George Gordon, Lord Byron
"Mad-bad-and dangerous to know," pronounced Lady Caroline Lamb, before
becoming his lover; a "splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity
and strength," declared Matthew Arnold: the fascination that made Byron
the archetypal Romantic, in Europe even more than in Britain, grew from
both judgments. He was born in London in 1788, the son of Captain John
"Mad Jack" Byron and his second wife, Catherine Gordon, a Scots heiress.
The Captain quickly ran through her fortune and departed; Byron and his
mother withdrew to Aberdeen in 1789. He passed the next ten years in straitened
circumstances, sensitive to the clubfoot with which he had been born,
left with a mother who displaced resentment against her absconded husband
onto him, and tended by a Calvinist nurse whom he later said had early
awakened his sexuality. In 1798 his great-uncle the fifth Baron Byron,
"the wicked Lord," died childless, and just after his tenth birthday Byron
unexpectedly inherited his title. He asked his mother "whether she perceived
any difference in him since he had been made a lord, as he perceived none
himself," but the difference shaped the poet.
Byron and his mother returned to England
and moved into Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, the now debt-ridden
estate presented to the Byrons by Henry VIII; to the lonely boy, the
Gothic hall embodied his tempestuous family heritage. In 1801 Byron
was sent to school at Harrow; in the same year he probably met his half-sister
Augusta. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1805, living extravagantly
and entangling himself with moneylenders, but also making enduring friendships.
Byron's first published volume, Hours
of Idleness, appeared in 1807, when he was nineteen; the lofty pose
he struck in announcing himself as "Lord Byron: A Minor" provoked a
savage notice from the Edinburgh Review, to which he retaliated
in 1809 with a satire in Popean couplets, English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers. "Written when I was very young and very angry," Byron
later confessed to Coleridge, the poem "has been a thorn in my side
ever since; more particularly as almost all the Persons animadverted
upon became subsequently my acquaintances, and some of them my friends."
He suppressed the fifth edition, but so memorable were its attacks on
Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Scott, and others that pirated editions
continued to appear. Byron took his seat in the House of Lords that
same year, and then departed on a grand tour shaped by the Napoleonic
wars, which barred much of Europe. He sailed to Lisbon, crossed Spain,
and proceeded to Greece and Albania, through country little known to
Western Europeans. There he began Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
In March 1810 he sailed for Constantinople, visited the site of Troy
and swam the Hellespont in imitation of the mythical Greek lover, Leander.
In the East, Byron found a world in which the love of an older aristocrat
for a beautiful boy was accepted, and he also developed a political
identity as the Western hero who would liberate Greece from the Turks.
Byron returned to London in July 1811,
but too late to see his mother before she died. In February 1812 he
made his first speech in the House of Lords, denouncing the death penalty
proposed for weavers who had smashed the machines they blamed for their
loss of work. Byron's parliamentary activity was superseded the next
month when the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
appeared and he "woke to find himself famous." The poem joined the immediacy
of a travelogue to the disillusionment of a speaker who voiced the melancholy
of a generation wearied by prolonged war. Despite Byron's claim that
Harold was a fiction designed merely to connect a picaresque narrative,
readers took him as the mouthpiece of an author speaking passionately
of his own concerns. The magnetism of this personality offset the cynicism
the poem displayed: the handsome, aristocratic poet, returned from exotic
travels, himself became a figure of force. Byron followed this success
with a series of "Eastern" tales that added to his aura: one of them,
The Corsair (1814), written in ten days, sold ten thousand copies
on the day of publication. Hebrew Melodies (1815) contains some
of Byron's most famous lyrics (She walks in beauty) and accorded
with the vogue for nationalist themes. Byron was both a sensational
commercial success and a noble who gave away his copyrights because
aristocrats do not write for money. Like all myths, "Byron" embodied
contradictions more than he resolved them.
This literary celebrity was enhanced by
Byron's lionizing in Whig society. Liaisons with Lady Caroline Lamb
and the "autumnal" Lady Oxford magnified his notoriety, but it was his
relationship with his half-sister Augusta, now married, that gave rise
to most scandal; her daughter Medora, born in 1814 and given the name
of the heroine of The Corsair, was widely thought to be Byron's,
and probably was. Seeking to escape these agitating affairs, and also
to repair his debts, Byron proposed to Annabella Milbanke. They married
in January 1815; their daughter Augusta Ada was born at the end of the
year, but a few weeks later Annabella left Byron to live with her parents,
amid rumors of insanity, incest, and sodomy. Pirated editions of Byron's
poems on the separation made marital discord into public scandal.
In April 1816 Byron quit England, bearing
the pageant of his bleeding heart, in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase,
across Europe. He settled in Geneva, near Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary
Godwin, who had eloped two years before. They had been joined by Mary's
stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom Byron resumed an affair he had
begun in England. Poetry was as much in the air as romance: Byron reported
that Shelley "dosed him with Wordsworth physic even to nausea"; the
influence and resistance the phrase shows are both evident in the third
canto of Childe Harold (1816). He wrote The Prisoner of Chillon
at this time and began the closet-drama Manfred (1817). At the
end of the summer the Shelley party left for England, where Claire gave
birth to Byron's illegitimate daughter Allegra; in October Byron departed
for Venice, where he rented a palazzo on the Grand Canal.
Byron described his Venetian life in brilliant
letters, some of which were meant for circulation in the circle of his
publisher John Murray. To a ceaseless round of sexual activity, he joined
substantial literary productivity. He studied Armenian, completed Manfred,
and visited Rome, gathering materials for a fourth canto of Childe
Harold (1818). The canto was his longest and most sublime, and its
invocation of Freedom's torn banner streaming "against the wind" fixed
his revolutionary reputation. Yet Byron began to feel trapped by the
modes that had won him popularity; determining to "repel charges of
monotony and mannerism," he wrote Beppo, a comic verse tale of
a Venetian ménage-à-trois (1818). In its colloquial, digressive ease,
Byron was testing the form of his greatest poem, Don Juan, at
once fictional autobiography, picaresque narrative, literary burlesque,
and exposure of social, sexual, and religious hypocrisies. The first
two cantos were published in 1819 in an expensive edition meant to forestall
charges of blasphemy and bearing neither the author's nor the publisher's
name. The authorship was nonetheless known: Blackwood's Magazine
criticized Byron for "a filthy and impious" attack on his wife, and
the second canto, which turns to shipwreck and cannibalism, redoubled
charges of nihilism. Shocking the proprieties of one audience, Byron
moved toward another; the poem sold well in increasingly cheap editions.
In April 1819 Byron met his "last attachment,"
Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, nineteen years old and married to a
man nearly three times her age. Through her family, Byron was initiated
into the Carbonari, a clandestine revolutionary organization devoted
to achieving Italian independence from Austria. While continuing Don
Juan, he wrote Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, and The
Two Foscari (all 1821), historical dramas exploring the relationship
between the powerful individual and the postrevolutionary state. To
the same year belongs Cain, a "mystery" drama refused copyright
for its unorthodoxy and immediately pirated by radicals.
When Teresa's father and brother were
exiled for their part in an abortive uprising, she followed them, and
Byron reluctantly went with her to Pisa. There he reunited with Percy
Shelley, with whom he planned a radical journal, The Liberal.
The first number contained The Vision of Judgment, a devastating
rebuttal to a eulogy of George III by Robert Southey, in the preface
to which the poet laureate had alluded to Byron as the head of a "Satanic
School."
Restive in the domesticity of life with
Teresa, Byron agreed to act as agent of a London committee aiding the
Greeks in their struggle for independence. In July 1823 he left for
Cephalonia, an island in western Greece. Clear of debt and now attentive
to his literary income, Byron devoted his fortune to the cause. Philhellenic
idealism was soon confronted by motley reality, but Byron founded, paid,
and trained a brigade of soldiers. A serious illness in February 1824,
followed by the usual remedy of bleeding, weakened him; in April he
contracted a fever, treated by further bleeding, from which he died
on 19 April at the age of thirty-six. Deeply mourned, he became a Greek
national hero, and throughout Europe his name became synonymous with
Romanticism. In England, the stunned reaction of the young Tennyson
spoke for many: on hearing the news, he sadly wrote on a rock "Byron
is dead." As Arnold later recalled, in placing Byron with Wordsworth
as the great English poets of the century, he had "subjugated" his readers,
and his influence was immense and lasting.