struggle of liberation. His two main translations are the "Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians", several chapters of Khorenatsi's "Armenian History" and sections of Lambronatsi's "Orations".[citation needed] When in Polis he discovered discrepancies in the Armenian vs the English version of the Bible and translated some passages that were either missing or deficient in the English version. His fascination was so great that he even considered a replacement of Cain story of the Bible with that of the legend of Armenian patriarch Haik.[citation needed] He may be credited with the birth of Armenology and its propagation.[citation needed] His profound lyricism and ideological courage has inspired many Armenian poets, the likes of Fr. Ghevond Alishan, Smbat Shahaziz, Hovhannes Tumanyan, Ruben Vorberian and others.[citation needed] Byron in Italy and Greece
In 1821–22 he finished cantos 6–12 of Don Juan at Pisa, and in the same year he joined with Leigh Hunt and Percy Bysshe Shelley in starting a short-lived newspaper, The Liberal, in the first number of which appeared The Vision of Judgment. His last Italian home was Genoa, where he was still accompanied by the Countess Guiccioli, and where he met Charles John Gardiner, 1st Earl of Blessington and Marguerite, Countess of Blessington and provided the material for her work "Conversations with Lord Byron", an important text in the reception of Byron in the period immediately after his death. Byron lived in Genoa until 1823 when—growing bored with his life there and with the Countess—he accepted overtures for his support from representatives of the movement for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.[citation needed] On July 16, Byron left Genoa on the Hercules, arriving at Kefalonia in the Ionian Islands on August 4. He spent £4000 of his own money to refit the Greek fleet, then sailed for Messolonghi in western Greece, arriving on December 29 to join Alexandros Mavrokordatos, a Greek politician with military power.[citation needed] Mavrokordatos and Byron planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. Byron employed a fire-master to prepare artillery and took part of the rebel army under his own command and pay, despite his lack of military experience, but before the expedition could sail, on 15 February 1824, he fell ill, and the usual remedy of bleeding weakened him further.[citation needed] He made a partial recovery, but in early April he caught a violent cold which the bleeding — insisted on by his doctors — aggravated. The cold became a violent fever, and he died on April 19.[citation needed] Post mortem
 The Greeks mourned Lord Byron deeply, and he became a hero. The national poet of Greece, Dionysios Solomos wrote a poem about his unexpected loss, named To the Death of Lord Byron (Εις το Θάνατο του Λόρδου Μπάιρον). Βύρων (Vyron), the Greek form of "Byron", continues in popularity as a masculine name in Greece, and a suburb of Athens is called Vyronas in his honour. His body was embalmed and his heart buried under a tree in Messolonghi. His remains were sent to England for burial in Westminster Abbey, but the Abbey refused.[6] He is buried at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham. At her request, Ada, the child he never knew, was buried next to him. In later years, the Abbey allowed a duplicate of a marble slab given by the King of Greece, which is laid directly above Byron's grave. In 1969, 145 years after Byron's death, a memorial to him was finally placed in Westminster Abbey.[citation needed] Upon his death, the barony passed to a cousin, George Anson Byron (1789–1868), a career military officer and Byron's polar opposite in temperament and lifestyle.[citation needed] Poetic worksByron wrote prolifically.[7] In 1833 his publisher, John Murray, released the complete works in 17 duodecimo volumes, including a life by Thomas Moore. His magnum opus, Don Juan, a poem spanning 17 cantos, ranks as one of the most important long poems published in England since Milton's Paradise Lost.[citation needed] Don Juan, Byron's masterpiece, often called the epic of its time, has roots deep in literary tradition and, although regarded by early Victorians as somewhat shocking, equally involves itself with its own contemporary world at all levels—social, political, literary and ideological.[citation needed] 
The Byronic hero pervades much of Byron's work. Scholars have traced the literary history of the Byronic hero from Milton, and many authors and artists of the Romantic movement show Byron's influence -- during the 19th century and beyond.[citation needed] The Byronic hero presents an idealised but flawed character whose attributes include[citation needed]:
Although Byron falls chronologically into the period most commonly associated with Romantic poetry, much of his work looks back to the satiric tradition of Pope and Dryden. In Canto III of Don Juan, he expresses his detestation for poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.[8] The most striking thing about Byron’s poetry is its strength and masculinity. Trenchantly witty, he used unflowery and colloquial language in many poems, such as Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos.[citation needed] His talent for drama was expressed in the vibrantly galloping rhythms of The Destruction of Sennacherib.[citation needed] However, poems such as When We Two Parted and So We’ll Go No More A-Roving express strong feelings in simple and touching language.[citation needed] He made little use of imagery and did not aspire to write of things beyond this world; the Victorian critic John Ruskin wrote of him that he spoke only of what he had seen and known; and spoke without exaggeration, without mystery, without enmity, and without mercy.[citation needed] His attitude towards writing poetry is summed up well in a letter to Thomas Moore on July 5th 1821:
Lord Byron and the Parthenon marbles
Byron was a bitter opponent of Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon marbles from Greece, and "reacted with fury" when Elgin's agent gave him a tour of the Parthenon in which he saw the missing friezes and metopes. He penned a poem, "The curse of Minerva", to denounce Elgin's actions:[9]
CharacterLord Byron, by all accounts, had a particularly magnetic personality—one may say astonishingly so.[citation needed] He obtained a reputation as being unconventional, eccentric, flamboyant and controversial. He was given to extremes of temper. Byron had a great fondness for animals, most famously for a Newfoundland dog named Boatswain; when Boatswain contracted rabies, Byron reportedly nursed him without any fear of becoming bitten and infected.[citation needed] Boatswain lies buried at Newstead Abbey and has a monument larger than his master's. The inscription, Byron's "Epitaph to a Dog", has become one of his best-known works, reading in part:
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