Lord Byron

The Right Honourable
The Lord Byron
FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society)
Lord Byron
Background information
Birthdate:	Jan 22, 1788
Location:	London, England
Date of death:	Apr 19, 1824 - age  35
Location:	Missolonghi, Aetolia, Ottoman Empire (present-day Aetolia-Acarnania, Greece)

George Gordon Byron (later Noel), 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among his beat Harold's Pilgrimage, and the short lyric "She Walks in Beauty".

Byron is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential. He traveled widely across Europe, especially in Italy where he lived for seven years. Later in life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire, for which many Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died in 1824 at the young age of 36 from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi. Often described as the most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, Byron was both celebrated and castigated in life for his aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs - with men as well as women, as well as rumors of a scandalous liaison with his half-sister - and self-imposed exile.

He also fathered Ada, Countess of Lovelace, whose work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine is considered a founding document in the field of computer science, and Allegra Byron, who died in childhood - as well as, possibly, Elizabeth Medora Leigh out of wedlock.

Narrative by Robin Roberts

From birth, Byron suffered from a deformity of his right foot. Although it has been referred to as a "club foot", a consequence of infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis) or dysplasia, a failure of the bones to form properly. Whatever the cause, he was afflicted with a limp that caused him lifelong psychological and physical misery, aggravated by painful and pointless "medical treatment" in his childhood and the nagging suspicion that with proper care it might have been cured.

He was extremely self-conscious about this from a young age, nicknaming himself le diable boiteux (French for "the limping devil"). Although he often wore specially-made shoes in an attempt to hide the deformed foot, he refused to wear any type of brace that might improve the limp

Byron enjoyed the adventure, especially relating to the sea. His paternal grandfather was Vice-Admiral the Hon. John "Foulweather Jack" Byron had circumnavigated the globe.

The first recorded notable example of open water swimming took place on May 3, 1810 when Lord Byron swam from Europe to Asia across the Hellespointe Strait. This is often seen as the birth of the sports and pastime, and to commemorate it, the event is re-created every year as an open water swimming event.

Political career

Byron first took his seat in the House of Lords 13 March 1809,[92] but left London on 11 June 1809 for the Continent. A strong advocate of social reform, he received particular praise as one of the few Parliamentary defenders of the Luddites: specifically, he was against a death penalty for Luddite "frame breakers" in Nottinghamshire, who destroyed textile machines that were putting them out of work.

Poetic works

Byron wrote prolifically. In 1832 his publisher, John Murray, released the complete works in 14 duodecimo volumes, including a life[95] by Thomas Moore. Subsequent editions were released in 17 volumes, first published a year later, in 1833.

Don Juan

Byron's magnum opus, Don Juan, a poem spanning 17 cantos, ranks as one of the most important long poems published in England since John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Byron published the first two cantos anonymously in 1819 after disputes known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe with his regular publisher over the shocking nature of the poetry; by this time, he had been a famous poet for seven years, and when he self-published the beginning cantos, they were well received in some quarters. It was then released volume by volume through his regular publishing house By 1822, cautious acceptance by the public had turned to outrage, and Byron's publisher refused to continue to publish the works. In Canto III of Don Juan, Byron expresses his detestation for poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In letters to Francis Hodgson, Byron referred to Wordsworth as "Turdsworth".

First travels to the East

Byron racked up numerous debts as a young man, owing to what his mother termed a "reckless disregard for money". In fear of creditors. He had planned to spend early 1808 cruising with his cousin George Bettesworth, who was captain of the 32-gun frigate HMS Tartar.

From 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. Letters to Byron from his friend Charles Skinner Matthews reveal that a key motive was also the hope of homosexual experience.

While in Athens, Byron met 14-year-old Nicolo Giraud, who became quite close and taught him Italian. It has been suggested that the two had an intimate relationship involving a sexual affair.

Attraction to the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean with its islands) was probably also a reason; he had read about the Ottoman and Persian lands as a child, was attracted to Islam (especially Sufi mysticism).

England 1811–1816

In 1813 he met for the first time in four years his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Rumors of incest surrounded the pair; Augusta's daughter Medora (b. 1814) was suspected to have been Byron's. To escape from growing debt and rumor, Byron pressed his determination to marry Annabella, who was said to be the likely heiress of a rich uncle. They married on 2 January 1815, and their daughter, Ada, was born in December of that year. However, Byron's continuing obsession with Augusta (and his continuing sexual escapades with actresses and others) made their marital life a misery. Annabella considered Byron insane, and in January 1816 she left him, taking their daughter, and began proceedings for a legal separation. The scandal of the separation, the rumors about Augusta, and ever-increasing debts forced him to leave England in April 1816, never to return.

Greece

Byron was living in Genoa when, in 1823, while growing bored with his life there, he accepted overtures for his support from representatives of the movement for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.

Byron spent £4,000 of his own money to refit the Greek fleet, then sailed for Missolonghi in western Greece.

Death

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, despite his lack of military experience. Before the expedition could sail, on 15 February 1824, he fell ill, and the usual remedy of bloodletting weakened him further. He made a partial recovery, but in early April he caught a violent cold which therapeutic bleeding, insisted on by his doctors, aggravated. It is suspected this treatment, carried out with unsterilized medical instruments, may have caused him to develop sepsis. He developed a violent fever and died in Missolonghi on 19 April.

His physician at the time, Julius van Millingen, son of Dutch-English archaeologist James Millingen, was unable to prevent his death. It has been said that if Byron had lived and had gone on to defeat the Ottomans, he might have been declared King of Greece. However, contemporary scholars have found such an outcome unlikely.

Byron's body was embalmed, but the Greeks wanted some part of their hero to stay with them. According to some sources, his heart remained at Missolonghi. His other remains were sent to England for burial in Westminster Abbey, but the Abbey refused for reason of "questionable morality"

Notes

• In 1812, Byron embarked on a well-publicized affair with the married Lady Caroline Lamb that shocked the British public. She had spurned the attention of the poet on their first meeting, subsequently giving Byron what became his lasting epitaph when she famously described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know". This did not prevent him from pursuing her.

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 sarcastically 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 pageboy, 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".

• Byron had an illegitimate child in 1817, Clara Allegra Byron, with Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Mary Shelley (author of Dracula)and stepdaughter of William Godwin, writer of Political Justice and Caleb Williams. Allegra is not entitled to the style "The Hon." as is usually given to the daughter of barons since she was illegitimate. Born in Bath in 1817, Allegra lived with Byron for a few months in Venice; he refused to allow an Englishwoman caring for the girl to adopt her, and objected to her being raised in the Shelleys' household. He wished for her to be brought up Catholic and not marry an Englishman, and made arrangements for her to inherit 5,000 lire upon marriage, or when she reached the age of 21, provided she did not marry a native of Britain. However, the girl died aged five of a fever in Bagna Cavallo, Italy while Byron was in Pisa; he was deeply upset by the news. He had Allegra's body sent back to England to be buried at his old school, Harrow, because Protestants could not be buried in consecrated ground in Catholic countries. At one time he himself had wanted to be buried at Harrow. Byron was indifferent towards Allegra's mother, Claire Clairmont

• Tom Holland, in his 1995 novel The Vampyre: Being the True Pilgrimage of George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron, romantically describes how Lord Byron became a vampire during his first visit to Greece - a fictional transformation that explains much of his subsequent behavior towards family and friends and finds support in quotes from Byron poems and the diaries of John Cam Hobhouse. It is written as though Byron is retelling part of his life to his great great-great-great-granddaughter. He describes traveling in Greece, Italy, Switzerland, meeting Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's death, and many other events in life around that time. Byron as vampire character returns in the 1996 sequel Supping with Panthers.

• The archetypal vampire character, notably Bram Stoker's Dracula, is based on Byron. The gothic ideal of a decadent, pale, and aristocratic individual who enamors himself to whomever he meets, but who is perceived to have a dark and dangerous inner self is a literary archetype derived from characterizations of Byron. The image of a vampire portrayed as an aristocrat was created by John William Polidori in The Vampyre, during the summer of 1816 which he spent in the company of Byron. The titled Count Dracula is a reprise of this character.

• Tom Holland, in his 1995 novel The Vampyre: Being the True Pilgrimage of George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron, romantically describes how Lord Byron became a vampire during his first visit to Greece - a fictional transformation that explains much of his subsequent behavior towards family and friends and finds support in quotes from Byron poems and the diaries of John Cam Hobhouse. It is written as though Byron is retelling part of his life to his great great-great-great-granddaughter. He describes traveling in Greece, Italy, Switzerland, meeting Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's death, and many other events in life around that time. Byron as vampire character returns in the 1996 sequel Supping with Panthers.

External links

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron
• https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:George_Gordon_Byron/Index_of_Titles

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