All about Lord Byron-An Illustrated Book
By Students’ Academy
Copyright@2011Students’ Academy
Smashwords Edition
Chapter 1: Introduction
Lord Byron is respected and without any question regarded as one of the all time great English poets; he is widely read and his influence is quite evident in the poetry of many of the following poets. His full name was George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron.
Byron was born on 22 January, 1788. Through his beautifully romantic poetry, he came to be recognized as a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan.
Undoubtedly, Byron is a notable figure in the world of English Literature, his personal life is also of high significance. His personal life featured aristocratic excesses, huge debts, numerous love affairs, and self-imposed exile.
Lady Caroline described Lord Byron as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. His social life was not without numerous upheavals. Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later traveled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. While Byron was living in Messolonghi he contracted a fever and he never recovered from it. Finally, he died there.
Chapter 2: Childhood and Early Life
Engraving of Byron's father, Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron
Lord Byron was born in an aristocrat family and there was nothing that he lacked in terms of material comforts and education. He was the son of Captain John 'Mad Jack' Byron and his second wife, the former Catherine Gordon, heiress of Gight in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral The Hon., John 'Foulweather Jack' Byron and Sophia Trevanion. Vice Admiral John Byron had circumnavigated the globe, and was the younger brother of the 5th Baron Byron, known as "the Wicked Lord".
When the time came for Christening, Lord Byron was Christianed George Gordon Byron at St Marylebone Parish Church after his maternal grandfather, George Gordon of Gight, a descendant of King James I. His grandfather ended his life; he committed suicide, in 1779. Byron's mother Catherine had to sell her land and title to pay her husband's debts. John Byron may have married Catherine for her money and, after squandering her fortune and selling her estate, having spent very little time with his wife and child in order to avoid creditors, he deserted them both and died a year later. Catherine regularly experienced mood swings and bouts of melancholy. She was definitely not going to prolong her stay there because the ambiance had come to be intolerable and she could not take it anymore.
Catherine Gordon, Byron's mother
After a few days, unable to continue to live there, Catherine decided to move to Scotland, where she raised her son in Aberdeen. On 21 May 1798, the death of Byron's great-uncle, the "wicked" Lord Byron, made the 10-year-old the 6th Baron Byron, and the young man then inherited both title and estate, Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire, England. His mother proudly took him to England. Byron lived at his estate infrequently, as the Abbey was rented to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, among others, during Byron's adolescence.
In the year 1799, in the month of August, Byron entered the school of William Glennie, an Aberdonian in Dulwich. He had some unusual experiences with his nurse there during the period he stayed there. Byron would later say that around this time and beginning when he still lived in Scotland, his governess, May Gray, would come to bed with him at night and "play tricks with his person”. According to Byron, this "caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts—having anticipated life".Gray was dismissed for allegedly beating Byron when he was 11.
Lord Byron’s early formal education took place at Aberdeen Grammar School. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he remained until July 1805. He represented Harrow during the very first Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lord's in 1805. After school he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Chapter 3: Changing of Name
The mountain Lochnagar is the subject of one of Byron's poems, in which he reminisces about his childhood
Byron’s names continued to change all through his life. He was christened "George Gordon Byron" in London. "Gordon" was a baptismal name, not a surname, after his maternal grandfather. When he wanted to claim his wife’s estate in Scotland, Byron's father took the additional surname "Gordon", becoming "John Byron Gordon", and he was occasionally styled "John Byron Gordon of Gight". Byron himself used this surname for a time and was registered at school in Aberdeen as "George Byron Gordon". At the age of 10, he inherited the English Barony of Byron, becoming "Lord Byron", and eventually dropped the double surname (though after this point his surname was hidden by his peerage in any event).
After the death of Byron’s mother-in-law, according to her will he had to change his surname to "Noel" , and only after that he could inherit half her estate, and so he obtained a Royal Warrant allowing him to "take and use the surname of Noel only". The Royal Warrant also allowed him to "subscribe the said surname of Noel before all titles of honour", and from that point he signed himself "Noel Byron" (the usual signature of a peer being merely the peerage, in this case simply "Byron"). This was, it was said, so that his signature would become "N.B." which were the initials of one of his heroes, Napoleon Bonaparte. He was also sometimes referred to as "Lord Noel Byron", as if "Noel" were part of his title, and likewise his wife was sometimes called "Lady Noel Byron". Lady Byron eventually succeeded to the Barony of Wentworth, becoming "Lady Wentworth"; her surname before marriage had been "Milbanke".
Chapter 4: Early Career
During the period away from school or college, Byron usually spent his time with his mother at Burgage Manor in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, in some antagonism. During his stay there, he developed friendships with Elizabeth Pigot and her brother, John, with whom he staged two plays for the entertainment of the community.
Byron's house in Southwell, Nottinghamshire
During his stay there, Elizabeth Pigot helped him a lot; she copied many of his rough drafts. With her encouragement and support, Byron was able to write his first volumes of poetry. Fugitive Pieces was printed by Ridge of Newark, which contained poems written when Byron was only 14. However, it was promptly recalled and burned on the advice of his friend, the Reverend Thomas Beecher, on account of its more amorous verses, particularly the poem To Mary. Pieces on Various Occasions, a "miraculously chaste" revision according to Byron, was published after this.
Lord Byron’s culminating book was Hours of Idleness. This book collected many of the previous poems, along with more recent compositions. The savage, anonymous criticism this received (now known to be the work of Henry Peter Brougham) in the Edinburgh Review prompted his first major satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). The work so upset some of these critics they challenged Byron to a duel; over time, in subsequent editions, it became a mark of prestige to be the target of Byron's pen.
Having come back from his travels, Byron acted fast and the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published in 1812. The first two cantos were highly acclaimed and widely read by the readers. He came to be recognized as a poet with a different voice. In his own words, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous".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 a type of protagonist that came to be known as the Byronic hero. About the same time, he began his intimacy with his future biographer, Thomas Moore.
Chapter 5: Early Love Life
John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare
Byron was notorious for his love affairs and the later biographers have written extensively about his various love affairs. Byron's first loves included Mary Duff and Margaret Parker, his distant cousins, and Mary Chaworth, whom he met while at Harrow. Byron later wrote that his passion for Duff began when he was "not [yet] eight years old," and was still remembered in 1813. Byron refused to return to Harrow in September 1803 because of his love for Chaworth; his mother wrote, "He has no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion. In short, the boy is distractedly in love with Miss Chaworth." In Byron's later memoirs, "Mary Chaworth is portrayed as the first object of his adult sexual feelings."
His life continued to remain filled with conflicting expressions of life and it seems that he could not cling to a particular lifestyle or a particular friend for a very long period of time. Byron returned to Harrow in January 1804, to a more settled period which saw the formation of a circle of emotional involvements with other Harrow boys, which he recalled with great vividness: 'My School friendships were with me passions (for I was always violent).'The most enduring of those was with the John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare — four years Byron's junior — whom he was to meet unexpectedly many years later in Italy (1821). His nostalgic poems about his Harrow friendships, Childish Recollections (1806), express a prescient "consciousness of sexual differences that may in the end make England untenable to him".
"Ah! Sure some
stronger impulse vibrates here,
Which whispers friendship will be
doubly dear
To one, who thus for kindred hearts must roam,
And
seek abroad, the love denied at home."
During his stay at Trinity, Byron came across a younger person and soon he developed a strong friendship with this younger 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 forever." In his memory Byron composed Thyrza, a series of elegies.
For the ensuing thirteen years, Byron continued to wear a ring of Edleston's until he died. In his autobiographical writings, Byron has described this affair as pure and full of passion but he called it a violent affair at the same time. This however has to be read in the context of hardening public attitudes to homosexuality in England, and the severe sanctions (including public hanging) against convicted or even suspected offenders. The liaison, on the other hand, may well have been 'pure' out of respect for Edleston's innocence, in contrast to the (probably) more sexually overt relations experienced at Harrow School. Also while at Cambridge he formed lifelong friendships with men such as John Cam Hobhouse and Francis Hodgson, a Fellow at King's College, with whom he corresponded on literary and other matters until the end of his life (including one of the frankest admissions of his earlier feelings for John Edleston, upon Edleston's death in 1811).
Byron is known for his numerous relations with women, but it is also clear that he was a bisexual and he liked boys with more passion and love. It is now known that John Murray, Byron's original publishers, had withheld compromising letters and instructed at least one major biographer (Leslie A. Marchand, 1957) to censor details of his bisexuality. Another biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, has posited that Byron's true sexual yearnings were for boys.
Chapter 6: Travelling to the East
The Byron's Stone in Tepelene, Albania
Teresa Makri in 1870
Byron as a young man was in the habit of borrowing money from friends and the persons known to him. He had racked up numerous debts, due to what his mother termed a "reckless disregard for money". His mother was in fear of his creditors, so she lived in Newstead during that period.
Byron had already made plans to spend early 1808 cruising with his cousin George Bettesworth, who was captain of the 32-gun frigate HMS Tartar. Bettesworth's unfortunate death at the Battle of Alvøen in May 1808 made that impossible.
Between the year1809 and 1811, Lord Byron went on the Grand Tour. The Grand Tour happened to be customary for a young nobleman in those days. 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 suggests that a key motive was the hope of homosexual experience, and other theories saying that he was worried about a possible dalliance with the married Mary Chatsworth, his former love (the subject of his poem from this time, "To a Lady: On Being Asked My Reason for Quitting England in the Spring").Attraction to the Levant was probably a motive in itself; he had read about the Ottoman and Persian lands as a child, was attracted to Islam (especially Sufi mysticism), and later wrote, “With these countries, and events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end." He travelled from England over Spain to Albania and spent time at the court of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, and in Athens. For most of the trip, he had a traveling companion in his friend John Cam Hobhouse.
Byron began his trip in Portugal from where he wrote a letter to his friend Mr. Hodgson in which he describes his mastery of the Portuguese language, consisting mainly of swearing and insults. Byron particularly enjoyed his stay in Sintra that is described in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage as "glorious Eden".
While in Athens, Byron met Nicolò Giraud, who became quite close and taught him Italian. It was also presumed that the two had an intimate relationship involving a sexual affair. Byron sent Giraud to school at a monastery in Malta and bequeathed him a sizeable sum of seven thousand pounds sterling. The will, however, was later cancelled. In 1810 in Athens Byron wrote Maid of Athens, ere we part for a 12-year-old girl, Teresa Makri [1798-1875], and reportedly offered £ 500 for her. The offer was not accepted.
Byron made his way to Smyrna where he and Hobhhouse cadged a ride to Constantinople on HMS Salsette. While Salsette was anchored awaiting Ottoman permission to dock at the city, on 3 May 1810 Byron and Lieutenant Ekenhead, of Salsette's marines, swam the Hellespont. Byron commemorated this feat in the second canto of Don Juan.
Chapter 7: Scandalous Love Affairs
In the year 1812, Lord Byron began a love affair with the married Lady Caroline Lamb. It was a highly publicized love affair that shocked the British public. Byron eventually broke off the relationship and moved swiftly on to others (such as that with Lady Oxford), but Lamb 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". She began to call on him at home, sometimes dressed in disguise as a page boy, 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 entitled Remember Thee! Remember Thee! which concludes with the line "Thou false to him, thou fiend to me".