Titans of History

BYRON

1788–1824

A variety of powers almost boundless, and a pride no less vast in displaying them,—a susceptibility of new impressions and impulses, even beyond the usual allotment of genius, and an uncontrolled impetuosity in yielding to them …

Byron, as described by his friend and biographer Thomas Moore in his Life of Lord Byron (1835)

Lord Byron, the dashing, brooding poet, was the quintessence of the romantic hero. Women lost themselves trying to save him; society looked on in fascinated outrage as the aristocratic outsider defied their conventions. Shadowed by a permanent aura of depravity, irresistible in his vulnerability, mocking, witty, flamboyant and bold, Byron gave birth to a new image of the hero. Yet it is the incandescent, exuberant genius of the poetry that makes him immortal

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was, as he wrote in his unfinished masterpiece Don Juan, “the Grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme.” The poet who could dash off sixty to eighty stanzas after a hearty dinner hit the English literary landscape like a hurricane. When the first two cantos of his Childe Harold were published in 1812, they sold out immediately. “I awoke one morning,” noted the twenty-year-old poet, “and found myself famous.”

Byron was the poster boy of the Romantic generation. The melancholic disillusionment of Childe Harold and the mordant, mocking irony of Don Juan satirized the hypocrisies and pretensions of society and mourned the failure of reality to live up to lofty ideals. Driven forward in searing, pounding rhythms, Byron’s poetry embodied the spirit of the age:

I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me; and to me,

High mountains are a feeling, but the hum

Of human cities torture

Everyone assumed that Byron was the lost and disenchanted eponymous hero of Childe Harold, restlessly wandering across the continent. The poet’s history was indeed romantic enough. Son of the profligate, charming Captain John “Mad Jack” Byron, the boy was brought up in penury in Aberdeen by his widowed mother until the death of his great-uncle transformed his fortunes. Brought back to England, the wild, club-footed ten-year-old inherited the magnificent ruins of Newstead Abbey and the title of Lord Byron.

Sitting in a corner, staring moodily into space, the slight, pale, beautiful Byron was a magnet for society’s women. “He is really the only topic almost of every conversation—the men jealous of him, the women of each other,” commented the political hostess Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire. With his innumerable conquests, Byron cut a swathe through society—from Lady Caroline Lamb, who was so mad about the poet that when he was attending a party to which she was not invited, she would wait outside in the street for him, to Lady Oxford, the middle-aged hostess who encouraged her young lover’s radicalism.

“Mad, bad and dangerous to know,” as Lady Caroline Lamb famously described him, the poet had no qualms about scandalizing society. “It may be now and then voluptuous—I can’t help that” was Byron’s insouciant response to claims that Don Juan was a “eulogy of vice.” Byron, living (by his own admission) in “an abyss of sensuality,” was infamous for his aura of tortured depravity and for the drinking orgies held with his friends, garbed in monks’ habits, amid the Gothic ruins of Newstead Abbey. “There never existed a more worthless set,” was the verdict of the war hero the duke of Wellington.

A domineering mother and a childhood of sexual abuse by his nurse May Gray had thwarted his capacity for relationships; he constantly thirsted for new sensations and new lovers, whether male or female. He fell passionately in love and became equally swiftly disillusioned. Augusta Leigh, whose own daughter was probably Byron’s, was the great love of his life, but she was also his half-sister. To all other women he could be monstrously cruel. He had an anguished relationship with his great friend Shelley’s sister-in-law, Claire Clairmont, whom he made pregnant and then rejected. The much-loved daughter of this affair Byron placed in an Italian convent, where she died at age five. Byron’s marriage to the humorless Annabella Milbanke was a disaster. It broke down irretrievably after less than a year amid talk of Byron’s marital violence, incestuous relationships and bisexuality—rumors so scandalous that they forced him in 1816 to leave England and the baby daughter of this marriage, Augusta Ada, never to return.

In Venice Byron swam home at night along the Grand Canal, pushing a board with a candle on it to light his way. The man who had kept a bear in his rooms at Cambridge lived in a palazzo that was a veritable menagerie. Shelley once listed the members of the household: “ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, a falcon … [and] I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens and an Egyptian crane.”

Visitors flocked to see the poet. Some found him grown fat and gray, but his vigor was restored by a passionate affair with a radical young Italian countess. Restless once again, Byron launched himself into yet another campaign: the fight for Greek independence from the Turks. He poured his money and his soul into the project. But at Missolonghi in Greece, weakened by a life of dissipation and excess, Byron caught a fever and died. Such was the end, at the age of just thirty-six, of the poet whose magnificent defiance of petty convention had outraged and enraptured Europe for a generation.