Lord Byron (1788 - 1824) was an English poet and peer, one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement. His narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan brought him extraordinary fame across Europe, and he died at Missolonghi while supporting the Greek struggle for independence from Ottoman rule. [1][2]
Early life and education
George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788 in London and spent his early childhood in Aberdeen with his mother in straitened circumstances. He was born with a deformity of the foot that affected him throughout his life. In 1798, at the age of ten, he unexpectedly inherited the title of sixth Baron Byron together with the family seat at Newstead Abbey. [1]
He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, then at Harrow School, and afterwards at Trinity College, Cambridge. His first collection, Hours of Idleness, appeared in 1807 and was severely reviewed, prompting the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. [2]
Fame
Between 1809 and 1811 Byron travelled through Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece and the Ottoman Levant, experiences that supplied the material for the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, published in 1812. The poem's melancholy, self-conscious wanderer captured the public imagination and made its author famous almost overnight. [3]
A sequence of popular Eastern tales followed, among them The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos and The Corsair, along with lyrics such as She Walks in Beauty. He took his seat in the House of Lords and spoke there against the death penalty for frame-breaking by textile workers during the Luddite unrest. [1]
Scandal and exile
Byron married Annabella Milbanke in 1815; their daughter Ada, later known as Ada Lovelace, was born the same year. The marriage collapsed within a year amid rumours concerning his conduct, including his relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, and in 1816 Byron left England permanently. [2]
He spent the summer of 1816 near Lake Geneva in the company of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin and John Polidori, a gathering during which Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein. Byron then settled in Italy, living in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa, and became involved with the Carbonari movement against Austrian rule. [3]
Major work
In Italy he wrote the dramatic poems Manfred and Cain, the mock-heroic Beppo, and above all Don Juan, a long comic and satirical epic in ottava rima that he left unfinished at his death. Its conversational range and mockery of contemporary politics and cant mark a departure from the brooding manner of his earlier work. [1]
Greece and death
Byron committed his money and reputation to the Greek War of Independence, sailing for Greece in 1823 and arriving at Missolonghi at the start of 1824 to help organise and finance the insurgent forces. He fell ill there and died on 19 April 1824 at the age of thirty-six. [4]
He was mourned as a national hero in Greece, and his body was returned to England for burial near Newstead after Westminster Abbey refused interment. A memorial was finally placed in Poets' Corner in 1969. [2]
