Lord Byron Biography

Dromo's Den

BYRON, George Gordon, sixth Lord (1788-1824) One of the greatest of English poets. He was born in London, Jan. 22, 1788, and was the only son of Capt. John Byron, of the Guards, and Catherine Gordon of Gight, a Scottish heiress. Captain Byron and his wife did not live happily. The husband was a profligate and the wife's fortune was soon squandered at the gaming table. Separated from her husband, she retired, on an income of £150 a year, to Aberdeen with her lame boy, whom in her capriciousness she treated with alternate violence and affection. In his eleventh year Byron succeeded his granduncle, William, Lord Byron, and mother and son immediately left the north for Newstead Abbey, the ancient seat of the family, a few miles distant from Nottingham, in the romantic district of Sherwood Forest. On succeeding to the title, Byron was sent to Dulwich College, and thereafter to Harrow (1803). The most remarkable thing about his early years was his extraordinary attachments. In his ninth year, in Aberdeenshire, he fell in love with Mary Duff. His cousin, Margaret Parker, who died early, was his next idol. His strongest passion, however, was for Mary Chaworth, whom he first met when on a visit to Newstead in 1803. Miss Chaworth's father had been killed in a duel by Lord Byron, the granduncle of the poet, and marriage would have healed the family feud and joined rich estates. But it was not to be. Miss Chaworth was Byron's senior by two years and evidently felt little flattered by the worship of the lame Harrow boy. Next year came the parting interview described in The Dream. In 1805 Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge. The next year he had a Newark bookseller print for him a volume of his verse, the entire impression of which he was induced to destroy. With additions and omissions, the volume was republished in 1807. Later in the same year Byron made his first real appearance before the public in Hours of Idleness. The poems contained in this volume were not absolutely without merit; but they might have been written by any well-educated boy who, in addition to ordinary cleverness, possessed the slightest touch of poetic sensibility. The volume was fiercely assailed by Brougham in the Edinburgh Review, and his sarcasms stung Byron into becoming a poet. Byron attributed the attack to Jeffrey. The satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was written in reply to the article in the Edinburgh Review, and the town was taken by a play of wit and mastery of versification unequaled since the days of Pope. Byron now withdrew from England visiting Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and Greece. On his return he published the first two cantos of Childe Harold (1812) with immense success and was at once enrolled among the great poets of his country. During the next two years he produced The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara. While these brilliant pieces were flowing from his pen, he was indulging in all the revelries and excesses of London society. What was noblest in the man revolted at this mode of life, and in an effort to escape from it he married, in 1815, Miss Milbanke, daughter of Sir Ralph Milbanke. This union was unfortunate. It lasted only a year, and during the brief period money embarrassments, recriminations, and all the miseries incidental to an ill-assorted marriage were of frequent occurrence. After the birth of her child, Ada, Lady Byron retired to her father's house and refused to return. Byron became the theme of all uncharitable tongues. The most popular poet, he was for a space the most unpopular individual in the country. In one of his letters, written from Italy some years later, referring to the slanders current at the time, he said: "I was accused of every monstrous vice of public rumor and private rancor. My name, which has been a knightly or a noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman, was tainted. I felt that if what was whispered and muttered and murmured was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew:" The separation from his wife and the departure from England in 1816, never to return, mark a stage in the development of Byron's genius. A new element of power now entered into his verse.

Misery and indignation stimulated him to remarkable activity. Six months' stay at Geneva produced the third canto of Childe Harold and The Prisoner of Chillon. Manfred and The Lament of Tasso were written in 1817. The nest year he was at Venice and finished Childe Harold there; and, in the gay and witty Beppo, made an experiment in the new field which ha was afterward to work so successfully. During the next three years he produced the first five cantos of Don Juan, and a number of dramas of various merit, Cain and Werner representing opposite poles. In 1821 he removed to Pisa and worked there at Don Juan, which, with the exception of The Vision of Judgment, occupied his pen almost up to the close of his life. In 1822 Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt started a journal called The Liberal. After the tragic death of Shelley in the summer of this year Byron and Hunt quarreled, and the journal came to a quick close. Morally, Byron's Italian life was licentious, and his genius was tainted by his indulgences. The least censurable of all his moral lapses was his liaison with the Countess Guiccioli. Near the close of his career he was visited by a new inspiration; the sun so long obscured shone out gloriously at its setting. In the summer of 1823 he sailed for Cephalonia to aid the Greeks in their struggle for independence. From Cephalonia he went to Missolonghi at the beginning of January, 1824. There he found nothing but confusion and contending chiefs, but in three months he succeeded in evoking some kind of order out of the chaos. His health, however, began to fail. He died from exposure and fever, April 19, 1824. His body was conveyed to England, and, on the refusal of the dean to permit burial in Westminster Abbey, it was interred in the family vault in the village church of Hucknall, near Newstead Abbey.

Lord Byron is a remarkable instance of the fluctuations of literary fashion. Elevated to the highest pinnacle of fame by his contemporaries, he was unduly decried after his death, when the romance which he had thrown around himself and his writings began to wear away; and it is only during the last 20 or 30 years that the proper place has been found for him in the public estimation. The resources of his intellect were amazing. Ho gained his first reputation as a depicter of the gloomy and stormful passions. After he wrote Beppo, he was surprised to find that he was a humorist; when he reached Greece, he discovered an ability for military organization. When all the schoolgirls of England fancied their idol with a scowling brow and a curled lip, he was laughing in Italy and declaring himself to be the most unromantic being in the world. And he was right. Take away all his Oriental wrappings and you discover an honest Englishman, who, above all things, hates cant and humbug. In Don Juan, which is his masterpiece, and in his letters, there is a wonderful fund of wit, sarcasm, humor, and knowledge of man. Few men had a clearer eye for fact and reality. His eloquence, pathos, and despair, as in Manfred and Childe Harold, were only phases of his mind. Towards the close of his life he was working towards his real strength, and that lay in wit and the direct representation of human life.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. IV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 243-244.