Lord Byron (1788–1824) was the most famous English poet of his day, and the model of the Romantic hero: proud, melancholy and rebellious. Author of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the comic epic Don Juan, he left England amid scandal, lived in Switzerland and Italy, and died in Greece while supporting its war of independence.
Works
Hebrew Melodies, Don Juan
A lame young lord
George Gordon Byron was born in London in 1788 with a deformed right foot that made him limp all his life. His father, a spendthrift captain, deserted the family, and he grew up in Aberdeen with his volatile mother. At ten he inherited the title of Lord Byron and the ruined Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire.
At Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge, he excelled at swimming and boxing despite his foot, ran up debts and kept a tame bear in his rooms. His first collection of poems was savaged by the Edinburgh Review, and he replied with a satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
Fame and scandal
After a two-year tour of Portugal, Spain, Greece and the Ottoman Empire, Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812. The book made him famous overnight, and he was lionised by London society. His love affairs, notably with Lady Caroline Lamb, became public scandals.
In 1815 he married Annabella Milbanke; their daughter Ada was born the same year, but his wife left him a few weeks later amid rumours of cruelty and of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta. Shunned by society, Byron left England in April 1816 and never returned.
Exile
He spent the summer of 1816 by Lake Geneva with Percy and Mary Shelley, then settled in Italy, in Venice, Ravenna and Pisa. There he wrote Manfred, Beppo and his masterpiece, Don Juan, a long, witty poem on the adventures of a young Spaniard, which remained unfinished.
In 1823 he sailed to Greece to support the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire, spending his fortune to equip troops. He fell ill with fever at Missolonghi and died in April 1824, at thirty-six. He is honoured in Greece as a national hero.
Anecdotes
The ghost story contest
In June 1816, kept indoors by bad weather at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Byron suggested that each of his guests write a ghost story. Mary Shelley began Frankenstein, and his doctor John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the first vampire story in English.
Swimming the Hellespont
On 3 May 1810, imitating the legendary Leander, Byron swam across the Hellespont, the strait between Europe and Asia, in about an hour and ten minutes. He was prouder of this feat, he said, than of any glory, political, poetical or rhetorical.
Frequently asked questions
What are Byron's most famous works?
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818), Don Juan (1819–1824), Manfred, The Prisoner of Chillon and short lyrics such as She Walks in Beauty.
Who was Byron's daughter?
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), a mathematician who wrote what is often considered the first computer program, for Charles Babbage's planned Analytical Engine. Byron never saw her after she was a few weeks old.
How did Byron die?
Of a fever, worsened by bloodletting, at Missolonghi in Greece in April 1824, while supporting the Greek war of independence.