Byron, the first British celebrity, was also a European poet and dramatist. Born in London, the only child of his mother Catherine Byron, and the son of his father Captain John Byron, he was quickly discovered to suffer from a deformity of the foot and lower leg, a disability that tormented Byron physically and psychologically throughout his life.1 Travelling to Scotland, Catherine’s home in 1789, Byron saw his father for the last time at two and a half, and was left with his mercurial mother. He inherited his title after the death of his great‐uncle in 1798, after which he and his mother took possession of Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire. He began his schooling at Harrow in 1801 before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1805. His first volume of poetry, Fugitive Pieces, was privately printed in 1806; its preoccupation with self‐fashioning foreshadows his later poetry. His second collection, Hours of Idleness, released in 1808, attracted mixed reviews but also one well‐aimed critique from the Edinburgh Review. Stung, Byron was provoked into his next work, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a satire on the literary scene that garnered strong reviews even though he would later disavow its attacks on figures he subsequently befriended.
Byron’s Grand Tour of the Eastern Mediterranean (1809–11) inspired the poem that made him famous, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Attracting legions of fans, the poem’s first two cantos, part romance, part travelogue, part lyric, were published in 1812, and Byron wrote and published the next two cantos between 1816 and 1818. Byron was captivated by the landscape and his experiences, and his travels were the bedrock of his poetry. His ‘Turkish Tales’ were composed and published between 1813 and 1816, and though Byron would later burlesque them, they contain the Byronic heroes on which his fame was built. He married Annabella Milbanke in 1815 and their short marriage produced their only child, Ada, before Annabella left Byron in 1816. Their separation led to Byron’s self‐imposed exile. The rumours circulating about their separation, particularly about his sexuality and his relationship with his half‐sister, Augusta, dogged Byron, and his removal to Europe saw him attempt to outrun the speculation. A seminal meeting in his life also took place in 1816; Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s half‐sister, with whom Byron had formed a relationship in England, contrived to introduce him to Shelley and Mary Shelley at Lake Geneva, and their immediate intimacy led to a lifelong friendship between Byron and Shelley. A daughter, Allegra, was born to Byron and Claire Clairmont in 1817. Moving to Italy, Byron plunged into Venetian life in 1818, and the city’s impressions on him are recorded in Beppo and his extraordinary letters of the period. In 1819 he met Teresa Guiccioli with whom he remained in a relationship until his death. He began Don Juan in 1819, which eventually led to his break from his publisher, John Murray, and became increasingly involved in revolutionary activity with the Neapolitan Carbonari, but his ambivalent stance is reflected in his plays, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari. Shelley’s death in 1822 deeply affected Byron, and his subsequent decision to fight for Greek independence in 1823 led Roderick Beaton to claim that ‘Byron’s tribute to Shelley, finally, will be not a poem, but a war. His will be a tribute not of words but … of deeds’.2 Byron died in Missolonghi, Greece in 1824, partly owing to the ineptitude of his doctors, but the Byron legend lives on.
Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (London: John Murray, 2002); Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography (London: John Murray, 1957); Jerome McGann, ‘Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788–1824)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2015 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4279, accessed 3 June 2015]; George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/4279.