George Gordon Lord Byron, 6th Baron Byron (January 22, 1788-April 19, 1824) was an Anglo-Scottish poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Among his best-known works are the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The latter remained incomplete on his death. He was regarded as one of the greatest European poets, and is still widely read.

Byron's fame rests not only on his writings, but also on his life, which featured extravagant living, numerous love affairs, debts, separation, allegations of incest and sodomy and an eventual death from fever after he travelled to fight on the Greek side in the Greek War of Independence; for which he is a Greek national hero.

He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." He is also notable for his daughter, Ada Lovelace.

Byron had two last names (in addition to his title); but only one at any given time. He was born George Gordon Byron; at age ten, he inherited the family title, becoming George Gordon (Byron), Lord Byron. When his mother-in-law died, her will required that he change his surname to Noel in order to inherit half her estate. (It would have been more usual to hyphenate to Byron-Noel - as his grandsons changed from King to King-Noel; but his in-laws had come to hate the name of Byron.) He was thereafter George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron. He then signed himself "Noel Byron", and boasted of having the same initials as Napoleon Bonaparte. Gordon was a baptismal name, not a surname (his mother had been a Gordon); Wentworth was Lady Byron's eventual title, not a surname (the Noels had inherited it from the Wentworths in 1745).

Byron was born in London, the son of Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and of John's second wife Lady Catherine Gordon, heiress of Gight, Aberdeenshire. His paternal grandfather was Vice-Admiral John "Foulweather Jack" Byron, who had circumnavigated the globe, and was younger brother of William Byron, 5th Baron Byron, known as "the Wicked Lord".

From Byron's birth he suffered from a malformation of the right foot, causing a slight lameness, which was a cause of lifelong misery to him, aggravated by the knowledge that with proper care it might have been cured. He was christened George Gordon after his maternal grandfather, George Gordon, 12th Laird of Gight, a descendant of James I. This grandfather committed suicide in 1779. Byron's mother Catherine had to sell her land and title to pay her father's debts. John Byron may have married Catherine for her money and, after squandering it, deserted her. Byron's parents separated before his birth. Lady Catherine moved back to Scotland shortly afterwards, where she raised her son in Aberdeen until May 21, 1798, when the death of his great-uncle made him the sixth Baron Byron, inheriting Newstead Abbey, rented to Henry Edward Yelverton, 19th Baron Grey de Ruthyn during Byron's adolescence.

He received his formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he remained until 1805, when he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. There he met and shortly fell deeply in love with a fifteen year old choirboy by the name of John Edleston. About his "protege" 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." Later, upon learning of his friend's death, he wrote, "I have heard of a death the other day that shocked me more than any, of one whom I loved more than any, of one whom I loved more than I ever loved a living thing, and one who, I believe, loved me to the last." In his memory Byron composed Thyrza, a series of elegies, in which he changed the pronouns from masculine to feminine so as not to offend sensibilities.

Travels to the East

From 1809 to 1811, Byron went on the Grand Tour then customary for a young nobleman. Because of the Napoleonic Wars, he was forced to avoid most of Europe and instead turned to the Orient, which had fascinated him from a young age anyway. Correspondence between his circle of Cambridge friends also makes clear that a key motive was the hope of homosexual experience. He travelled from England over Spain to Albania and spent a lot of time there and in Athens. While in Athens he had a torrid love affair with Nicolò Giraud, a boy of fifteen or sixteen who taught him Italian. In gratitude for the boy's love Byron sent him to school at a monastery in Malta and bequeathed him seven thousand pounds sterling - almost double what he was later to spend refitting the Greek fleet. For most of the trip, he had a travelling companion in his friend John Cam Hobhouse. On this tour, the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were written.

Beginning of poetic career

Some early verses which he had published in 1806 were suppressed. They were followed in 1807 by Hours of Idleness, which was savagely attacked in the Calvinist Edinburgh Review. In reply he sent forth English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), which created considerable stir and shortly went through 5 editions.

After his return from his travels, the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published in 1812, and were received with acclamation. In his own words, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." He followed up his success with four equally celebrated Oriental Tales, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara which established the Byronic hero. About the same time began his intimacy with his future biographer, Thomas Moore.

Political career

Byron eventually took his seat at the House of Lords in 1811 shortly after his return from the Levant and made his first speech there on February 27, 1812. He was a strong advocate of social reform, and was particularly noted as one of the few Parliamentary defenders of the Luddites. He was also a defender of Roman Catholics. Byron was inspired to write political poems such as "Song for the Luddites" (1816) and "The Landlords' Interest" (1823). Examples of poems where he attacked his political opponents include "Wellington: The Best of the Cut-Throats" (1819) and "The Intellectual Eunuch Castlereagh" (1818).

Byron in Italy and Greece

In 1821-22 he finished cantos 6-12 of Don Juan at Pisa, and in the same year he joined with Leigh Hunt in starting a short-lived newspaper, The Liberal, in the first number of which appeared The Vision of Judgment. His last Italian home was Genoa, where he was still accompanied by the Countess, and where he lived until 1823, when he offered himself as an ally to the Greek insurgents. By 1823 Byron had grown bored with his life in Genoa and with his mistress, the Contessa Guiccioli. When the representatives of the movement for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire contacted him to ask for his support, he accepted. On July 16, Byron left Genoa on the Hercules, arriving at Kefalonia in the Ionian Islands on August 4. He spent £4000 of his own money to refit the Greek fleet, then sailed for Messolonghi in western Greece, arriving on December 29 to join Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos, leader of the Greek rebel forces. In Kefalonia he met a Greek boy, Loukas Khalandritsanos, whom he employed as a page and with whom he developed an emotional, and possibly a sexual, relationship.

Mavrokordatos and Byron planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, 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 and pay, despite his lack of military experience, but before the expedition could sail, on February 15 1824, he fell ill, and the usual remedy of bleeding weakened him further. He made a partial recovery, but in early April he caught a violent cold which the bleeding -- insisted on by his doctors -- aggravated. The cold became a violent fever, and he died on April 19.

Post-mortem

The Greeks mourned Lord Byron deeply, and he became a national hero. I?ύρÏ?I½ (Viron), the Greek form of "Byron", continues in popularity as a masculine name in Greece, and a suburb of Athens is called Vironas in his honour. His body was embalmed and his heart buried under a tree in Messolonghi. His remains were sent to England for burial in Westminster Abbey, but the Abbey refused. He is buried at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham. At her request, Ada, the child he never knew, was buried next to him. In later years, the Abbey allowed a duplicate of a marble slab given by the King of Greece, which is laid directly above Byron's grave. In 1969, 145 years after Byron's death, a memorial to him was finally placed in Westminster Abbey.

Upon his death, the barony passed to a cousin, George Anson Byron (1789-1868), a career military officer and Byron's polar opposite in temperament and lifestyle.

Poetic works

Byron wrote prolifically. In 1833 his publisher, John Murray, released the complete works in 17 octavo volumes, including a life by Thomas Moore. His magnum opus, Don Juan, a poem spanning 17 cantos, ranks as one of the most important long poems published in England since Milton's Paradise Lost. Don Juan, Byron's masterpiece, often called the epic of its time, has roots deep in literary tradition and, although regarded by early Victorians as somewhat shocking, equally involves itself with its own contemporary world at all levels - social, political, literary and ideological.

The Byronic hero pervades much of Byron's work. Scholars have traced the literary history of the Byronic hero from Milton, and many authors and artists of the Romantic movement show Byron's influence -- during the 19th century and beyond. The Byronic hero presents an idealised but flawed character whose attributes include:

• having great talent
• exhibiting great passion
• having a distaste for society and social institutions
• expressing a lack of respect for rank and privilege
• thwarted in love by social constraint or death
• rebelling
• suffering exile
• hiding an unsavoury past
• ultimately, acting in a self-destructive manner

Character

Lord Byron, by all accounts, had a particularly magnetic personality - one may say astonishingly so. He obtained a reputation as being unconventional, eccentric, flamboyant and controversial. He was given to extremes of temper, which have often been taken by later commentators as evidence of bipolar disorder, commonly known as manic depression. Byron had a great fondness for animals, most famously for a Newfoundland dog named Boatswain; when Boatswain contracted rabies, Byron reportedly nursed him without any fear of becoming bitten and infected. Boatswain lies buried at Newstead Abbey and has a monument larger than his master's. The inscription, Byron's "Epitaph to a dog", has become one of his best-known works:

Byron also notably kept a bear while he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge (reputedly out of resentment of Trinity rules forbidding pet dogs - he later suggested that the bear apply for a college fellowship). At other times in his life, Byron kept a fox, monkeys, a parrot, cats, an eagle, a crow, a falcon, peacocks, guinea hens, an Egyptian crane, a badger, geese, and a heron.

Lasting influence

The re-founding of the Byron Society in 1971 reflects the fascination that many people have for Byron and his work. This society has become very active, publishing a learned annual journal. Today some 36 International Byron Societies function throughout the world, and an International Conference takes place annually. Hardly a year passes without a new book about the poet appearing. In the last 20 years two new feature films about him have screened, and a television play has been broadcast.

Byron exercised a marked influence on Continental literature and art, and his reputation as poet is higher in many European countries than in England or America, although not as high as in his time. He has also appeared as a character in popular fiction, a testament to his influence. John Crowley's novel Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (2005) involves the rediscovery of a lost manuscript by Lord Byron, as does Frederick Prokosch's The Missolonghi Manuscript (1968). Byron appears as a character in Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard (1989) and Walter Jon Williams' novella Wall, Stone Craft (1994), as also in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). The Black Drama by Manly Wade Wellman (Weird Tales, 1938; Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales, 2001) involves the rediscovery and production of a lost play by Byron (from which Polidori's The Vampyre was plagiarised) by a man who purports to be a descendant of the poet.

Television portrayals include a major 2003 BBC drama on Byron's life, and minor appearances such as in an episode of Highlander: The Series and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy.

A complete picture of Byron's character has only been possible in recent years with the freeing up of the archive of Murray, Byron's original publishers, who had formerly withheld compromising letters and instructed at least one major biographer (Leslie Marchard) to censor details of his bisexuality. (The Guardian, November 9, 2002)

Bibliography

Major works

• Hours of Idleness (1806)
• English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
• Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818)
• 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) (text on Wikisource)
• The Dream (1816)
• Prometheus (1816)
• Darkness (1816)
• Manfred (1816) (text on Wikisource)
• The Lament of Tasso (1817)
• Beppo (1817)
• Mazeppa (1818)
• The Prophecy of Dante (1819)
• Marino Faliero (1820)
• Sardanapalus (1821)
• The Two Foscari (1821)
• Cain (1821)
• The Vision of Judgement (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)

Minor works

• So, we'll go no more a roving
• The First Kiss of Love (1806)
• Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination (1806)
• To a Beautiful Quaker (1807)
• The Cornelian (1807)
• Lines Addressed to a Young Lady (1807)
• Lachin y Garr (1807)
• Epitaph to a dog (1808)
• She Walks in Beauty (1814)
• When We Two Parted

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