lord byron

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 3:40 pm

Lord Byron

, Lord Byron
(disambiguation) and George
Byron (disambiguation).

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] The Lord Byron [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Portrait of Lord Byron by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Born	George Gordon Byron 22 January 1788(1788-01-22) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Died	19 April 1824(1824-04-19) (aged 36) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Occupation	Poet, politician
Nationality	British
Literary movement	[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Notable work(s)	[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Children	[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Influences[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] · [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Influenced[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] · [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

George Gordon Byron, 6th
Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron,
was a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] poet and a leading figure in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Amongst Byron's
best-known works are the brief poems [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
When We Two Parted, and So, we'll
go no more a roving, in addition to the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] poems Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. He is regarded as one of the
greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.

Byron was celebrated in life
for aristocratic excesses including huge debts, numerous love affairs, and
self-imposed exile. He was famously described by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
as "mad, bad and dangerous to know".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
He travelled to fight against the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in the Greek War of
Independence, for which [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
revere him as a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
He died from a fever contracted while in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in Greece.

Early life

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Engraving
of Byron's father, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], date
unknown

Main
article: Early
life of George Gordon Byron

Byron was the son of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and his third
wife, the former Catherine Gordon (d. 1811), heiress of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Scotland. Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral
The Hon. John 'Foulweather Jack' Byron and Sophia Trevanion.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Vice Admiral John Byron had circumnavigated the globe, and was the younger
brother of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], known as "the
Wicked Lord".

He was christened George
Gordon Byron at St Marylebone
Parish Church after his maternal grandfather, George Gordon of
Gight, a descendant of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. His grandfather committed [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Catherine regularly experienced mood swings and bouts of melancholy.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Catherine
Gordon, Byron's mother

Catherine moved back to Scotland
shortly afterwards, where she raised her son in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], in Nottinghamshire, England. His mother proudly took
him to England.
Byron lived at his estate infrequently, as the Abbey was rented to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
among others, during Byron's adolescence.

In August 1799, Byron entered
the school of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], an [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
According to Byron, this "caused the anticipated melancholy of my
thoughts—having anticipated life".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Gray was dismissed for allegedly beating Byron when he was 11.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Byron received his early
formal education at Aberdeen Grammar
School. In 1801 he was sent to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
where he remained until July 1805.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
He represented Harrow during the very first [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] cricket
match at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
in 1805.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
After school he went on to Trinity College,
Cambridge.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Name

Byron's names changed
throughout his life. He was christened "George Gordon Byron" in London.
"Gordon" was a baptismal name, not a surname, after his maternal
grandfather. In order 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in any event).

When Byron's mother-in-law,
Judith Noel died in 1822, her will required that he change his surname to
"Noel" in order to 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, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. 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".

Early career

While not at school or
college, Byron lived with his mother at Burgage Manor in Southwell,
Nottinghamshire, in some antagonism.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
While there, he cultivated friendships with Elizabeth Pigot and her brother,
John, with whom he staged two plays for the entertainment of the community.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Byron's
house in Southwell,
Nottinghamshire

During this time, with the
help of Elizabeth Pigot, who copied many of his rough drafts, he was encouraged
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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Hours of Idleness,
which collected many of the previous poems, along with more recent
compositions, was the culminating book. The savage, anonymous criticism this
received (now known to be the work of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) in the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
prompted his first major satire,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). It was put into the hands of
his relation R.C. Dallas requesting him to "...get it published without
his name"^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Dallas gives a
large series of changes and alterations, as well as the reasoning for some of
them. He also states that Byron had originally intended to prefix an argument
to this poem, and Dallas
quotes it.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Although the work was published anonymously, by April, Dallas is writing that "you are already
pretty generally known to be the author."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
The work so upset some of his 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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

After his return from his
travels, he again entrusted Dallas
as his literary agent to publish his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
which Byron thought of little account. The first two cantos of Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage were published in 1812, and were received with acclaim.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
In his own words, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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, A
Tale. About the same time, he began his intimacy with his future biographer,
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

Personal life

Early love life

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

John
FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare

Byron's first loves included
Mary Duff and Margaret Parker, his distant cousins,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
and Mary Chaworth, whom he met while at Harrow.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Byron later wrote that his passion for Duff began when he was "not [yet]
eight years old," and was still remembered in 1813.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
In Byron's later memoirs, "Mary Chaworth is portrayed as the first object
of his adult sexual feelings."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Byron returned to Harrow in
January 1804,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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).'^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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).^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

"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."

While at Trinity, Byron met
and formed a close friendship with the 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 for ever." In his memory Byron composed Thyrza, a series of
elegies.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

In later years he described
the affair as 'a violent, though pure love and passion'. 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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Also while at Cambridge
he formed lifelong friendships with men such as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], a Fellow
at King's College, with whom he corresponded on literary and other matters
until the end of his life.

Another biographer, Fiona
MacCarthy, has posited that Byron's true sexual yearnings were for adolescent
males.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

First travels to the East

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

The
Byron's Stone in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Teresa
Makri in 1870

Byron racked up numerous
debts as a young man, due to what his mother termed a "reckless disregard
for money".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
She lived at Newstead during this time, in fear of her son's creditors.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

He had planned to spend early
1808 cruising with his cousin [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], who was captain
of the 32-gun frigate [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Bettesworth's unfortunate
death at the Battle
of Alvøen in May 1808 made that impossible.

From 1809 to 1811, Byron went
on the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], then
customary for a young nobleman. The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] forced
him to avoid most of Europe, and he instead turned to the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
Correspondence among his circle of Cambridge friends also suggests that a key
motive was the hope of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] experience,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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").^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
He travelled from England
over Portugal, Spain and the Mediterranean to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and spent time at the
court of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of
Ioannina,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
and in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. For most of
the trip, he had a travelling companion in his friend John
Cam Hobhouse. Many of these letters are referred to with details in Recollections
of the Life of Lord Byron.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Byron began his trip in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
that is described in Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage as "glorious Eden".
From Lisbon he travelled overland to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and from there by
sea on to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Byron sent Giraud to school at a monastery in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and bequeathed him a
sizeable sum of seven thousand pounds sterling. The will, however, was later
cancelled.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
In 1810 in
Athens Byron wrote [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
for a 12-year-old girl, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] [1798-1875], and
reportedly offered £ 500 for her. The offer was not accepted.^{[[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]}

Byron made his way to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] where he and
Hobhhouse cadged a ride to Constantinople on [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
Byron commemorated this feat in the second canto of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

Political career

Byron first took his seat in the
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] 13 Mar
1809,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
but left London
on 11 Jun 1809 for the Continent.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
A strong advocate of social reform, he received particular praise as one of the
few [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] defenders of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]:
specifically, he was against a death
penalty for Luddite "frame breakers" in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], who
destroyed textile machines that were putting them out of work. His first speech
before the Lords was loaded with sarcastic references to the
"benefits" of automation, which he saw as producing inferior material
as well as putting people out of work. He said later that he "spoke very
violent sentences with a sort of modest impudence", and thought he came
across as "a bit theatrical".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
The full text of the speech, which he had previously written out, were
presented to Dallas
in manuscript form and he quotes it in his work.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
In another Parliamentary speech he expressed opposition to the established
religion because it was unfair to people of other faiths.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
These experiences inspired Byron to write political poems such as Song for
the Luddites (1816) and The Landlords' Interest, Canto XIV of The
Age of Bronze.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Examples of poems in which he attacked his political opponents include [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]: The Best of
the Cut-Throats (1819); and The Intellectual Eunuch [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (1818).^{[[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]}

Death

Mavrokordatos and Byron
planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] experience, but before the
expedition could sail, on 15 February 1824, he fell ill, and the usual remedy
of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
weakened him further.^{[[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]} 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 unsterilised medical instrumentation, may have
caused him to develop [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
He developed a violent fever, and died on 19 April.^{[[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]} It has been
said that had Byron lived and gone on to defeat the Ottomans, he might have
been declared King of Greece. However, this is unlikely.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}