Contents introduction chapter I 1 Family and early life

Early career and first travels to the East

In 1807 Byron's juvenilia were collected under the title Hours of Idleness; although the little book exhibited only the milder forms of romantic Weltschmerz, it was harshly criticized by the Edinburgh Review. The irate author counterattacked in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), the first manifestation of a gift for satire and a sarcastic wit which single him out among the major English romantics, and which he may have owed to his aristocratic outlook and his classical education.
In 1809 a 2-year trip to the Mediterranean countries provided material for the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Their publication in 1812 earned Byron instant glory, as they combined the more popular features of the late-18th-century romanticism: colorful descriptions of exotic nature, disillusioned meditations on the vanity of earthly things, a lyrical exaltation of freedom, and above all, the new hero, handsome and lonely, somberly mysterious, yet strongly impassioned for all his weariness with life.
While his fame was spreading, Byron was busy shocking London high society. After his affairs with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, his incestuous and adulterous love for his half sister Augusta not only made him a reprobate, but also crystallized the sense of guilt and doom to which he had always been prone. From then on, the theme of incest was to figure prominently in his writings, starting with the epic tales that he published between 1812 and 1816: The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The Siege of Corinth, and Parisina. Incestuous love, criminal although genuine and irresistible, was a suitable metaphor for the tragic condition of man, who is cursed by God, rebuked by society, and hated by himself because of sins for which he is not responsible. The tales, therefore, add a new dimension of depth to the Byronic hero: in his total alienation he now actively assumes the tragic fatality which turns natural instinct into unforgivable sin, and he deliberately takes his rebellious stance as an outcast against all accepted notions of the right order of things.

While thus seeking relief in imaginative exploration of his own tortured mind, Byron had been half hoping to find peace and reconciliation in a more settled life. But his marriage to Anna Isabella Milbanke (Jan. 1, 1815) soon proved a complete failure, and she left him after a year. London society could have ignored the peculiarities of Byron's private life, but a satire against the Prince Regent, "Stanzas to a Lady Weeping," which he had appended to The Corsair, aroused hysterical abuse from the Tories, in whose hands his separation from his wife became an efficient weapon. On April 25, 1816, Byron had to leave his native country, never to return.

With the death in 1798 of his great-uncle, the “Wicked” fifth Lord Byron, George became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, heir to Newstead Abbey, the family seat in Nottinghamshire. He enjoyed the role of landed nobleman, proud of his coat of arms with its mermaid and chestnut horses surmounting the motto “Crede Byron” (“Trust Byron”).
An “ebullition of passion” for his cousin Margaret Parker in 1800 inspired his “first dash into poetry.” From 1801 to 1805, he attended the Harrow School, where he excelled in oratory, wrote verse, and played sports. He also formed the first of those passionate attachments with other, chiefly younger, boys that he would enjoy throughout his life; before reaching his teen years he had been sexually initiated by his maid. There can be little doubt that he had strong bisexual tendencies, though relationships with women seem generally, but not always, to have satisfied his emotional needs more fully.
In the summer of 1803 he fell so deeply in love with his distant cousin, the beautiful-and engaged-Mary Chaworth of Annesley Hall, that he interrupted his education for a term to be near her. Years later he told Thomas Medwin that all his “fables about the celestial nature of women” originated from “the perfection” his imagination created in Mary Chaworth.
Early in 1804 he began an intimate correspondence with his half sister, Augusta, five years his senior. He asked that she consider him “not only as a Brother” but as her “warmest and most affectionate Friend.” As he grew apart from his capricious, often violent, mother, he drew closer to Augusta.
Byron attended Trinity College, Cambridge, intermittently from October 1805 until July 1808, when he received a MA degree. During “the most romantic period of [his] life,” he experienced a “violent, though pure, love and passion” for John Edleston, a choirboy at Trinity two years younger than he. Intellectual pursuits interested him less than such London diversions as fencing and boxing lessons, the theater, demimondes, and gambling. Living extravagantly, he began to amass the debts that would bedevil him for years. In Southwell, where his mother had moved in 1803, he prepared his verses for publication.
In November 1806 he distributed around Southwell his first book of poetry. Fugitive Pieces, printed at his expense and anonymously, collects the poems inspired by his early infatuations, friendships, and experiences at Harrow, Cambridge, and elsewhere. When his literary adviser, the Reverend John Thomas Becher, a local minister, objected to the frank eroticism of certain lines, Byron suppressed the volume. A revised and expurgated selection of verses appeared in January 1807 as Poems on Various Occasions, in an edition of 100 copies, also printed privately and anonymously. An augmented collection, Hours of Idleness, “By George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Minor,” was published in June. The new poems in this first public volume of his poetry are little more than schoolboy translations from the classics and imitations of such pre-Romantics as Thomas Gray, Thomas Chatterton, and Robert Burns, and of contemporaries including Walter Scott and Thomas Moore. Missing were the original flashes of eroticism and satire that had enlivened poems in the private editions. The work has value for what it reveals about the youthful poet’s influences, interests, talent, and direction. In “On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School,” he employs heroic couplets for satiric effect in the manner of Alexander Pope, a model for Byron throughout his career. In obviously autobiographical poems Byron experiments with personae, compounded of his true self and of fictive elements, which both disclose and disguise him. Groups of verses on a single subject show his understanding of the effectiveness of multiple points of view.
It was as a published poet that Byron returned to Cambridge in June 1807. Besides renewing acquaintances, he formed an enduring friendship with John Cam Hobhouse—his beloved “Hobby.” Inclined to liberalism in politics, Byron joined Hobhouse in the Cambridge Whig Club. In February 1808 the influential Whig journal the Edinburgh Review, published anonymously Henry Brougham’s notice of Hours of Idleness, which combined justifiable criticism of the book with unwarranted personal assaults on the author. The scornfully worded review had a beneficial effect. Stung and infuriated, Byron set aside mawkish, derivative, occasional verse and began avenging himself through satire, expanding his poetic commentary on present-day “British Bards,” started the previous year, to include a counterblast against “Scotch Reviewers."
In March 1809, two months after attaining his majority, he took his seat in the House of Lords. Shortly thereafter, Byron’s first major poetic work, English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. A Satire, was published anonymously in an edition of 1,000 copies. Inspired by the Dunciad of his idol, Pope, the poem, in heroic couplets, takes indiscriminate aim at most of the poets and playwrights of the moment, notably Walter Scott, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His main target is the critics. From these “harpies that must be fed” he singles out for condemnation “immortal” Francis Jeffrey, whom he mistakenly assumed had written the offending comments on Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review.
The satire created a stir and found general favor with the reviewers. The overall aim, as stated in the preface, is “to make others write better.” Of the major Romantic poets, Byron most sympathized with neoclassicism, with its order, discipline, and clarity. The importance of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers lies not only in its vigor and vitality but in Byron’s lively advocacy of the neoclassical virtues found in such 17th- and 18th-century poets as Dryden and Pope, and, from his own day, in Gifford. His admiration for Pope never wavered, nor did he ever totally abandon the heroic couplet and Augustan role of censor and moralist, as seen in Hints from Horace (written 1811), The Curse of Minerva (written 1811), and The Age of Bronze (written 1822-1823).
Feeling revenged on the reviewers, Byron was anxious to realize a long-held dream of traveling abroad. Though in debt, he gathered together sufficient resources to allow him to begin a tour of the eastern Mediterranean. Anxious to set down the myriad experiences the trip afforded him, Byron began an autobiographical poem in Ioannina, Greece, on October 31, 1809, wherein he recorded the adventures and reflections of Childe Burun (a combination of the archaic title for a youth of noble birth and an ancient form of his own surname); he subsequently renamed the hero Harold. The Spenserian stanza in which he cast his impressions no doubt derived from his readings in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene reprinted in an anthology he had carried on his trip. Byron completed the first canto in Athens at the end of the year.
Turning southward, he and Hobhouse journeyed through Missolonghi and rode into Athens on Christmas night 1809. They lodged at the foot of the Acropolis with Mrs. Tarsia Macri, widow of a Greek who had been British vice consul. Byron soon fell in love with her three daughters, all under the age of 15, but especially with Theresa, only 12, his “Maid of Athens."
Excursions in January 1810 to Cape Sounion, overlooking the islands of the Cyclades, and to Marathon, where the Athenians defeated the invading Persians in 490 B.C., reinforced for him the appalling contrast between the glory and might of ancient Greece and its contemporary disgrace. He movingly evoked these scenes and sentiments a decade later in the often-quoted stanzas on “The Isles of Greece” and on Marathon in Don Juan.
In March 1810 Byron and Hobhouse extended their tour into Turkey. On March 28, in Smyrna, he completed the second canto of Childe Harold, incorporating his adventures in Albania and his thoughts on Greece. He visited the plain of Troy and on May 3, while Hobhouse read Ovid’s Hero and Leander, imitated Leander’s feat of swimming the Hellespont; within a week, lines “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” commemorated his pride in this exploit. In July he traveled back to Athens, where he settled in the Capuchin monastery below the Acropolis. Here, he studied Italian and modern Greek, just as he would learn Armenian from monks in Venice six years later.
Stirred to literary composition, he first produced explanatory notes for Childe Harold; then, in February and March 1811, he wrote two poems in heroic couplets. Hints from Horace, a sequel to English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, satirizes contemporary poetry and drama, while praising Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Butler.
Byron arrived at Sheerness, Kent, on July 14, two years and 12 days after his departure. To Augusta he wrote on September 9 that he had probably acquired nothing by his travels but “a smattering of two languages & a habit of chewing Tobacco,” but this claim was disingenuous. “If I am a poet,” he mused, “... the air of Greece has made me one.” He had accumulated source material for any number of works. More, exposure to all manner of persons, behavior, government, and thought had transformed him into a citizen of the world, with broadened political opinions and a clear-sighted view of prejudice and hypocrisy in the “tight little island” of England. Significantly, he would select as the epigraph for Childe Harold a passage from Le Cosmopolite, ou, le Citoyen du Monde (1753), by Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron, that, in part, compares the universe to a book of which one has read but the first page if he has seen only his own country.
Within three weeks of his return, Byron was plunged into a period of prolonged mourning. His mother died on August 2, before he set out for Newstead. Whatever her failings, she had loved her son, taken pride in his accomplishments, and managed Newstead economically in his absence. “I had but one friend in the world,” he exclaimed, “and she is gone.” News of the deaths of two classmates followed hard upon this sorrow. Then, in October, he learned of the death from consumption of John Edleston, the former choirboy at Trinity College. Deeply affected, he lamented his loss in the lines “To Thyrza” (1811), a woman’s name concealing the subject’s true identity and gender. He also commemorated Edleston in additions to Childe Harold.
In January 1812 Byron resumed his seat in the House of Lords, allying himself with the Liberal Whigs. During his political career he spoke but three times in the House of Lords, taking unpopular sides. In his maiden speech on February 27 he defended stocking weavers in his home area of Nottinghamshire who had broken the improved weaving machinery, or frames, that deprived them of work and reduced them to near starvation; he opposed as cruel and unjust a government-sponsored bill that made frame breaking a capital offense. On April 21, he made a plea for Catholic emancipation, the most controversial issue of the day.
Upon his return to England in July 1811, Byron had given the manuscript of Childe Harold to R.C. Dallas, his adviser in the publication of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. Dallas enthusiastically showed the poem to John Murray II, the respected publisher of Scott and Southey, who agreed to publish Byron, beginning a rich association between publisher and poet.
On March 10, 1812 Murray published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. 500 quarto copies, priced at 30 shillings each, sold out in three days. An octavo edition of 3,000 copies at 12 shillings was on the market within two days. Shortly after Childe Harold appeared, Byron remarked, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Murray brought out five editions of the poem in 1812 alone, and published the 10th, and last, separate edition in 1815. In less than six months sales had reached 4,500 copies. In the Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey cited as the “chief excellence” of Childe Harold “a singular freedom and boldness, both of thought and expression, and a great occasional force and felicity of diction.”
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II, can be read as Byron’s poetic journal of his Mediterranean and Eastern tour in 1809 to 1811. But the international popularity of the work derived less from its appeal as a travelogue than from its powerful articulation of the Weltschmerz, or “World-weariness,” born of the chaos of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars that disrupted all of European society.
In Canto I Harold, “sore sick at heart” with his life of “revel and ungodly glee,” leaves his native Albion on pilgrimage to find peace and spiritual rebirth. As befits a quest poem, Childe Harold is subtitled A Romaunt, recalling the medieval romances whose knighted heroes go in search of holy objects, and is cast in the stanza and archaic language of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
Harold was introduced, Byron wrote in the preface, “for the sake of giving some connexion to the piece.” By labeling Harold “a fictitious character” Byron sought to dissociate himself from his protagonist, but his readers, noting many and striking similarities, persisted in equating the artist with his hero. Though he, too, speculated on such a relationship, Walter Scott, recognized that in Harold Byron had created a new and significant Romantic character type which reappeared in almost all his heroes.
Harold is the first “Byronic Hero.” Of complicated ancestry (admirably traced by Peter L. Thorslev, Jr.), he descends, with inherited traits, from Prometheus, Milton’s Satan, the sentimental heroes found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, hero-villains in Gothic novels by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, Friedrich von Schiller’s Karl Moor, and Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion. Thorslev insists that, as befits their complex genealogy, Byron’s various heroes exhibit not uniformity, but considerable diversity. Among their traits are romantic melancholy, guilt for secret sin, pride, defiance, restlessness, alienation, revenge, remorse, moodiness, and such noble virtues as honor, altruism, courage, and pure love for a gentle woman.
The drawing rooms and salons of Whig society vied for Byron’s presence and lionized him. At Holland House, he met the spirited, impulsive Lady Caroline Lamb, who initially judged him “mad—bad—and dangerous to know.” Their tempestuous affair lasted through the summer, until Byron rejected her; she continued the pursuit, burned “effigies” of his picture, and transformed their relationship into a Gothic romance in her novel Glenarvon (1816).
Despite its outcome, his connection with Lady Caroline left him on friendly terms with her mother-in-law, the witty Elizabeth Milbanke Lamb, Lady Melbourne. Through her, in September, he proposed marriage to her niece, Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, as a possible means of escaping the insistent Caroline. A 20-year-old bluestocking, Annabella was widely read in literature and philosophy and showed a talent for mathematics. She declined the proposal in the belief that Byron would never be “the object of that strong affection” which would make her “happy in domestic life.” With good humor and perhaps relief Byron accepted the refusal; in a letter of October 18, 1812 he thanked Lady Melbourne for her efforts with his “Princess of Parallelograms.” By November he was conducting an affair with the mature Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford, a patroness of the Reform Movement.