“Problem: bored. Solution: sex, alcohol, firearms.”
—DANIEL FRIEDMAN ON THE LIFE OF LORD BYRON
Nearly two hundred years after his death, Lord Byron (1788–1824) continues to make headlines: in 2008, the Sun, a British tabloid, ran a sensational story about the poet under the headline, “Lord Byron’s Life of Bling, Booze and Groupie Sex.” As a young boy, however, George Gordon Byron was an unlikely candidate to leave such a lasting impression upon the nineteenth-century literary landscape. He later recalled that as a child he was “neither tall nor short, dull nor witty,” before adding that he was “lively—except in my sullen moods, and then I was always a devil.”
When his grandfather passed away, George Gordon became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, Lord Byron. You can tell everything you need to know about Byron’s family history by looking at the nicknames of his relatives: his grand-uncle was known as “the Wicked Lord,” and his father went by the moniker “Mad Jack” Byron. Mad Jack was deceased when young George Gordon inherited his title, and management of the family estate fell to the new Lord Byron—who was only ten years old.
Despite his mother’s caution, Byron quickly found himself borrowing money against the lands he stood to inherit, to support his lavish appetites. Although he was born into money, he never seemed to have enough. What exactly did Byron spend his money on? Aside from upkeep on his family’s rapidly deteriorating estate, Byron collected exotic animals. Over his life he would amass a veritable zoo of animals, including a bear, several monkeys, a goat with a broken leg, a wolf, horses, dogs, cats, an eagle, a crow, a falcon, peacocks, guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane.
Despite his affluence, the young Lord Byron was constantly plagued by “black moods.” He was apt to break down over the slightest thing. “I cry for nothing,” he once wrote. “Today I burst into tears all alone by myself over a cistern of goldfishes—which are not pathetic animals.” His macabre habits, such as firing pistols indoors and drinking wine from his ancestors’ skulls, did little to alleviate his depression.
Social interactions only worsened his mood: “An animated conversation has much the same effect on me as champagne,” he said. “It elevates me and makes me giddy, and I say a thousand foolish things while under its intoxicating influence. It takes a long time to sober me after; and I sink, under reaction, into a state of depression, out of humor with myself and the world. I find an interesting book the only sedative to restore me.”
When he wasn’t reading, spending money, or brooding, Lord Byron wrote poetry. He felt that he had some catching up to do with his literary elders. Shakespeare, for instance, “had a million advantages over me—besides the incalculable one of having been dead for one or two centuries,” which he termed an attractive quality “to the gentle living reader.” He published several volumes of poetry in his late teens, including Fugitive Pieces and Hours of Idleness, to little acclaim.
Since proper gentlemen simply did not dirty their hands with an industrious task like writing, Byron gave his copyrights away to friends and family to avoid being mistaken for a lowly author. Poetry? ’Tis no more than a hobby, like shooting pistols indoors! It’s unclear if any of his peers in the House of Lords bought into this logic. Even when his books later became bestsellers and his debt was mounting to burdensome levels, Byron refused to accept payment for his work.
When he turned twenty, Byron picked up his pen and paper and left England. He traversed the European and Asian continents, plugging any hole he could find. He is reported to have slept with two hundred women while in Venice—in the course of just one year. And that doesn’t include the dozens of teenage boys biographers have linked him to during the same period. “He has no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion,” his mother lamented.
In 1811, Byron returned to England. Despite his adventures, he was completely bored with life. “At twenty-three the best of life is over. I have seen mankind in various countries and find them equally despicable. I grow selfish and misanthropical.” In his private journal, he continued his rant: “I am tolerably sick of vice which I have tried in its agreeable varieties, including wine and ‘carnal company.’ ” Even seeing his poems in print had failed to uplift his spirits. “I have outlived all my appetites and most of my vanities—even the vanity of authorship.”
Ironically, it was only after this point that his career really took off, with the publication of the first canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Byron awoke one morning and found himself famous, he joked. He was only half kidding.
When Byron came of age, Europe was in the final days of the Enlightenment, a massive period of upheaval that pulled the continent solidly out of the ignorance and error of the Middle Ages and into the intellectual light of the eighteenth century. While academics welcomed the Enlightenment with open arms, the common man was highly skeptical of the new world order. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the American Revolution (1775–1783), and the French Revolution (1789–1799) all contributed to the sense that the world was quickly spinning out of control. The young, sensitive writers who came to be known as the Romantics were attuned to the growing sense among the populace that the eighteenth century was too fast-paced for its own good. With the publication of the first canto of Childe Harold in 1812, Byron became the poster child for the Romantic era overnight.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was vaguely based on Byron’s travels through Portugal and the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. Childe Harold, the disaffected young hero, sets out on his own in an uncaring, cruel world to recapture a sense of wonder that the Enlightenment had bleached from nature and industry had run roughshod over.
English readers of all classes snapped the narrative up as Byron’s publisher serialized it from 1812 to 1818. The Duchess of Devonshire wrote that Childe Harold “is on every table, and Byron courted, visited, flattered and praised whenever he appears. He is really the only topic of conversation—the men jealous of him, the women of each other.” Melancholy and disillusionment were in vogue, and Byron was as melancholic and disillusioned as they came.
But as Byron’s fame blossomed, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his glory days were behind him. “Fame is but like all other pursuits, ending in disappointment—its worthlessness only discovered when attained,” he later said. “People complain of the brevity of life. Should they not rather complain of its length, as its enjoyments cease long before the halfway-house of life is passed, unless one has the luck to die young?”
Lord Byron’s life did not end at twenty-three, forcing him to put up with the pains of life as an eighteenth-century celebrity. “How very disagreeable it is to be so stared at!” he once complained. “I pay the price of passing through the town, and exposing myself to the gazing multitudes.”
Novelist Lady Blessington, who spoke at length with Byron, wrote, “There were days when he seemed more pleased than displeased at being followed and stared at. When gay, he attributed the attention he excited to the true case—admiration of his genius. But when in a less good-natured humor, he looked on the spotlight as an impertinent curiosity, caused by the scandalous histories circulated against him.” He also “suffered from” an unending deluge of fan letters, the “anonymous amatory letters and portraits” that he received from his adoring fans. Byron nonchalantly dismissed them, confessing to Blessington that he “has never noticed any of them”—the women or the letters, one cannot be sure.
Byron did, however, have a thing for his admirers’ hair. Like a child tossing aside the birthday card and ripping open the wrapped present, Byron plundered his fan letters for the locks of hair that women routinely sent him. He catalogued more than one hundred locks of hair in envelopes meticulously labeled with the women’s names.
One of the most notorious additions to his hair collection was Lady Caroline Lamb, a married aristocrat with whom he had a brief and fiery affair. Rumors spread that the fair Lady Lamb had herself delivered naked on a serving tray to Byron’s dining room. Pleased with what he saw, Byron indulged himself with Lamb—repeatedly, and with great passion. Lamb was a writer as well, and they seemed like the perfect intellectual and physical match. (Her husband apparently didn’t give either of them pause.) Their affair was cut short, however, when Lamb let on that she was in love with the notoriously commitment-phobic lord. “I will kneel and be torn from your feet before I will give you up,” Lamb wrote to him. Byron immediately dumped her.
Lady Caroline Lamb refused to give up on her quarry. She would “make” him love her, she said, and sent Byron a lock of her pubic hair as a ploy to get him back. “I cut the hair too close and bled,” she wrote in an accompanying letter.
Byron was amused at Lamb’s attempts to rekindle their romance. He responded with the taunt “Any woman can make a man in love with her, but show me her who can keep him so!” Byron sent her a lock of hair—not from his own head, but from the head of Lady Oxford, another of his many lovers. Then Byron promptly married Lamb’s cousin, Anne Isabella Milbanke. He was in desperate need of the property and influx of cash his new bride would bring, but he was none too eager to wed. “I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness,” he wrote. Although Lamb pledged to buy a pistol and kill herself in front of Byron and his new bride, she instead sent them a letter of congratulations. Lamb was nothing if not polite.
Unsurprisingly, Byron’s lifestyle of “bling, booze, and groupie sex” proved to be incompatible with married life. His unhappiness reached its apex when his wife gave birth to their first and only child, and he proclaimed that he was in hell. He had predicted as much years earlier when, plotting his poem Don Juan, he contemplated whether his hero should “end in hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest.”
His wife may have preferred eternal damnation.
During his first and only year of wedded bliss, Byron engaged in several trysts with other men and women. He also impregnated his own half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron carried a curl of his half-sister’s chestnut hair with him, writing on an accompanying piece of paper that she was “the one I most loved.” But that gesture wasn’t conspicuous enough for Byron, who had identical gold brooches fashioned for himself and his sister using locks of their hair. Byron even invited Augusta on his honeymoon with Anne—she politely declined—and moved in with his sister at one point, all to his wife’s horror. After they separated, Anne discovered further evidence of her husband’s depravity: a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine.
Anne was granted a legal separation from Byron just a year into their marriage. She was not going to stand by her man, as Sade’s wife had done. In addition to the charges of incest, Anne alleged that her husband had sodomized her—a far more serious crime in the eyes of the law, punishable by death.
Byron’s only friend during this difficult time was his trusty vial of Black Drop, an opium compound that calmed his nerves and numbed his emotions. He fled England to avoid the ensuing scandal and possible legal ramifications of his actions. “I was unfit for England; England was unfit for me,” he wrote, later telling Lady Blessington, “Nothing so completely serves to demoralise a man as the certainty that he has lost the sympathy of his fellow creatures; it breaks the last tie that binds him to humanity.”
Byron contemplated publicly rebuking his wife’s allegations, but declared such a crusade hopeless. “Our laws are bound to think a man innocent until he is proved to be guilty, but our English society condemns him before trial,” he said. “I was thought a devil, because Lady Byron was allowed to be an angel. There are neither angels nor devils on earth.” Of course, the real reason Byron did not try to refute her charges was that the truth was indisputable.
And so Byron set off for foreign shores with his entourage of animals and trusty pistols. He had places to go, people to do...