November 9, 2009 • 29 mins
Whether the topic is Lucrezia Borgia or Frankenstein, Lord Byron keeps popping up in podcasts. Who was this poet, and why is he associated with so many historical figures? Join Katie and Sarah as they take a look back at the incomparable Lord Byron.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and Sarah and
I are solving a bit of a War's waldo today.
We keep doing podcast research and coming across the same
(00:23):
personage in places we never expected to find him. No,
and that's George Gordon Lord Byron. And first he pops
up in Frankenstein, which you know, that's obvious enough, he
was there when Mary Shelley was writing it. But then
he popped up in Lucrezia, Borgia, of all places, which
they don't live in nearly the same century. So it's
(00:44):
kind of an odd match. But perhaps it's not so
strange that we find him in all of these unlikely places,
because he had a variety of interests, from travel to
his brilliant poetry to a menagerie of animals, and of
course he was the most famous poet in Europe, as
well as a fascinating public figure because of his utterly
(01:07):
bizarre social life and romantic life, yes, scandalous affairs and
cruel behavior towards variety of people. He was very good looking,
he was a nobleman, but on his worst behavior for
most of the time. And interestingly enough, while Byron is
this world famous poet and obviously um a titan of
(01:29):
poetry today, his literary contemporaries didn't really have much respect
for him. Keats had a particularly skating quote. He called
him a careless hectorer in proud bad verse. That's pretty cold, Keats.
But today he's appreciated for what he did with his work,
and Um, according to I pulled out my old romantic
(01:51):
literature book. My professors would be so proud. Katie was saying,
it's nice when you get to to use those the
books that you couldn't sell back. But according to Miller Matlock,
his unique expression of the consciousness and moods of early
modernity is what we so appreciate today. And on that note,
let's go back to his beginnings. He was the son
of Captain John Byron, who was known as Mad Jack,
(02:13):
which I think is pretty fabulous. He's a descendant of
William the Conqueror too, and his second wife Katherine Gordon,
who was a Scottish heiress and a descendant of James
the First. I like this family treat thing. It's very helpful.
Mad Jack liked to spend his money, so the Byron
fortune was somewhat diminished by the time Little Byron came
along January. He was born in London in a rented
(02:37):
room because Catherine couldn't afford anything else and mad Jack
had run off to France. And interestingly, he was born
with a call over his head, which some people think
that pretends second site or good luck or distinction. And
the call the call is actually sold to a naval officer,
which I just thought was so disgusting. Did it work
(02:59):
for him? No, it's supposed to if you own a call,
which if you buy it from a baby birthday, Um,
it's supposed to prevent drowning. But the guy who bought
it drowned twelve years later. So Byron's call not good luck,
not very helpful. His mom took him to Aberdeen when
he was young because that's where her people were, And interestingly,
(03:19):
George had a club of foot and a withered leg
when he was born, and for the rest of his
life he blamed his mother for this because she wore
a corset while she was pregnant. So we've got some
early mother hatred going on, which is always nice and
a grown man, and he's also he has a sort
of tough childhood. Um he's sexually abused and beaten by
his nanny who gives him these really strict Calvinist sermons
(03:42):
and then brings home men from the town. So it's
a very uncomfortable setting for Byron to grow up in
a bizarre mix with those very strict morals and then
the very lax behavior on the other hand. But he
inherits a title at ten and becomes Baron Byron of Rothdale.
(04:03):
And he inherits this, he's not in line for it.
He never thinks he's going to inherit this. He gets
it from a great uncle, the fifth Baron Byron, who's
known as William the Wicked Lord Byron. Um. He was
expecting his son to inherit it, of course, and disliked
his son so much that he trashes his estate, basically
(04:25):
chops down lots of trees. Um. His son dies before him, though,
and his grandson, and so it goes to this obscure relative,
Lord Byron. And because of this title, Byron also gets
an estate called Newstead Abbey, which is used to be
grand but at this point, as practically in ruins, and
of course they don't have the fortune to repair it,
and nor does the other Byron's estate. It's near Sherwood Forest,
(04:48):
to which I thought was so perfectly romantic. Um. So
Byron sent to school in London in eighteen o one,
and a little bit after that he has his for love. Um.
He falls in love with a cousin, Mary Chaworth, who
lives on an estate near near his own, and he's
(05:09):
so in love with her that he refuses to go
back to school at first. Um. And she's older than him,
she's a few years older, she's already engaged or about
to be, and um, he just he sets her up
as his ideal of unattainable love. This is where the
romantic streak environ begins to show itself. But also kind
(05:32):
of sad because he only gets over her when he
overhears her mocking his his lameness, of his foot, cruelty
and your children. It's also about the time when he
starts his homosexual love affairs, which for a long time
throughout history were somewhat suppressed. It's reported he has sexual
relationships with Newstead servants of both sexes. At this time,
(05:55):
he has a servant named William Fletcher who's by his
side from the age of sixteen until almost his death.
And William is a very good looking man. And he
also strikes up a this is his quote, violent though
pure love and passion for a guy named John Eddleston
who's a chorister, and Edelston gives him a Cornelian as
(06:15):
a present, and Byron wrote lots of poems about him.
And that's the person most people think of when they
think of Byron's bisexual reputation. That started with John and
also further fueling Byron's reputation. When he's a teenager, he
meets his half sister, Augusta Byron. They didn't know each
other's children at all. Um, they meet when he's about fifteen,
(06:38):
and it suggested that they later have their own sexual relationship.
So yes, Augusta will come back up. Yeah, we'll hear
about her some more. So you can see everything starting
starting to come together to make Byron this rascally character
he ends up being. When some of it's confusing, You
had mentioned something about the guy who was leasing new Stead. Yeah,
(07:01):
Lord Gray, who was leasing new Stead until Byron reached
his majority. Um, it's thought to have made some sort
of sexual advance at the young Byron that so shocked
him that the two break and don't don't talk to
each other again. Even though Byron's mother is very much
(07:21):
a fan of Lord Gray and tries to reconcile them,
Byron wants nothing to do with him. Well, and since
Byron sort of hates his mother and that would actually
make more sons, so at this point he's gonna mother.
He doesn't like a father who's abandoned him. Abusive relationships
and who commit suicide right, and some other confusing personal relationships.
But in eighteen oh five he's off to Trinity College
(07:41):
in Cambridge, where he seems to have a pretty good
time racking up lots of debt. He had what twelve
thousand pounds in debt before he even reached i't even know,
which I think is twenty one, So that's I mean,
there aren't credit cards. I don't know what Byron would
have done on a modern college campus. I have no idea.
(08:03):
But this is actually where he met John Edelston that
I mentioned, that I mentioned before, And this is also
when he starts writing his poetry. Yeah, he writes some
early poems and prints them in a volume called Fugitive Pieces.
And um. He also makes his best friend at Cambridge,
John cam Hobhouse, who gets him into politics, something that
(08:24):
as a future lord um he'll play a role in.
And hob House is his best friend for life truly
b FF. He's the best man at his wedding. He
travels with him all around the world and I have
a falling out for a while that he ends up
being loyal to the end and his diaries are part
of the reason we know so much about Byron. Yeah,
and my favorite Byron at Cambridge story that just shows
(08:47):
how how bad he was, but in kind of a
funny way. At this point at least um Cambridge bar
students from having dogs on on campus, and so Byron
chooses to have a tame bear as his pet, and
Cambridge can't do anything about it because they don't have
any rules about it. And um he even suggests in
(09:09):
a letter to a friend that his bear companion should
sit for a fellowship. So Byron has a has a
long love for animals. He really likes dogs. He keeps
his bear with him when he moves back to Newstead.
Um he actually has dogs companions almost until his death.
I really want to bear now, but I have a
feeling our boss did not go for that. No, as
(09:31):
come a little bit later. This is also around the
time his first volume of poetry gets published, House of Idleness,
in eighteen oh seven. Yeah, and this is obviously a
deeper work than the fugitive pieces that were published earlier.
This is actually a complete volume. And uh, we probably
wouldn't know much about the House of Idleness except that
he's mocked for them in the Edinburgh Review. And he
(09:53):
writes a comeback couplet satire called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,
which guests him his first recognition. Oh the cutthroat world
of poetry. In eighteen o nine, Byron reaches his majority
and takes his seat in the House of Lords. And
then he and Hobhouse go on their Grand tour. And again,
I have been deprived of my own grand tour, so
(10:14):
if someone would like to send me on one, please
let me know. But they go traveling all over the place.
They start in Portugal and moved to Spain, Greece and Albania.
And on their grand tour, Byron and Hobhouse get involved
in a little bit of political intrigue. The Ionian Islands
had been restored to the French, but the English wanted them,
and so did Ali Pasha, who was not known as
(10:37):
the greatest guy in Greek history. So Byron and Hobhouse
get used by a guy named Spirittian Forresty. He entertains
them and then mentions, you know, why don't you go
to Albania and see Ali Pasha. That would be lovely
because he wants to sweeten his own deal. So as
Byron and Hobhouse go off towards Albania, the English come
toward the Ionian Islands, and they were really upset I
(11:00):
think when they both realized that they were as they
thought they had done. You can just imagine them like
finishing Cambridge and thinking they're pretty pretty clever. Yeah, publish
their poetry satire and then go and get used by
some guy named Spiridion. And around the same time Byron
starts child Harold's Pilgrimage, which is one of the works
(11:21):
he's best known for. His UM, his Oriental Odyssey. UM
that's very much semi autobiographical. And I would like to interject,
with no segue whatsoever, that at this time he also
shoots an eagle, which is one of my favorite facts
I found, and there are so many of these we
could have researched him for that doesn't gell with my
(11:43):
animal lover point from earlier, Katie. He also decapitated a
goose at around this same time, so he loves them
with sometimes he kills them. Sometimes you do kill the
things you love. And during this trip Byron also has many,
many more affairs with both men and women, and he
meets Niccolo Giroux, who he later mentioned in a will
of his leaving his money, but it ends up being revoked,
(12:04):
and while they're gone, their friends back home are writing
both of them letters in code about what's happening to
gay men in England at the time. You could be
hanged for the quote unquote crime of homosexual behavior. So
it's possible that he and Hobhouse also had some sort
of intimate relationship, but whatever was going on, they were
(12:25):
kept abreast of the news in England. And this will
become important a little bit later with Byron's marriage, but
for now we'll head back to England. Yeah, So they
go back to London in July of eighteen eleven and
Byron just misses his mother's death. Um, but quickly gets
to work in the House of Lords and gives his
first speech in eighteen twelve, which was urging tolerance against
(12:48):
riotous nodding him weavers, um, you could get the death
penalty at the time for breaking your frames basically, And
his second speech is about Irish Catholic rights. So he's
got these very rowl sort of idea social reform and um.
One month after this first speech, the first two cantos
of Child Harold's Pilgrimage, which he was working on on
(13:10):
the Grand Tour, are published, and Byron later writes that
I awoke one morning and found myself famous, and that
is one of his most famous quotes about how one
day everything can just change. And after this he begins
an affair with a married woman named Lady Caroline Lamb
who is red Child Harold and decides she has to
(13:31):
meet this guy, and she writes some of this ultimate Yes,
she adores him, and he meets her, and he's not
too impressed by what he sees. She's really not his type,
but they end up carrying on this scandalous, torrid, passionate
affair and she almost leaves her husband for him. Yeah,
Byron's friend, John Hobhouse encourages him to not elope with
(13:52):
her and sort of narrowly prevents this enormous scandal, which
is probably a good idea because things were a little
too hot, heavy down toward the insane side. Yeah. When
he breaks it off with her, Lady Caroline organizes a
bonfire where the village girls congregate and burn an effigy
of Byron, and then they dance around the fire and
(14:15):
toss in copies of his letters to her and his
gifts little gold trinkets. And she's so worried that this
is going to make people think she's crazy, and even
writes some stuff about it. But I mean it kind
of does. I don't know, if you wanted to throw
a bonfire, I would probably come. I would even burn
people in effigy of Accessary ends up not looking very good,
(14:37):
but they continue a correspondence interestingly enough that turns increasingly literary,
and she even publishes a book, this real kiss and
tell novel called Glenn arvon Um, which just exposes the
character of Byron to the world. Well, and she's still
keeping up her crazy antics. She completely weeks out to
(15:01):
use scientific terminology, and she creates these really public scenes.
She suddenly shows up at his house, often in disguise,
and creates scenes there. She writes some crazy letters Hobhouse
rights and his diaries that once she came in disguise
to the house and then tried to grab a sword
and stab herself and they managed to stop her. And
she also is said to have sent her pubic hair
(15:23):
to him in a letter, which I don't reman something
I would want from an X in case any of
you were listening. She lost a bunch of weight, and
he had had a really mean quote about how he
was being haunted by a skeleton because she'd become very
emaciated by this time. And I kind of feel bad
for miss Lamb. And she's the one who had labeled
him mad, bad and dangerous to know, which is probably
(15:45):
the most famous description of him. So she really kicks
off the string of sort of unfortunate lovers he has
before his marriage. Though he takes up with Lady Oxford,
and this made me so angry. She's the mother of six,
which is not the part that made me angry. But
Byron shares Caroline's letters with Lady Oxford, so yeah, reading
(16:06):
the excess letters, and then even lets her respond to
some of them and sign her initials at the bottom,
which of course devastates or Caroline back home and he's
taking up with Lady Francis Webster, and around this time
probably also starting a love affair with his half sister Augusta,
who is married to Colonel George Lee, and some say
(16:28):
that her child, Elizabeth Maddoorali, is really Lord Byron's. So
during this he's writing all of these gloomy tales like
the cours Fair and the jour Um, these sort of
oriental um I guess escapes for him for his reckless
love life and what to do when you're having too
(16:50):
many affairs and you don't know what to do. Get married,
straight and narrow and go ahead and get married. It's
gonna work out really well. Maybe you can sense the sarcasm.
The person he decides to marry is Lady Caroline Land's cousin,
Annabella Millbank, who is absolutely nothing like him. He could
not have picked someone more understuded to him if he tried.
(17:10):
She loves math and she fancies herself, yes I have.
She likes math and morals and um. They get married
and things aren't good from the start. There's this sort
of bad Elman too, and Byron is a superstitious man,
so he really doesn't like this. He gives her a
wedding ring that was his mother's and it's too big,
(17:32):
so she ties it with a black ribbon, and um,
he's horrified by this and makes her take it off,
and he's also He also thinks he's spotted the Black
Friar of Newston, his ancestral home, a month before the wedding,
and the black Friar is supposed to portend bad luck
for the house Byron, and things just get even more bizarre.
(17:54):
Lady Byron has their daughter, his only legitimate child, Augusta
Aida and sister seen which I don't know about that,
and apparently he paced the hallways all night with loaded
guns when they were getting married, and when they have
the baby does something even weirder. He smashes bottles with
a poker while she's being born, which I just saw
(18:16):
that like alone, there was no explanation for it. Um,
So I don't know what was going through Byron's mind
during his marriage, but the two were not a good
match now and Annabella leaves sixteen months after they're married,
and then accuses him not only of incest with his
half sister Augusta and mistreatment, but also of annally raping
(18:38):
her two days after she had the baby. So his
reputation is officially shot. The shot that's too much for
Um for his British public to accept, so he goes
abroad in April eighteen sixteen, actually endever to return to England,
so self imposed exile starts in Switzerland and the Hobhouse
comes with him for the very beginning, and this is
(19:00):
when if you listen to our podcast. He ends up
in a ghost writing competition which Mary Shelley gets Frankenstein
out of, and also takes up with Claire Claremont, who
he had actually started an affair with in England. She um,
you want to say she followed him. She actually goes
(19:20):
ahead of him, knowing he'll he'll be there soon enough. Um.
He really has a low opinion of Claire Claremont. He
calls her a foolish girl. In a letter to a sister.
He basically makes it sound like he couldn't avoid her.
She was so into him there was nothing he could do,
which is ridiculous because this didn't keep him from sleeping
with her and conceiving a child with her, who is
(19:42):
born when they leave in January eighteen seventeen. She's born Alba,
and later her name is changed to Allegra, which is
always kind of a strange thing to do, but I
thinks so too, and her life is so sad. Things
don't go well for little Allegra. He says he will
not give Claire Claremont money to raise the child, which
(20:05):
he could easily have done he had the money to
do that. Then it probably has to do with his
low opinion of her. Yeah, so he's just not going
to do that. He doesn't trust her, so instead he
takes custody and he won't tell Claire anything about her,
and then he ends handing her off to a bunch
of other people, and she ends up any convent school
where she dies at age five, and no one visited her,
(20:26):
but not even her parents. So sad story there, and
another example of Byron's cruelty with women, which will be
a running theme for a little while. So at the
end of this Faithful Summer where Frankenstein is written and
um Claire is pregnant, the Shelleys leave for England and
(20:48):
Claire has her baby and Byron and hop House leeve
for Italy, and this is my favorite part of my notes.
They see a triple guillotining and they climb onto the
roof of St. Peter's gun sights again at any and
they're really but they had a great time. And Cophouse
wrote all about it in his diary, and Byron really
trumps up his life during this period. Um in his
(21:09):
letters to his friends he claims that he has made
love to a hundred or more women during Carnival of
eighteen seventeen. But if you think about the context this,
this is a bad time for Byron Um because of
his familial estrangement and his bad reputation, his growing debt.
If he was in that much debt as a minor,
(21:29):
imagine how bad it's gotten. Um. So he's trying to
make things seem better than they really are, and he
takes up with a woman named Marianna Segatti, who's his
landlord's wife, and then later he moves on to Margarita Kanye,
a baker's wife who he refers to as the gentle Tigress,
a detail I really liked. And those aren't the only
(21:51):
affairs that are going on, as being Byron, there are plenty,
but Newstead Abby is sold in eighteen eighteen, and that's
looking for a buggers for several years. He initially didn't
want to part with it, but finally is convinced that
it's the only way he can he can make it.
And he also writes the fourth canto of Child Harold
(22:13):
at about this time and Bepo, which is more of
a it's less of this gloomy sort of oriental epic style,
and which marks a change in his writing for a while,
and it sets him up for writing his most famous work,
which I keep thinking is Don Juan, and Sarah keeps
insisting because of the rhyme scheme, was Don Juan. That's
(22:34):
what I learned Don Juan, because he sets up the
rhymes in the poem so that you're forced to mispronounce
the foreign words. So I may just have shown myself
as the worst English major ever. I apologize to my
college professors. But he has a lot more fun writing
this one than he does with his earlier work, and
like a lot of his earlier works, it has thinly
(22:57):
disguised people from his life. The the mother in the poem,
Donna Anaz, is a complete, a complete shadow for Annabella,
his wife. He even writes in short, she was a
walking calculation. Uh, somebody who's really smart and clever, but
that's kind of presented in a bad, a bad way.
(23:20):
And he also talks about a quarrel between a husband
and wife in the work and all the nosy people
who think they understand what the problem was, but they
don't really know what they're talking about. I guess he's
conceived of himself by this time as being very misunderstood.
And he's really an editor's worst nightmare too. Since Sarah
and I are editors, we took a lot of them,
we empathize with this position. Yeah. In a letter to
(23:42):
John Murray, who was the publisher of the first two cantos,
he writes that I will have none of your damned
cutting and slashing. So oh I would I would really
hate to get I would really hate to get something
like that from one of my writers. That's when we
go downstairs and buy some peanut butter Eminem's. But around
the same time, also Byron has gained a lot of weight,
(24:03):
which Sarah, you said you remember to hearing I had
always learned in English that he battled with his weight
for his whole life and would yo yo diet. And
I didn't see a lot on that except that kid
gained a lot during this time and that he was
a pretty pudgy little kid. So if you know any
(24:24):
more about that, please email us at History Podcast at
how staff works dot com. We'd love to hear more
about it. She also meets Countess Teresa Gamba guicci Olie,
who is either seventeen or nineteen. We've come across a
couple of different pages, but she's married to an older
count sixty year old, and she's young and beautiful, and
she loves Byron deeply and knew him intimately, and she
(24:47):
thinks she understands him like no one else. She believes
he's a good man and he's misunderstood and has somehow
incurred this terrible reputation. I don't think it occurred to
her that maybe she just saw one side of him
and everyone saw the other sides. But she writes a
book called Lord Byron's Life in Italy to vindicate him,
and he becomes her cavalier servant, which is a gentleman
(25:08):
in waiting, but basically it's a socially accepted lover. Uh.
He rents an apartment from her and her husband, where
Byron the animal lover, I'm going to stick to that side,
not to the shooting and the eagle shooting. Um. He
installs ten horses, eight dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an
eagle and unshocked one, a crow and a falcon um.
(25:31):
And eventually Tres and her husband separate. But um, it's
Byron and Tress relationship is not affected by that. He
actually gets pretty close to her family, her father and brother,
who are members of the secret society, the Carbonari, which
has the aim to free Italy from Austrian rule. And
(25:53):
it's interesting that this English lord gets this in through
his Italian lover and the secret society. But he is
really into it in his I sort of feel like
his early interest in politics, which fall by the wayside,
is rekindled by this. It grows much stronger. At this point,
it seems like he's put not that he's not still
(26:13):
sleeping with other people, but a little bit of that.
The frenetic pace has slowed, and he's getting much more
interested in what else he could do. Yeah, and his
relationship with Teresa is more like a marriage than anything else.
He's had, so at this time, he's hanging out a
little bit more with Shelley and they go to a
villa by the sea with s a s Lee Hunt,
(26:35):
and they start working on this radical journal called The Liberal.
And this is really the only big thing we found
about during his life during this period, during this period,
maybe because he's actually got a relatively calm life during
this period, um, but this is when Shelley drowns, and Um,
Byron keeps on working with Lee Hunt on The Liberal,
(26:58):
even though he becomes less and less in stood in it.
But he moves from working on this journal The Liberal
to getting involved in the cause of Greece in their
war for independence. And some have said that he would
have been the King of Greece if things had actually
gone through. As a bold claim. It is a very
bold claim, but you know, I'm willing to think that
he could do it. And around the same time, he
(27:20):
meets a guy named Lucas Calendard Sanos I'm positive and
not pronouncing that correctly, who was part of his little
ragtag army that Byron had gotten together in this Greek
liberation thing. And he adored him, but his love was unrequited.
And Lucas was with him when he died, which was
at age what thirty six, thirty six or thirty seven.
(27:40):
Byron was very very much committed to the Greek cause
against the Turks. He loaned his money, he commanded a
personal brigade of soldiers. Um he was. He was pretty
brave and a Greek hero. And Byron contracted his fatal
illness when he was in route to a Greek campaign.
(28:01):
He gets rheumatic fever by April and he dies on
Easter Sunday in eighteen twenty four, and his memoirs were
burned by Thomas Moore. And I wish, I wish, wish,
wish they were still around because I loved People always
have to burn the memoirs. They don't want you to
know their secret. And Byron it wasn't very clear if
(28:22):
he wanted to be buried where he died or go
back to England. But regardless of his wishes, he was
sent back to England and buried at Newstead. What you
have to tell the dog story, which you told me.
He when he was a young man, he initially set
up a pact for his favorite dog, Boatswain, who had
(28:44):
died of rabies and an old man who who worked
worked the grounds to all be buried together. And later
when the old man was asked about it, he was like, well,
if if Lord Byron is going to be here, okay,
but I'm not sure I want to be buried alone
with the dog. So none of that happened. The dog
(29:05):
is buried outside Lord Byron in the crypt. So now
you know that you can make packs with people about
where you'd like to be buried. Random people in your
life is interested in it, apparently, And well, we don't
have any poetry articles on the site to interest you.
We do have several articles on bears. Since Byron liked bears,
we're going to send you to those instead. We suggest
(29:28):
you search for Bear on the home page at www
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blog on the how stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and Sarah and
I are solving a bit of a War's waldo today.
We keep doing podcast research and coming across the same
(00:23):
personage in places we never expected to find him. No,
and that's George Gordon Lord Byron. And first he pops
up in Frankenstein, which you know, that's obvious enough, he
was there when Mary Shelley was writing it. But then
he popped up in Lucrezia, Borgia, of all places, which
they don't live in nearly the same century. So it's
(00:44):
kind of an odd match. But perhaps it's not so
strange that we find him in all of these unlikely places,
because he had a variety of interests, from travel to
his brilliant poetry to a menagerie of animals, and of
course he was the most famous poet in Europe, as
well as a fascinating public figure because of his utterly
(01:07):
bizarre social life and romantic life, yes, scandalous affairs and
cruel behavior towards variety of people. He was very good looking,
he was a nobleman, but on his worst behavior for
most of the time. And interestingly enough, while Byron is
this world famous poet and obviously um a titan of
(01:29):
poetry today, his literary contemporaries didn't really have much respect
for him. Keats had a particularly skating quote. He called
him a careless hectorer in proud bad verse. That's pretty cold, Keats.
But today he's appreciated for what he did with his work,
and Um, according to I pulled out my old romantic
(01:51):
literature book. My professors would be so proud. Katie was saying,
it's nice when you get to to use those the
books that you couldn't sell back. But according to Miller Matlock,
his unique expression of the consciousness and moods of early
modernity is what we so appreciate today. And on that note,
let's go back to his beginnings. He was the son
of Captain John Byron, who was known as Mad Jack,
(02:13):
which I think is pretty fabulous. He's a descendant of
William the Conqueror too, and his second wife Katherine Gordon,
who was a Scottish heiress and a descendant of James
the First. I like this family treat thing. It's very helpful.
Mad Jack liked to spend his money, so the Byron
fortune was somewhat diminished by the time Little Byron came
along January. He was born in London in a rented
(02:37):
room because Catherine couldn't afford anything else and mad Jack
had run off to France. And interestingly, he was born
with a call over his head, which some people think
that pretends second site or good luck or distinction. And
the call the call is actually sold to a naval officer,
which I just thought was so disgusting. Did it work
(02:59):
for him? No, it's supposed to if you own a call,
which if you buy it from a baby birthday, Um,
it's supposed to prevent drowning. But the guy who bought
it drowned twelve years later. So Byron's call not good luck,
not very helpful. His mom took him to Aberdeen when
he was young because that's where her people were, And interestingly,
(03:19):
George had a club of foot and a withered leg
when he was born, and for the rest of his
life he blamed his mother for this because she wore
a corset while she was pregnant. So we've got some
early mother hatred going on, which is always nice and
a grown man, and he's also he has a sort
of tough childhood. Um he's sexually abused and beaten by
his nanny who gives him these really strict Calvinist sermons
(03:42):
and then brings home men from the town. So it's
a very uncomfortable setting for Byron to grow up in
a bizarre mix with those very strict morals and then
the very lax behavior on the other hand. But he
inherits a title at ten and becomes Baron Byron of Rothdale.
(04:03):
And he inherits this, he's not in line for it.
He never thinks he's going to inherit this. He gets
it from a great uncle, the fifth Baron Byron, who's
known as William the Wicked Lord Byron. Um. He was
expecting his son to inherit it, of course, and disliked
his son so much that he trashes his estate, basically
(04:25):
chops down lots of trees. Um. His son dies before him, though,
and his grandson, and so it goes to this obscure relative,
Lord Byron. And because of this title, Byron also gets
an estate called Newstead Abbey, which is used to be
grand but at this point, as practically in ruins, and
of course they don't have the fortune to repair it,
and nor does the other Byron's estate. It's near Sherwood Forest,
(04:48):
to which I thought was so perfectly romantic. Um. So
Byron sent to school in London in eighteen o one,
and a little bit after that he has his for love. Um.
He falls in love with a cousin, Mary Chaworth, who
lives on an estate near near his own, and he's
(05:09):
so in love with her that he refuses to go
back to school at first. Um. And she's older than him,
she's a few years older, she's already engaged or about
to be, and um, he just he sets her up
as his ideal of unattainable love. This is where the
romantic streak environ begins to show itself. But also kind
(05:32):
of sad because he only gets over her when he
overhears her mocking his his lameness, of his foot, cruelty
and your children. It's also about the time when he
starts his homosexual love affairs, which for a long time
throughout history were somewhat suppressed. It's reported he has sexual
relationships with Newstead servants of both sexes. At this time,
(05:55):
he has a servant named William Fletcher who's by his
side from the age of sixteen until almost his death.
And William is a very good looking man. And he
also strikes up a this is his quote, violent though
pure love and passion for a guy named John Eddleston
who's a chorister, and Edelston gives him a Cornelian as
(06:15):
a present, and Byron wrote lots of poems about him.
And that's the person most people think of when they
think of Byron's bisexual reputation. That started with John and
also further fueling Byron's reputation. When he's a teenager, he
meets his half sister, Augusta Byron. They didn't know each
other's children at all. Um, they meet when he's about fifteen,
(06:38):
and it suggested that they later have their own sexual relationship.
So yes, Augusta will come back up. Yeah, we'll hear
about her some more. So you can see everything starting
starting to come together to make Byron this rascally character
he ends up being. When some of it's confusing, You
had mentioned something about the guy who was leasing new Stead. Yeah,
(07:01):
Lord Gray, who was leasing new Stead until Byron reached
his majority. Um, it's thought to have made some sort
of sexual advance at the young Byron that so shocked
him that the two break and don't don't talk to
each other again. Even though Byron's mother is very much
(07:21):
a fan of Lord Gray and tries to reconcile them,
Byron wants nothing to do with him. Well, and since
Byron sort of hates his mother and that would actually
make more sons, so at this point he's gonna mother.
He doesn't like a father who's abandoned him. Abusive relationships
and who commit suicide right, and some other confusing personal relationships.
But in eighteen oh five he's off to Trinity College
(07:41):
in Cambridge, where he seems to have a pretty good
time racking up lots of debt. He had what twelve
thousand pounds in debt before he even reached i't even know,
which I think is twenty one, So that's I mean,
there aren't credit cards. I don't know what Byron would
have done on a modern college campus. I have no idea.
(08:03):
But this is actually where he met John Edelston that
I mentioned, that I mentioned before, And this is also
when he starts writing his poetry. Yeah, he writes some
early poems and prints them in a volume called Fugitive Pieces.
And um. He also makes his best friend at Cambridge,
John cam Hobhouse, who gets him into politics, something that
(08:24):
as a future lord um he'll play a role in.
And hob House is his best friend for life truly
b FF. He's the best man at his wedding. He
travels with him all around the world and I have
a falling out for a while that he ends up
being loyal to the end and his diaries are part
of the reason we know so much about Byron. Yeah,
and my favorite Byron at Cambridge story that just shows
(08:47):
how how bad he was, but in kind of a
funny way. At this point at least um Cambridge bar
students from having dogs on on campus, and so Byron
chooses to have a tame bear as his pet, and
Cambridge can't do anything about it because they don't have
any rules about it. And um he even suggests in
(09:09):
a letter to a friend that his bear companion should
sit for a fellowship. So Byron has a has a
long love for animals. He really likes dogs. He keeps
his bear with him when he moves back to Newstead.
Um he actually has dogs companions almost until his death.
I really want to bear now, but I have a
feeling our boss did not go for that. No, as
(09:31):
come a little bit later. This is also around the
time his first volume of poetry gets published, House of Idleness,
in eighteen oh seven. Yeah, and this is obviously a
deeper work than the fugitive pieces that were published earlier.
This is actually a complete volume. And uh, we probably
wouldn't know much about the House of Idleness except that
he's mocked for them in the Edinburgh Review. And he
(09:53):
writes a comeback couplet satire called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,
which guests him his first recognition. Oh the cutthroat world
of poetry. In eighteen o nine, Byron reaches his majority
and takes his seat in the House of Lords. And
then he and Hobhouse go on their Grand tour. And again,
I have been deprived of my own grand tour, so
(10:14):
if someone would like to send me on one, please
let me know. But they go traveling all over the place.
They start in Portugal and moved to Spain, Greece and Albania.
And on their grand tour, Byron and Hobhouse get involved
in a little bit of political intrigue. The Ionian Islands
had been restored to the French, but the English wanted them,
and so did Ali Pasha, who was not known as
(10:37):
the greatest guy in Greek history. So Byron and Hobhouse
get used by a guy named Spirittian Forresty. He entertains
them and then mentions, you know, why don't you go
to Albania and see Ali Pasha. That would be lovely
because he wants to sweeten his own deal. So as
Byron and Hobhouse go off towards Albania, the English come
toward the Ionian Islands, and they were really upset I
(11:00):
think when they both realized that they were as they
thought they had done. You can just imagine them like
finishing Cambridge and thinking they're pretty pretty clever. Yeah, publish
their poetry satire and then go and get used by
some guy named Spiridion. And around the same time Byron
starts child Harold's Pilgrimage, which is one of the works
(11:21):
he's best known for. His UM, his Oriental Odyssey. UM
that's very much semi autobiographical. And I would like to interject,
with no segue whatsoever, that at this time he also
shoots an eagle, which is one of my favorite facts
I found, and there are so many of these we
could have researched him for that doesn't gell with my
(11:43):
animal lover point from earlier, Katie. He also decapitated a
goose at around this same time, so he loves them
with sometimes he kills them. Sometimes you do kill the
things you love. And during this trip Byron also has many,
many more affairs with both men and women, and he
meets Niccolo Giroux, who he later mentioned in a will
of his leaving his money, but it ends up being revoked,
(12:04):
and while they're gone, their friends back home are writing
both of them letters in code about what's happening to
gay men in England at the time. You could be
hanged for the quote unquote crime of homosexual behavior. So
it's possible that he and Hobhouse also had some sort
of intimate relationship, but whatever was going on, they were
(12:25):
kept abreast of the news in England. And this will
become important a little bit later with Byron's marriage, but
for now we'll head back to England. Yeah, So they
go back to London in July of eighteen eleven and
Byron just misses his mother's death. Um, but quickly gets
to work in the House of Lords and gives his
first speech in eighteen twelve, which was urging tolerance against
(12:48):
riotous nodding him weavers, um, you could get the death
penalty at the time for breaking your frames basically, And
his second speech is about Irish Catholic rights. So he's
got these very rowl sort of idea social reform and um.
One month after this first speech, the first two cantos
of Child Harold's Pilgrimage, which he was working on on
(13:10):
the Grand Tour, are published, and Byron later writes that
I awoke one morning and found myself famous, and that
is one of his most famous quotes about how one
day everything can just change. And after this he begins
an affair with a married woman named Lady Caroline Lamb
who is red Child Harold and decides she has to
(13:31):
meet this guy, and she writes some of this ultimate Yes,
she adores him, and he meets her, and he's not
too impressed by what he sees. She's really not his type,
but they end up carrying on this scandalous, torrid, passionate
affair and she almost leaves her husband for him. Yeah,
Byron's friend, John Hobhouse encourages him to not elope with
(13:52):
her and sort of narrowly prevents this enormous scandal, which
is probably a good idea because things were a little
too hot, heavy down toward the insane side. Yeah. When
he breaks it off with her, Lady Caroline organizes a
bonfire where the village girls congregate and burn an effigy
of Byron, and then they dance around the fire and
(14:15):
toss in copies of his letters to her and his
gifts little gold trinkets. And she's so worried that this
is going to make people think she's crazy, and even
writes some stuff about it. But I mean it kind
of does. I don't know, if you wanted to throw
a bonfire, I would probably come. I would even burn
people in effigy of Accessary ends up not looking very good,
(14:37):
but they continue a correspondence interestingly enough that turns increasingly literary,
and she even publishes a book, this real kiss and
tell novel called Glenn arvon Um, which just exposes the
character of Byron to the world. Well, and she's still
keeping up her crazy antics. She completely weeks out to
(15:01):
use scientific terminology, and she creates these really public scenes.
She suddenly shows up at his house, often in disguise,
and creates scenes there. She writes some crazy letters Hobhouse
rights and his diaries that once she came in disguise
to the house and then tried to grab a sword
and stab herself and they managed to stop her. And
she also is said to have sent her pubic hair
(15:23):
to him in a letter, which I don't reman something
I would want from an X in case any of
you were listening. She lost a bunch of weight, and
he had had a really mean quote about how he
was being haunted by a skeleton because she'd become very
emaciated by this time. And I kind of feel bad
for miss Lamb. And she's the one who had labeled
him mad, bad and dangerous to know, which is probably
(15:45):
the most famous description of him. So she really kicks
off the string of sort of unfortunate lovers he has
before his marriage. Though he takes up with Lady Oxford,
and this made me so angry. She's the mother of six,
which is not the part that made me angry. But
Byron shares Caroline's letters with Lady Oxford, so yeah, reading
(16:06):
the excess letters, and then even lets her respond to
some of them and sign her initials at the bottom,
which of course devastates or Caroline back home and he's
taking up with Lady Francis Webster, and around this time
probably also starting a love affair with his half sister Augusta,
who is married to Colonel George Lee, and some say
(16:28):
that her child, Elizabeth Maddoorali, is really Lord Byron's. So
during this he's writing all of these gloomy tales like
the cours Fair and the jour Um, these sort of
oriental um I guess escapes for him for his reckless
love life and what to do when you're having too
(16:50):
many affairs and you don't know what to do. Get married,
straight and narrow and go ahead and get married. It's
gonna work out really well. Maybe you can sense the sarcasm.
The person he decides to marry is Lady Caroline Land's cousin,
Annabella Millbank, who is absolutely nothing like him. He could
not have picked someone more understuded to him if he tried.
(17:10):
She loves math and she fancies herself, yes I have.
She likes math and morals and um. They get married
and things aren't good from the start. There's this sort
of bad Elman too, and Byron is a superstitious man,
so he really doesn't like this. He gives her a
wedding ring that was his mother's and it's too big,
(17:32):
so she ties it with a black ribbon, and um,
he's horrified by this and makes her take it off,
and he's also He also thinks he's spotted the Black
Friar of Newston, his ancestral home, a month before the wedding,
and the black Friar is supposed to portend bad luck
for the house Byron, and things just get even more bizarre.
(17:54):
Lady Byron has their daughter, his only legitimate child, Augusta
Aida and sister seen which I don't know about that,
and apparently he paced the hallways all night with loaded
guns when they were getting married, and when they have
the baby does something even weirder. He smashes bottles with
a poker while she's being born, which I just saw
(18:16):
that like alone, there was no explanation for it. Um,
So I don't know what was going through Byron's mind
during his marriage, but the two were not a good
match now and Annabella leaves sixteen months after they're married,
and then accuses him not only of incest with his
half sister Augusta and mistreatment, but also of annally raping
(18:38):
her two days after she had the baby. So his
reputation is officially shot. The shot that's too much for
Um for his British public to accept, so he goes
abroad in April eighteen sixteen, actually endever to return to England,
so self imposed exile starts in Switzerland and the Hobhouse
comes with him for the very beginning, and this is
(19:00):
when if you listen to our podcast. He ends up
in a ghost writing competition which Mary Shelley gets Frankenstein
out of, and also takes up with Claire Claremont, who
he had actually started an affair with in England. She um,
you want to say she followed him. She actually goes
(19:20):
ahead of him, knowing he'll he'll be there soon enough. Um.
He really has a low opinion of Claire Claremont. He
calls her a foolish girl. In a letter to a sister.
He basically makes it sound like he couldn't avoid her.
She was so into him there was nothing he could do,
which is ridiculous because this didn't keep him from sleeping
with her and conceiving a child with her, who is
(19:42):
born when they leave in January eighteen seventeen. She's born Alba,
and later her name is changed to Allegra, which is
always kind of a strange thing to do, but I
thinks so too, and her life is so sad. Things
don't go well for little Allegra. He says he will
not give Claire Claremont money to raise the child, which
(20:05):
he could easily have done he had the money to
do that. Then it probably has to do with his
low opinion of her. Yeah, so he's just not going
to do that. He doesn't trust her, so instead he
takes custody and he won't tell Claire anything about her,
and then he ends handing her off to a bunch
of other people, and she ends up any convent school
where she dies at age five, and no one visited her,
(20:26):
but not even her parents. So sad story there, and
another example of Byron's cruelty with women, which will be
a running theme for a little while. So at the
end of this Faithful Summer where Frankenstein is written and
um Claire is pregnant, the Shelleys leave for England and
(20:48):
Claire has her baby and Byron and hop House leeve
for Italy, and this is my favorite part of my notes.
They see a triple guillotining and they climb onto the
roof of St. Peter's gun sights again at any and
they're really but they had a great time. And Cophouse
wrote all about it in his diary, and Byron really
trumps up his life during this period. Um in his
(21:09):
letters to his friends he claims that he has made
love to a hundred or more women during Carnival of
eighteen seventeen. But if you think about the context this,
this is a bad time for Byron Um because of
his familial estrangement and his bad reputation, his growing debt.
If he was in that much debt as a minor,
(21:29):
imagine how bad it's gotten. Um. So he's trying to
make things seem better than they really are, and he
takes up with a woman named Marianna Segatti, who's his
landlord's wife, and then later he moves on to Margarita Kanye,
a baker's wife who he refers to as the gentle Tigress,
a detail I really liked. And those aren't the only
(21:51):
affairs that are going on, as being Byron, there are plenty,
but Newstead Abby is sold in eighteen eighteen, and that's
looking for a buggers for several years. He initially didn't
want to part with it, but finally is convinced that
it's the only way he can he can make it.
And he also writes the fourth canto of Child Harold
(22:13):
at about this time and Bepo, which is more of
a it's less of this gloomy sort of oriental epic style,
and which marks a change in his writing for a while,
and it sets him up for writing his most famous work,
which I keep thinking is Don Juan, and Sarah keeps
insisting because of the rhyme scheme, was Don Juan. That's
(22:34):
what I learned Don Juan, because he sets up the
rhymes in the poem so that you're forced to mispronounce
the foreign words. So I may just have shown myself
as the worst English major ever. I apologize to my
college professors. But he has a lot more fun writing
this one than he does with his earlier work, and
like a lot of his earlier works, it has thinly
(22:57):
disguised people from his life. The the mother in the poem,
Donna Anaz, is a complete, a complete shadow for Annabella,
his wife. He even writes in short, she was a
walking calculation. Uh, somebody who's really smart and clever, but
that's kind of presented in a bad, a bad way.
(23:20):
And he also talks about a quarrel between a husband
and wife in the work and all the nosy people
who think they understand what the problem was, but they
don't really know what they're talking about. I guess he's
conceived of himself by this time as being very misunderstood.
And he's really an editor's worst nightmare too. Since Sarah
and I are editors, we took a lot of them,
we empathize with this position. Yeah. In a letter to
(23:42):
John Murray, who was the publisher of the first two cantos,
he writes that I will have none of your damned
cutting and slashing. So oh I would I would really
hate to get I would really hate to get something
like that from one of my writers. That's when we
go downstairs and buy some peanut butter Eminem's. But around
the same time, also Byron has gained a lot of weight,
(24:03):
which Sarah, you said you remember to hearing I had
always learned in English that he battled with his weight
for his whole life and would yo yo diet. And
I didn't see a lot on that except that kid
gained a lot during this time and that he was
a pretty pudgy little kid. So if you know any
(24:24):
more about that, please email us at History Podcast at
how staff works dot com. We'd love to hear more
about it. She also meets Countess Teresa Gamba guicci Olie,
who is either seventeen or nineteen. We've come across a
couple of different pages, but she's married to an older
count sixty year old, and she's young and beautiful, and
she loves Byron deeply and knew him intimately, and she
(24:47):
thinks she understands him like no one else. She believes
he's a good man and he's misunderstood and has somehow
incurred this terrible reputation. I don't think it occurred to
her that maybe she just saw one side of him
and everyone saw the other sides. But she writes a
book called Lord Byron's Life in Italy to vindicate him,
and he becomes her cavalier servant, which is a gentleman
(25:08):
in waiting, but basically it's a socially accepted lover. Uh.
He rents an apartment from her and her husband, where
Byron the animal lover, I'm going to stick to that side,
not to the shooting and the eagle shooting. Um. He
installs ten horses, eight dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an
eagle and unshocked one, a crow and a falcon um.
(25:31):
And eventually Tres and her husband separate. But um, it's
Byron and Tress relationship is not affected by that. He
actually gets pretty close to her family, her father and brother,
who are members of the secret society, the Carbonari, which
has the aim to free Italy from Austrian rule. And
(25:53):
it's interesting that this English lord gets this in through
his Italian lover and the secret society. But he is
really into it in his I sort of feel like
his early interest in politics, which fall by the wayside,
is rekindled by this. It grows much stronger. At this point,
it seems like he's put not that he's not still
(26:13):
sleeping with other people, but a little bit of that.
The frenetic pace has slowed, and he's getting much more
interested in what else he could do. Yeah, and his
relationship with Teresa is more like a marriage than anything else.
He's had, so at this time, he's hanging out a
little bit more with Shelley and they go to a
villa by the sea with s a s Lee Hunt,
(26:35):
and they start working on this radical journal called The Liberal.
And this is really the only big thing we found
about during his life during this period, during this period,
maybe because he's actually got a relatively calm life during
this period, um, but this is when Shelley drowns, and Um,
Byron keeps on working with Lee Hunt on The Liberal,
(26:58):
even though he becomes less and less in stood in it.
But he moves from working on this journal The Liberal
to getting involved in the cause of Greece in their
war for independence. And some have said that he would
have been the King of Greece if things had actually
gone through. As a bold claim. It is a very
bold claim, but you know, I'm willing to think that
he could do it. And around the same time, he
(27:20):
meets a guy named Lucas Calendard Sanos I'm positive and
not pronouncing that correctly, who was part of his little
ragtag army that Byron had gotten together in this Greek
liberation thing. And he adored him, but his love was unrequited.
And Lucas was with him when he died, which was
at age what thirty six, thirty six or thirty seven.
(27:40):
Byron was very very much committed to the Greek cause
against the Turks. He loaned his money, he commanded a
personal brigade of soldiers. Um he was. He was pretty
brave and a Greek hero. And Byron contracted his fatal
illness when he was in route to a Greek campaign.
(28:01):
He gets rheumatic fever by April and he dies on
Easter Sunday in eighteen twenty four, and his memoirs were
burned by Thomas Moore. And I wish, I wish, wish,
wish they were still around because I loved People always
have to burn the memoirs. They don't want you to
know their secret. And Byron it wasn't very clear if
(28:22):
he wanted to be buried where he died or go
back to England. But regardless of his wishes, he was
sent back to England and buried at Newstead. What you
have to tell the dog story, which you told me.
He when he was a young man, he initially set
up a pact for his favorite dog, Boatswain, who had
(28:44):
died of rabies and an old man who who worked
worked the grounds to all be buried together. And later
when the old man was asked about it, he was like, well,
if if Lord Byron is going to be here, okay,
but I'm not sure I want to be buried alone
with the dog. So none of that happened. The dog
(29:05):
is buried outside Lord Byron in the crypt. So now
you know that you can make packs with people about
where you'd like to be buried. Random people in your
life is interested in it, apparently, And well, we don't
have any poetry articles on the site to interest you.
We do have several articles on bears. Since Byron liked bears,
we're going to send you to those instead. We suggest
(29:28):
you search for Bear on the home page at www
dot how stuff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Let us know what you think, Send an email to
podcast at how stuff works dot com, and be sure
to check out the stuff you missed in history Glass
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