George Gordon Noel Byron

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was born 22 January 1788 in London and died on 19 April 1824 in Missolonghi, Greece. Byron was among the most famous of the English 'Romantic' poets (his contemporaries included Percy Shelley and John Keats); he was also a satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe. His major works include Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18) and Don Juan (1819-24). He died of fever and exposure while engaged in the Greek struggle for independence.

As a child he was known as George Gordon. Born with a clubfoot, he was taken by his mother, Catherine Gordon, to Aberdeen, Scotland, where they lived in lodgings on a meager income. He developed an extreme sensitivity to his lameness while attending the Aberdeen grammar school. At the age of 10, George inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle, the \Byron. His mother proudly took him to England.

In 1801 Byron went to Harrow, where his friendships with younger boys fostered a romantic attachment to the school. He spent the summer of 1803 with his mother at Southwell, near Nottingham, but soon escaped to Newstead and stayed with his tenant, Lord Grey, and courted his distant cousin Mary Chaworth. When she grew tired of \writing melancholy poetry - and she became the symbol of idealized and unattainable love. Later, when he had achieved fame and become the darling of London society, she came to regret her rejection.

After a term at Trinity College, Byron indulged in dissipation and undue generosity in London that put him deeply into debt. He returned in the summer of 1806 to Southwell, where he gathered his early poems in a volume privately printed in November with the title Fugitive Pieces. The following June his first published poems, Hours of Idleness, appeared. When he returned to Trinity he formed a close friendship with John Cam Hobhouse, who stirred his interest in liberal Whiggism. At the beginning of 1808, he entered into \abyss of sensuality\in London that threatened to undermine his health. On reaching his majority in January 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords, published an anonymous satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and embarked with Hobhouse on a grand tour.

The sailed on the Lisbon packet (please read the very funny poem about the experience!), crossed Spain, and proceeded by Gibraltar to Malta. There Byron fell in love with a married woman and almost fought a duel on her account. Byron and Hobhouse next landed at Preveza, Greece, and made an inland voyage to Janina and later to Tepelene in Albania to visit Ali Pasa. On there return Byron began at Janina an autobiographical poem, Childe Harold, which he continued during the journey to Athens. They lodged with a widow, whose daughter, Theresa Macri, Byron celebrated as The Maid of Athens. In March 1810 he sailed with Hobhouse for Constantinople by way of Smyrna, and, while becalmed at the mouth of the Hellespont, Byron visited the site of Troy and swam the channel in imitation of Leander. Byron’s sojourn in Greece made a lasting impression on his mind and character - he delighted in the sunshine and moral tolerance of the people. After leaving, he often spoke longingly of his visit - and his desire to return.

Byron arrived in London on 14 July 1811, and his mother died on August 1 before he could reach her at Newstead. On 27 February 1812, he made his first speech in the House of Lords, and at the beginning of March, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage published by John Murray and took the town by storm. Besides furnishing a poetic travelogue of picturesque lands, it gave vents to the moods of melancholy and disillusionment of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. And

the poem conveyed the disparity between the romantic ideal and the world of reality, a unique achievement in 19th century verse. Byron was lionized in Whig society and the handsome poet with the clubfoot was swept into affairs with the passionate Lady Caroline Lamb, the \Lady Oxford, his half sister Augusta Leigh, and Lady Frances Webster. (For Caroline Lamb’s take on the stormy relationship, read Lord Glenarvon; for Byron’s take, read the poem Remember Thee! Remember Thee!) The agitation of these affairs and the sense of mingled guilt and exultation they aroused in his mind are reflected in the Oriental tales he wrote during the period. Seeking escape in marriage, in September 1814, he proposed to Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke. The marriage took place on 2 January 1815. After a honeymoon \all sunshine,\the Byrons, in March, settled in London. Delays in negotiations to sell Newstead left them financially embarrassed and before long bailiffs were in the house. Byron escaped to the house of John Murray, his publisher. Augusta Leigh had come for a visit, and Byron, exasperated by debts, irritated by Annabella’s humorless sensitivity, and liberated by drink, talked wildly and hinted at past sins. (For Byron’s views on Annabella, read the related journal entries and letters.)

Lady Byron gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada, on 10 December, and in January she left with the child for a visit to her parents and let him know that she was not moving back. The reasons for her decision were never given and rumors began to fly, most of them centering on Byron’s relations with Augusta Leigh. When the rumors grew, Byron signed the legal separation papers and went abroad, never returning to England. (an interesting fact: the great American abolitionist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, best known for Uncle Tom's Cabin, became a vocal supporter of Lady Byron. She interviewed Annabella for the Atlantic Monthly magazine and the article was so inflammatory and outrageous that many readers stopped purchasing the magazine. Their circulation never recovered from the blow.)

After visiting the battlefield of Waterloo, he went to Switzerland. At the Villa Diodati, near Geneva, he was on friendly terms with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his entourage, which included William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary, who was Shelley’s wife, and Godwin’s stepdaughter by a second marriage, Claire Clairmont, who had begun an affair with Byron before he left England. A boat trip to the head of the lake with Shelley gave Byron material for his Prisoner of Chillon, and he completed a third canto of Childe Harold at Diodati (my personal favorite.) At the end of the summer the Shelley party left for England, Claire carrying Byron’s illegitimate daughter (born 12 January 1817, and named Alba by Claire and Allegra by Byron.) A tour of the Bernese Oberland with Hobhouse provided the scenery for Manfred, a Faustian poetic drama that reflected Byron’s brooding sense of guilt and remorse and the wider frustrations of the romantic spirit doomed by the reflection that man is \deity, alike unfit to sink or soar.\

On October 5 Byron and Hobhouse left for Italy. Byron took lodgings in the house of a Venetian draper, with whose beautiful wife, Marianna Segati, he proceeded to fall in love. He studied Armenian at the monastery of San Lazzaro and occasionally attended local literary gatherings. In May he joined Hobhouse in Rome and rode over the ruins, gathering impressions that he recorded in a fourth canto of Childe Harold. At a summer villa at La Mira on the Brentat River, he also wrote Beppo, a rollicking satire on Italian manners. There he met Margarita Cogni, wife of a baker, who followed him to Venice and eventually replaced Marianna Segati in his affections. During the summer of 1818, he completed the first canto of Don Juan, a picaresque verse satire, with pointed references to his own experiences. Claire had sent his illegitimate

daughter Allegra for him to raise and was continually annoying him with admonitions.

The sale of Newstead Abbey finally cleared most of his debts and left him with a small income which supported him in Italy. But money did not solve any of his problems, notably his dissatisfaction and restlessness. Shelley and other visitors, in 1818, had found Byron grown fat, with hair long and turning gray, looking older than his years, and sunk in promiscuity. But a chance meeting with the Countess Teresa Guicciolo in April 1819 changed the course of his life. In a few days he fell completely in love with Teresa, 19 years old and married to man nearly three times her age. Byron followed her to Ravenna, and, later in the summer, she accompanied him back to Venice and stayed until her husband called for her. Byron returned to Ravenna in January 1820, as Teresa’s accepted gentleman-in-waiting. He won the friendship of her father and brother who initiated him into the secret revolutionary society of the Carbonari. In Ravenna he was brought into closer touch with the life of the Italian people than he had ever been. He gave arms to the Carbonari and alms to the poor. It was one of the happiest and most productive periods of his life. He wrote The Prophecy of Dante; three cantos for Don Juan; the poetic dramas Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain (all published in 1821); and his satire on the poet Robert Southey, The Vision of Judgment. When Teresa’s father and brother were exiled for the part in an abortive uprising and she, now separated from her husband, was forced to follow them, Byron reluctantly removed to Pisa, where Shelley had rented the Casa Lanfranchi on the Arno River for him. He arrived on November 1, 1821, having left his daughter Allegra in a convent near Ravenna where he had sent her to be educated. She died on April 20 of the following year.

Byron paid daily visits to Teresa, whose father and brother had found temporary asylum in Pisa, until early summer when then all went to Leghorn, where Byron had leased a villa near Shelley’s house on the Bay of Lerici.

There the poet Leigh Hunt found him on July 1, when he arrived from England to join with Shelley and Byron in the editing of a new periodical. Hunt and his family were installed in the lower floor of Byron’s house in Pisa, where Byron and Teresa returned after her father and brother were expelled from Tuscany. The drowning of Shelley on July 8 left Hunt entirely dependent on Byron, who had already \Byron found Hunt an agreeable companion, but their relations were somewhat strained by Mrs. Hunt’s moral condescension and by the depredations of her six children. Byron contributed his Vision of Judgment to the first number of the new periodical, The Liberal, which was published in London by Hunt’s brother John (October 15, 1822). At the end of September he moved his entire household to a suburb of Genoa, where Teresa’s family had found asylum and had taken a large house for him. Mary Shelley leased another house nearby for herself and the Hunts.

Byron’s interest in the periodical had waned, but he continued to support Hunt and to give manuscripts to The Liberal. After a quarrel with his published, John Murray, Byron gave all his later work - including cantos VI to XVI of Don Juan, The Age of Bronze, and The Island - to John Hunt. Restive in the domesticity of his life with Teresa and longing for the opportunity for some noble action that would vindicate him in the eyes of his countrymen Byron seized the offer from the London Greek Committee, which came in April 1823, to act as its agent in aiding the Greeks in their war for independence from the Turks.

On July 16, Byron left Genoa on a chartered ship, arriving at the Ionian island of Cephalonia on August 2; he settled in Metaxata. He sent 4000 pounds of his own money to prepare the Greek

fleet for sea service and then sailed for Missolonghi on December 29 to join Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos, leader of the forces in western Greece.

With tremendous energy he entered into the plans to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto. He employed a fire master to prepare artillery and took under his own command and pay the Souliot soldiers, reputedly the bravest of the Greeks. In addition he made efforts to unite eastern and western Greece but effecting a reconciliation of the factions. But a serious illness on February 15, 1824, followed by the usual remedy of bleeding, weakened him at the same time that an insurrection of the Souliots opened his eyes to their cupidity. Though his enthusiasm for the Greek cause was undiminished, he had thenceforth a more realistic view of the obstacles. He was also suffering from the emotional strain of an unequal friendship with Loukas Chalandritsanos, a Greek boy, whom he had brought as a page from Cephalonia and to whom he addressed his last agonized poems. He was planning to attend a conference at Salona when he contracted a fever, which was aggravated by the bleeding insisted on by the doctors, and he soon died.

Deeply mourned throughout the land, he became a symbol of disinterested patriotism and a Greek national hero. His body was taken to England and, refused burial in Westminster Abbey, was placed in the vault of his ancestors near Newstead. Ironically, 145 years after his death, in 1969, a memorial to Byron was finally placed on the floor of the Abbey. Here is a contemporary newspaper account of the decision.

Chronology of Byron’s Works and Life

1788 Byron born 22 January in London.

1790 Taken by his mother to Aberdeen, Scotland. 1791 Death of his father, Captain John Byron, in France. 1793 Enters his first school, in Aberdeen.

1794-95 Attends Aberdeen Grammar School. In 1794, on the death of his great uncle, becomes heir to the title, Baron Byron of Rochdale.

1798 Is made Lord Byron. Moves with his mother to Newstead Abbey, ancestral home of the Byrons. 1801-05 Attends Harrow School. In 1803 falls his love with Mary

Chaworth, his neighbor at Newstead. (The attachment ends when he overhears Mary laugh to her maid, \Me care for that lame boy!\ 1805 Enters Trinity College, Cambridge.