Byron, George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron

I

Introduction

Byron, George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824), known as Lord Byron, English poet, who was one of the most important and versatile writers of the Romantic movement.

II

Early Development

Byron was born on January 22, 1788, the son of Captain John (“Mad Jack”) Byron and Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress whose fortune he had squandered. Jack Byron died in France in 1791, and the young Byron was brought up in Aberdeen by his temperamental mother and a Calvinist nurse, who, according to Byron, initiated him sexually when he was nine years old. It is widely believed that he was born with a club foot; certainly, Byron was forced to undergo painful and unsuccessful medical treatments throughout his childhood.

Inheriting the title of Baron Byron in 1798 from his great-uncle, Byron moved with his mother to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral estate, and was educated at Harrow School and—intermittently—at Trinity College, Cambridge University. Here he was notorious for loose living and radicalism, and was described by a tutor as “a young man of tumultuous passions”. He left, without a degree and deeply in debt, in 1807 to pursue an extravagant lifestyle in London.

Byron’s collection of lyrics, Hours of Idleness, published the same year, was harshly attacked in the Edinburgh Review, prompting Byron’s lively satirical response, “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” (1809). Written in heroic couplets, this poem shows the influence of Alexander Pope, whom Byron admired greatly. In 1817 he declared his astonishment at: “the ineffable distance in point of sense—harmony—effect—and even Imagination Passion—and Invention—between the little Queen Anne’s Man [Pope]—and us of the lower Empire ... “.

III

Fame

In 1812 the publication of Cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage made Byron famous. A rambling narrative in Spenserian stanzas, the poem had been written while travelling across Europe to Greece, where Byron had swum the Hellespont (like Leander in Greek mythology) and engaged in a series of romantic adventures. The melancholy hero of Childe Harold, brooding on his own estrangement, captured the imagination of the English public:

Handsome and personally magnetic, Byron was fêted by London society and he circulated in every fashionable set. In 1813 he wrote that “The great object of life is Sensation—to feel that we exist—even though in pain—it is this ‘craving void’ which drives us to Gaming—to Battle—to Travel ... “. Byron also had a series of scandalous love affairs, including one with Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, and later fictionalized him in her novel Glenarvon.

With the wildly successful publications—Byron was, in modern terminology, a best-seller—of the Eastern tales, The Bride of Abydos and The Giaour in 1813, and The Corsair and Lara in 1814, the myth of the Byronic hero intensified. Byron wrote of his poetry, “it is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake”, and his rapid style of composition (The Bride of Abydos was written in four days) is reflected in the energy and fluency of his verse. In 1815 the Hebrew Melodies were published, with music. As these lines from “She Walks in Beauty” suggest, Byron’s lyrical power itself has a musical quality, derived from his technical confidence:

In 1815 Byron married the heiress and keen mathematician Annabella Milbanke, whom he had described in earlier letters as “the Princess of Parallelograms”, writing: “I should like her more if she were less perfect.” The marriage ended after a year, Annabella leaving him after the birth of their daughter, probably because of suspicions of his sexual relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, to whom he was deeply attached. It is likely that Byron did in fact father one of Augusta’s children.

IV

Exile from England

Under a cloud of scandal, and accused of “every monstrous vice”, Byron left England (the “tight little Island”, as he described it) for ever in 1816, travelling first to Switzerland, where he met Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. Claire Clairmont, the half-sister of Mary Shelley, followed Byron and later gave birth to his daughter. In Switzerland, Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon; two acts of a play, Manfred; and Canto III of Childe Harold. Canto III, according to the Edinburgh Review, showed “the same stern and lofty disdain of all mankind” as Byron’s earlier work, “but mixed ... with deeper and more matured reflections, and a more intense sensibility to all that is grand and lovely in the external world”. Personal meditation is interwoven with reflections on world events and figures such as Napoleon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Byron called Canto III his “favourite”, writing: “I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies.”