January 20, 2018 • 31 mins
Today’s classic podcast comes to us from previous hosts Katie and Sarah. Coming up on January 22, 2018 is the 230th birthday of George Gordon, Lord Byron. Who was this poet, and why is he associated with so many historical figures?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody. Today's classic comes to us from previous hosts
Katie and Sarah. Coming up on January is the two
birthday of George Gordon Lord Byron, and Katie and Sarah
did a podcast on him back into thousand and nine.
So not long after we came onto the show, we
(00:21):
got a request from a listener named Alexandra to talk
about quote Lord Byron's terrible nous, and Katie and Sarah
definitely get into that here. Byron was described as mad, bad,
and dangerous, and a lot of disturbing stuff comes up
in this episode, from animal cruelty to rape and an
incestuous relationship with his half sister. Folks should also know
(00:43):
that there is a podcast in the archive about Byron's
daughter Ada Lovelace as well, and at the end of
this episode today, if you're considering sending us a note
about how to say boson, we're already aware. Enjoy. Welcome
to stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff
(01:04):
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 personage
in places we never expected to find him. No, and
(01:27):
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 kind
of an odd match. But perhaps it's not so strange
(01:48):
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
bizarre social life and romantic life and yes, scandalous affairs
(02:12):
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 poetry today, his literary contemporaries didn't really have
(02:33):
much respect for him. Keats had a particularly scathing quote.
He called him a careless hectorer in proud bad verse.
That's pretty cold. But today he's appreciated for what he
did with his work. And um, according to I pulled
out my old romantic literature book. My professors would be
(02:53):
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 Matlick, 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, which I think is
(03:14):
pretty fabulous. Is 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 tree 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
(03:36):
was born in London in a rented 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 for him? No,
(04:00):
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,
George had a club of foot and a withered leg
(04:22):
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 actually abused and beaten by
his nanny who gives him these really strict Calvinist sermons
(04:42):
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, that he
inherits a title at hen and becomes Baron Byron of Rothdale.
(05:03):
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
(05:25):
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,
(05:48):
to which I thought was so perfectly romantic. Yes. 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 so in love with her that he
(06:11):
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 it.
(06:31):
But also kind of sad because he only gets over
her when he overhears her mocking his his lameness, of
his foot, cruelty for 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.
(06:54):
At this time, he has a servant named William Fletcher
who's by his side from the age of sixteen until
almost 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 a present, and Byron wrote lots of poems
(07:17):
about him, And that's the person most people think of
when they think of Byron's bisexual reputation. It 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, and it suggested that they later have their
(07:41):
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, Lord Gray, who was leasing new Stead
(08:03):
until Byron reached his majority. Um is 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 a fan of Lord Gray and tries
to reconcile them, Byron wants nothing to do with him well,
(08:26):
and since Byron sort of hates his mother, that would
actually make more sons. So at this point he's got
a mother he doesn't like, a father who's abandoned him,
abusive relationships and who commits suicide right, and some other
confusing personal relationships. But in eighteen o five he's off
to Trinity College in Cambridge, where he seems to have
a pretty good time racking up lots of debt. He
(08:48):
had what twelve thousand pounds in debt before he even
reached I don'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. 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,
(09:10):
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 as a future lord um he'll
play a role in. And hob House is his best
friend for life, truly BFF. He's the best man at
(09:33):
his wedding. He travels with him all around the world
and they 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 how how bad he was, but in
kind of a funny way. At this point at least,
(09:54):
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 a letter to a friend that his
bear companion should sit for a fellowship. So Byron has
(10:15):
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 as companions almost
until his death. I really want a bear now, but
I have a feeling our boss would not go for
that now to ask him 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,
(10:37):
and this is obviously 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 writes a comeback couplet satire called
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which shim his first recognition. Oh,
(11:01):
the cutthroat world of poetry. Yeah. 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 if someone would like to
(11:22):
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 the greatest
(11:44):
guy in Greek history. So Byron and Hobhouse get used
by a guy named Spiritian 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 think when
(12:07):
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, published their poetry
satire and then go and get used by some guy
named Spiridian. And around the same time Byron starts child
Harold's Pilgrimage, which is one of the works he's best
(12:28):
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 animal lover
(12:50):
point from earlier, Katie. He also decapitated a goose at
around this same time, so he loves them but 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 Jerron,
who he will later mention in a will of his
leaving his money, but it ends up being revoked, and
(13:11):
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 kept
(13:32):
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 riotous
(13:55):
nodding him weavers you could get the death penalty at
the time for breaking or frames basically, and his second
speech is about Irish Catholic rights, so he's got these
very liberal sort of idea and 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
(14:17):
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 read Child Harold and decides she has to
(14:37):
meet this guy, and she writes some of us 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
(14:59):
her and sort of narrowly prevents this enormous scandal, which
is probably a good idea because things were a little
too hot and heavy down to 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
(15:21):
and 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 the necessary ends up not
(15:43):
looking very good, 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 too the world well,
and she's still keeping up her crazy antics. She completely
(16:06):
freaks out to 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
(16:28):
her pubic hair to him in a letter, which remains
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 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
(16:50):
probably the most famous description of him. So she really
kicks off this string of sort of unfortunate lovers he
has before his mayor 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
(17:12):
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
(17:34):
that her child, Elizabeth Maddoorali, is really Lord Byron's. So
during this he's writing all of these gloomy tales like
the Chris Sair 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
(17:57):
many affairs and you don't know what to do. Get
me harry straight and narrow and go ahead and get married.
It's going to 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 unsuited
to him if he tried. She loves math and she
(18:19):
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 omen 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, so she ties it with a
(18:40):
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 Friars is
to pretend bad luck for the house Byron, and things
just get even more bizarre. Lady Byron has their daughter,
(19:02):
his only legitimate child, Augusta Aida, and 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 that like alone. There was no exclamation
(19:26):
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 her two days after she had the baby,
(19:46):
so his reputation is officially shot shot. That's too much
for for his British public to accept, so he goes
abroad in April eighteen sixteen, actually never to return to England.
Self imposed exile starts in Switzerland and Hobhouse comes with
him for the very beginning, and this is when if
(20:07):
you listen to our podcast. He ends up in a
ghostwriting 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 ahead of him,
(20:28):
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 his 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
(20:49):
born when they leave in January eight seventeen. She's born Alba,
and later her name is changed to a Legra, which
is always kind of a strange thing to do by
I think 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,
(21:11):
which he could easily have done he had the money
to do that. Then it probably has to do with
his low opinion of her. Yes, 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
(21:32):
visited her, 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 Fateful Summer where Frankenstein is written
(21:54):
and um Claire is pregnant, the Shelleys leave for England
and Claire has her baby, and Byron and hop House
leave 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 fun sites. Again any
context there really, but they had a great time, and
(22:16):
cop Hoouse wrote all about it in his diary, and
Byron really trumps up his life during this period. M
In his 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
(22:39):
growing debt. If he was in that much debt as
a minor, imagine how bad it's scotten Um. So he's
trying to make things seem better than they really are,
and he takes up with a woman named Marianna Sagotti,
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 tie Chris, A detail I really liked.
(23:03):
And those aren't the only affairs that are going on
as being byron there are plenty. But Newstead Abby is
sold in eighteen eighteen, and that looking for a backer
stats 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 at about this time,
(23:27):
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 what
(23:47):
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 apologie dives 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
(24:10):
disguised people from his life. The mother in the poem,
Donna Anez, 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.
(24:33):
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 we
(24:53):
empathize with this position. In a letter to John Murray,
who is 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's gained a lot of weight, which Sarah,
(25:17):
you said you remembered 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 more about that,
(25:38):
please email us at History Podcast at house staff Works
dot com. We'd love to hear more about it. He
also meets Countess Teresa Gamba Guchi only, who is either
seventeen or nineteen. We've come across a couple of different ages.
But she's married to an older count sixty year old,
and she's young and beautiful, and she loves Byron deeply
(25:59):
and knew him in timately, and she 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 else 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 in waiting, but
(26:22):
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, and eventually Trees and
(26:46):
her husband separate, but um it's Byron and Tres. This
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 it's interesting
(27:07):
that this English lord gets this in through his Italian
lover in the secret society, but he gets really into
it in his I sort of feel like his early
interest in politics, which fall by the wayside, is rekindled
by this, right, it grows much stronger. At this point,
it seems like he's put not that he's not still
sleeping with other people, but a little bit of that.
(27:29):
The phrenetic pace has slowed and he's getting much more
interested in what else he can 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 and they start working on this radical journal called
(27:50):
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 even though he becomes less and less
(28:12):
interested 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 meets a guy named Lucas Calendard Sanos
(28:35):
I'm positive I'm not pronouncing that correctly, who was part
of his little rag tag 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. Byron was very very much
committed to the Greek cause against the Turks. He loaned
(28:59):
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. He gets rheumatic fever by
April and he dies on Easter Sunday in eighteen twenty four,
(29:21):
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 he wanted to be buried where he
died or go back to England. But regardless of his wishes,
(29:42):
he was sent back to England and buried at Newstead.
What you have to tell the dog story which you
told me earlier when he was a young man, he
initially set up a pact for his favorite dog, Boatswain
who had died of rabies, and an old man who
who worked worked the grounds, to all be buried together.
(30:06):
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 is buried outside Lord Byron in
the crypt So now you know that you can make
pacts with people about where you'd like to be buried.
(30:26):
Random people in your life is interested in it, apparently.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
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(30:46):
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(31:06):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
M
Hi, everybody. Today's classic comes to us from previous hosts
Katie and Sarah. Coming up on January is the two
birthday of George Gordon Lord Byron, and Katie and Sarah
did a podcast on him back into thousand and nine.
So not long after we came onto the show, we
(00:21):
got a request from a listener named Alexandra to talk
about quote Lord Byron's terrible nous, and Katie and Sarah
definitely get into that here. Byron was described as mad, bad,
and dangerous, and a lot of disturbing stuff comes up
in this episode, from animal cruelty to rape and an
incestuous relationship with his half sister. Folks should also know
(00:43):
that there is a podcast in the archive about Byron's
daughter Ada Lovelace as well, and at the end of
this episode today, if you're considering sending us a note
about how to say boson, we're already aware. Enjoy. Welcome
to stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff
(01:04):
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 personage
in places we never expected to find him. No, and
(01:27):
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 kind
of an odd match. But perhaps it's not so strange
(01:48):
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
bizarre social life and romantic life and yes, scandalous affairs
(02:12):
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 poetry today, his literary contemporaries didn't really have
(02:33):
much respect for him. Keats had a particularly scathing quote.
He called him a careless hectorer in proud bad verse.
That's pretty cold. But today he's appreciated for what he
did with his work. And um, according to I pulled
out my old romantic literature book. My professors would be
(02:53):
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 Matlick, 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, which I think is
(03:14):
pretty fabulous. Is 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 tree 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
(03:36):
was born in London in a rented 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 for him? No,
(04:00):
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,
George had a club of foot and a withered leg
(04:22):
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 actually abused and beaten by
his nanny who gives him these really strict Calvinist sermons
(04:42):
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, that he
inherits a title at hen and becomes Baron Byron of Rothdale.
(05:03):
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
(05:25):
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,
(05:48):
to which I thought was so perfectly romantic. Yes. 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 so in love with her that he
(06:11):
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 it.
(06:31):
But also kind of sad because he only gets over
her when he overhears her mocking his his lameness, of
his foot, cruelty for 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.
(06:54):
At this time, he has a servant named William Fletcher
who's by his side from the age of sixteen until
almost 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 a present, and Byron wrote lots of poems
(07:17):
about him, And that's the person most people think of
when they think of Byron's bisexual reputation. It 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, and it suggested that they later have their
(07:41):
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, Lord Gray, who was leasing new Stead
(08:03):
until Byron reached his majority. Um is 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 a fan of Lord Gray and tries
to reconcile them, Byron wants nothing to do with him well,
(08:26):
and since Byron sort of hates his mother, that would
actually make more sons. So at this point he's got
a mother he doesn't like, a father who's abandoned him,
abusive relationships and who commits suicide right, and some other
confusing personal relationships. But in eighteen o five he's off
to Trinity College in Cambridge, where he seems to have
a pretty good time racking up lots of debt. He
(08:48):
had what twelve thousand pounds in debt before he even
reached I don'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. 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,
(09:10):
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 as a future lord um he'll
play a role in. And hob House is his best
friend for life, truly BFF. He's the best man at
(09:33):
his wedding. He travels with him all around the world
and they 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 how how bad he was, but in
kind of a funny way. At this point at least,
(09:54):
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 a letter to a friend that his
bear companion should sit for a fellowship. So Byron has
(10:15):
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 as companions almost
until his death. I really want a bear now, but
I have a feeling our boss would not go for
that now to ask him 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,
(10:37):
and this is obviously 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 writes a comeback couplet satire called
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which shim his first recognition. Oh,
(11:01):
the cutthroat world of poetry. Yeah. 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 if someone would like to
(11:22):
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 the greatest
(11:44):
guy in Greek history. So Byron and Hobhouse get used
by a guy named Spiritian 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 think when
(12:07):
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, published their poetry
satire and then go and get used by some guy
named Spiridian. And around the same time Byron starts child
Harold's Pilgrimage, which is one of the works he's best
(12:28):
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 animal lover
(12:50):
point from earlier, Katie. He also decapitated a goose at
around this same time, so he loves them but 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 Jerron,
who he will later mention in a will of his
leaving his money, but it ends up being revoked, and
(13:11):
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 kept
(13:32):
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 riotous
(13:55):
nodding him weavers you could get the death penalty at
the time for breaking or frames basically, and his second
speech is about Irish Catholic rights, so he's got these
very liberal sort of idea and 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
(14:17):
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 read Child Harold and decides she has to
(14:37):
meet this guy, and she writes some of us 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
(14:59):
her and sort of narrowly prevents this enormous scandal, which
is probably a good idea because things were a little
too hot and heavy down to 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
(15:21):
and 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 the necessary ends up not
(15:43):
looking very good, 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 too the world well,
and she's still keeping up her crazy antics. She completely
(16:06):
freaks out to 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
(16:28):
her pubic hair to him in a letter, which remains
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 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
(16:50):
probably the most famous description of him. So she really
kicks off this string of sort of unfortunate lovers he
has before his mayor 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
(17:12):
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
(17:34):
that her child, Elizabeth Maddoorali, is really Lord Byron's. So
during this he's writing all of these gloomy tales like
the Chris Sair 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
(17:57):
many affairs and you don't know what to do. Get
me harry straight and narrow and go ahead and get married.
It's going to 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 unsuited
to him if he tried. She loves math and she
(18:19):
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 omen 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, so she ties it with a
(18:40):
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 Friars is
to pretend bad luck for the house Byron, and things
just get even more bizarre. Lady Byron has their daughter,
(19:02):
his only legitimate child, Augusta Aida, and 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 that like alone. There was no exclamation
(19:26):
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 her two days after she had the baby,
(19:46):
so his reputation is officially shot shot. That's too much
for for his British public to accept, so he goes
abroad in April eighteen sixteen, actually never to return to England.
Self imposed exile starts in Switzerland and Hobhouse comes with
him for the very beginning, and this is when if
(20:07):
you listen to our podcast. He ends up in a
ghostwriting 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 ahead of him,
(20:28):
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 his 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
(20:49):
born when they leave in January eight seventeen. She's born Alba,
and later her name is changed to a Legra, which
is always kind of a strange thing to do by
I think 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,
(21:11):
which he could easily have done he had the money
to do that. Then it probably has to do with
his low opinion of her. Yes, 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
(21:32):
visited her, 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 Fateful Summer where Frankenstein is written
(21:54):
and um Claire is pregnant, the Shelleys leave for England
and Claire has her baby, and Byron and hop House
leave 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 fun sites. Again any
context there really, but they had a great time, and
(22:16):
cop Hoouse wrote all about it in his diary, and
Byron really trumps up his life during this period. M
In his 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
(22:39):
growing debt. If he was in that much debt as
a minor, imagine how bad it's scotten Um. So he's
trying to make things seem better than they really are,
and he takes up with a woman named Marianna Sagotti,
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 tie Chris, A detail I really liked.
(23:03):
And those aren't the only affairs that are going on
as being byron there are plenty. But Newstead Abby is
sold in eighteen eighteen, and that looking for a backer
stats 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 at about this time,
(23:27):
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 what
(23:47):
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 apologie dives 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
(24:10):
disguised people from his life. The mother in the poem,
Donna Anez, 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.
(24:33):
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 we
(24:53):
empathize with this position. In a letter to John Murray,
who is 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's gained a lot of weight, which Sarah,
(25:17):
you said you remembered 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 more about that,
(25:38):
please email us at History Podcast at house staff Works
dot com. We'd love to hear more about it. He
also meets Countess Teresa Gamba Guchi only, who is either
seventeen or nineteen. We've come across a couple of different ages.
But she's married to an older count sixty year old,
and she's young and beautiful, and she loves Byron deeply
(25:59):
and knew him in timately, and she 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 else 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 in waiting, but
(26:22):
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, and eventually Trees and
(26:46):
her husband separate, but um it's Byron and Tres. This
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 it's interesting
(27:07):
that this English lord gets this in through his Italian
lover in the secret society, but he gets really into
it in his I sort of feel like his early
interest in politics, which fall by the wayside, is rekindled
by this, right, it grows much stronger. At this point,
it seems like he's put not that he's not still
sleeping with other people, but a little bit of that.
(27:29):
The phrenetic pace has slowed and he's getting much more
interested in what else he can 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 and they start working on this radical journal called
(27:50):
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 even though he becomes less and less
(28:12):
interested 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 meets a guy named Lucas Calendard Sanos
(28:35):
I'm positive I'm not pronouncing that correctly, who was part
of his little rag tag 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. Byron was very very much
committed to the Greek cause against the Turks. He loaned
(28:59):
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. He gets rheumatic fever by
April and he dies on Easter Sunday in eighteen twenty four,
(29:21):
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 he wanted to be buried where he
died or go back to England. But regardless of his wishes,
(29:42):
he was sent back to England and buried at Newstead.
What you have to tell the dog story which you
told me earlier when he was a young man, he
initially set up a pact for his favorite dog, Boatswain
who had died of rabies, and an old man who
who worked worked the grounds, to all be buried together.
(30:06):
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 is buried outside Lord Byron in
the crypt So now you know that you can make
pacts with people about where you'd like to be buried.
(30:26):
Random people in your life is interested in it, apparently.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
(30:46):
be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
(31:06):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
M
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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