Byron was not Lord Byron from birth. Born in London on January 22nd, 1789, he was christened George Gordon Byron, son of John Byron and his second wife Catherine, formerly Catherine Gordon, a moneyed woman whom John reduced to near poverty. George inherited the title Lord Byron on the death, in 1798, of the grandson of Baron Byron of Rochdale. When he reached his majority, he came into the ownership of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire – a mansion half in ruins but the other half habitable – and some legally ambiguous property, including a coal mine in Rochdale, which he later managed to sell.
An income of £500 a year, plus a servant and a horse, were assigned to him on the strength of his prospects. This would have been ample for a civilized life, but Byron ran up such bills with his interior decorator, his tailor, his jeweler, his wine-merchant, and hotels in London, that he was soon in debt to the extent of £10,000. This was not a catastrophe, because peers of the realm could not be sued for debt, but it was not a trivial matter.
At school in Harrow from April 1801 to 1805, he discovered the pleasures of “boy-love”, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, from July 1805 to 1808, the love of young men. He also acquired a notable grasp of classical literature and of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. But he was not a scholar. Moving to London in January 1808, he entered upon the life of a man-about-town, with particular interest in boxing, duelling, partying, gossip, and sex. In 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords, but rarely spoke, even though he had opinions – his political attitudes were vaguely Whiggish, Radical, and populist. He had also a gift of impertinent oratory.
On July 2nd, 1809, he left England – “quit the country I must immediately” – and stayed away for two years, partly it has been suggested because he was afraid the law in England would catch up with him, homosexual acts being punishable there by death. He preferred to live in societies that had a more relaxed approach to such behaviour. Athens suited him best, but he also spent time in Lisbon, Seville, Cadiz, Gibraltar, Malta, Albania, Missolonghi, Smyrna and Constantinople. While abroad, he gave his inclinations their freedom: he wrote a letter to a friend in London, informing him, using standard gay code, that he had enjoyed two hundred orgasms, presumably in the past several months. He may have been boasting, exaggerating or simply lying.
Back in London in July 1811, Byron resumed his sexual life, this time mainly with aristocratic women such as Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, who were gifted with complaisant husbands. In March 1812 he published the first two cantos of Childe Harold and found himself famous: he remained a celebrity for his short life. In June, he started an affaire with Augusta Leigh, his half-sister: same father, different mothers. Incest was a matter of note for the ecclesiastical courts, which had no jurisdiction over him, and the civil law had no interest in such relations.
Augusta gave birth to their daughter in April 1814. Marriage to Augusta being impossible, Byron turned his thoughts – or a few of them – to Annabella Milbanke, and married her on January 2nd, 1815. She bore him a daughter, Augusta Ada, in December. The marriage lasted a year, till Annabella left him and returned to her father’s house. After much acrimony, a deed of separation was signed in April 1816. Snubbed by London society for his mistreatment of his wife, Byron left England again on April 25th, this time for good. He was already involved with Claire Clairmont, whom he did not especially love. He travelled to Geneva, where the poet Shelley and his entourage – including Claire – were in residence. On November 10th he moved to Venice. More liaisons, indifferently with lower-class women, ensued. On January 12th, 1817 Claire gave birth to Allegra, Byron’s daughter. He went to Rome, where he stayed for a month before going back to Venice, his choice of cities. In April 1819 he started an affair with Teresa Countess Guiccioli, the last of his major liaisons. He could afford these extravagances, being rich enough for palatial furnishings. In 1822 his income was almost doubled, upon the death of Lady Judith Noel, Lady Byron’s mother. He was already well off. Between 1812 and 1817 his poems gave him an additional income of nearly £2,000 a year.
In July 1823 Byron thought to turn himself into a man of action. He was ardent in favour of Greece winning its independence from Turkey, and he set out for Missolonghi in western Greece in the hope of becoming a leader of some kind. And he did; he could have called himself General. Establishing himself in a splendid apartment, he soon discovered that what the Greeks most urgently wanted from him was his cash. He paid 600 mercenaries to fight for a year, or at least to dress up in the uniforms of fight, but they mainly wanted to quarrel among themselves. At this point, early in 1824, the gods decided to put a stop to these adventures. Byron contracted a fever. Dying, he languished in love of Lukas Chalandritsanos, a beautiful Greek boy who was not in love with that fat Englishman. “Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot / To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.” He died on April 19th, 1824, aged 35.
Byron wrote without cease: poems, poetic dramas, journals, and letters to aristocratic women, notably Lady Melbourne, in which he described his amorous woes. Of his major poems, Childe Harold and Don Juan, I prefer Don Juan, especially cantos twelve to the end, in which Juan returns to England and confronts the most egregious instances of native cant. Byron’s significance in English poetry is that he devised a style in which he could say anything that occurred to him, digress without apology from narrative to recollection, slide gracefully from anything to anything. Negligent of many values, he was serious about his rhymes. Many later English poets learned their conversational styles by studying his. A show-off, he had much to show.
Between 1973 and 1982 the scholar Leslie Marchand assembled Byron’s Letters and Journals in 12 volumes. Some readers prefer Byron’s letters to his poems. Richard Landsdown’s book is a selection from Marchand’s 12, with copious biographical notes. It is hard to reduce twelve to one, but Lansdown has done well, giving readers a lively sense of “this singularly magnetic individual”.
Denis Donoghue is Emeritus University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University
