Lord Byron

George Gordon, Lord Byron. 22 January 1788-19 April 1824. English writer associated with Romanticism and the Byronic hero.

Lord Byron was born on 22 January 1788 in London and died 19 April in 1824 in Greece (Hirschfeld 24; Coleridge). He was the 6th Baron of his family. His mother´s name was Catherine Gordon. She was heiress of Gight in Aberdeenshire (Scotland) wherefore Lord Byron later got his title. The marriage of Catherine and Lord Byron´s father Captain John 'Mad Jack' Byron was unhappy, for which reason Catherine not only lost all of her her money and land in order to pay his debts but further Lord Byron had to grow up without father. Captain John Byron visited Catherine only once after she had given birth to their son but left her right away again and traveled back to France where he died on the 2nd of August 1791 ([1]).

Physically Lord Byron was disabled - his right leg was shorthened cause of an infantile paralysis. In 1799 he attended the Aberdeen Grammar School but when he got his title after the death of his great uncle he changed the school and went to a school at Dulwich, later to Harrow, and in the end attended Trinity College, Cambridge. From his poems it became clear that he fell in love with Mary Anne Chaworth who did not return his feelings. He was devastated about her marrying someone else ([2]; [3]).

In Cambridge he found some good friends and also had his first love affair with a young student called Edleston. Edleston died quite early in 1811 and it is suggested that the Thyrza poems are dedicated to Edleston. In 1807 Lord Byron published his first poem collection under his own name called Hours of Idleness. The response was exceedingly positive and the few critics were confronted by Lord Byron with mockery. In 1809 he took his seat in the House of Lords and started on his Grand Tour through Europe to complete an education then thought necessary for a young lord. During his travels he started his most famous work Childe Harold's Pilgrimage ([4]).

When Byron returned to England he found his mother dead and information reached him about the deaths of Edleston and another friend. His letters during this time point out his despair and grief. In 1812 he held his first speech in the House of Lords and received a lot of sympathy and respect. In the same year he published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage which brought him fame ([5]): "Just turned twenty-four he "found himself famous," a great poet, a rising statesman" ([6]).

He started several love affairs with, for example, Lady Caroline Lamb (William Lamb´s wife), Lady Oxford and Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. The liaison with Lady Lamb went public and became a social scandal. It is further suggested that Lady Lamb, now socially dismissed, tried to bring Lord Byron to fall as well supposedly by spreading rumours about him having an incestuous relationship with his half sister Mrs Leigh. Interestingly some sources follow these speculations and even state the third child of Leigh (Elizabeth Medora Leigh) was his child ([7]; [8]).

In 1815 he married Anna Isabella Milbanke who had turned down his proposal before, but later accepted. Anna was a highly educated woman whose main interest lay in mathematics which was extensively uncommon during these times. She gave birth to their daughter Augusta Ada Byron in the same year. The daughter became a famous mathematician and is still known today (the programming language Ada is named after her) ([9]).

But only one year later Anna got a formal divorce from Lord Byron and the rumours about him having an affair with his half-sister started all over again. Before his and the reputation of his sister got more besmirched Lord Byron decided to leave England again and some of his friends joined him. Among these friends were the doctor John Polidori (who later wrote the short story "The Vampyre" from notes by Lord Byron), Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley). While telling each other horror stories at Lake Geneva Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin started writing her famous novel Frankenstein ([10]; [11]).

Byron travelled afterwards to Italy where he had a further love affair with Contessa Guicioli which caused a scandal, because he even lived with her and her husband in the same house. But Byron was also politically active when he joined the Italian freedom fighters who fought for the end of the Austrian rule and an Italian national state. Later he moved to Greece where he got heavily involved in the Greek War of Independence against Turkey. However, he did not experience the outcome due to a pneumonia of which he died on 19 April 1824. Nevertheless he became a Greek hero in the following time for his commitment. ([12]).

Works

- Hours of Idleness (1806)

- English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)

- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I & II (1812)

- The Giaour (1813)

- The Bride of Abydos (1813)

- The Corsair (1814)

- Lara (1814)

- Hebrew Melodies (1815)

- The Siege of Corinth (1816)

- Parisina (1816)

- The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)

- The Dream (1816)

- Prometheus (1816)

- Darkness (1816)

- Manfred (1817)

- The Lament of Tasso (1817)

- Beppo (1818)

- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818)

- Mazeppa (1819)

- The Prophecy of Dante (1819)

- Marino Faliero (1820)

- Sardanapalus (1821)

- The Two Foscari (1821)

- Cain (1821)

- The Vision of Judgment (1821)

- Heaven and Earth (1821)

- Werner (1822)

- The Deformed Transformed (1822)

- The Age of Bronze (1823)

- The Island (1823)

- Don Juan (1819–1824; incomplete on Byron's death in 1824)

Sources

Hirschfeld, Georg. Lord Byron. Menschen, Völker, Zeiten. Eine Kulturgeschichte in Einzeldarstellungen. 14 vols. Ed. Max Kemmerich. Leipzig: Verlag Karl König, 1926.

The Encyclopedia Britannica. Ed. E. H. Coleridge. 1905. Scanned and edited by Jeffrey D. Hoeper. 1999. <http://engphil.astate.edu/gallery/BYRON11.HTML>.

Yolanthes Bibliothek. Ed. A. Kalmer. 2003. <http://www.yolanthe.de/vorw_frame1.htm>.

LoveToKnow Corp. 2002. <http://www.2020site.org/lord_byron/>.

Ed. John McCormick. 1997. <http://www.adahome.com/articles/1997-12/al_birthday.html>.