170- ] English Literature
Lord Byron - Summary
Lord
Byron (born January 22, 1788, London, England—died April 19, 1824, Missolonghi,
Greece) British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality
captured the imagination of Europe. Renowned as the “gloomy egoist” of his
autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) in the 19th century,
he is now more generally esteemed for the satiric realism of Don Juan
(1819–24).
Life
and career
Byron
was the son of the handsome and profligate Captain John (“Mad Jack”) Byron and
his second wife, Catherine Gordon, a Scots heiress. After her husband had
squandered most of her fortune, Mrs. Byron took her infant son to Aberdeen,
Scotland, where they lived in lodgings on a meagre income; the captain died in
France in 1791. George Gordon Byron had been born with a clubfoot and early
developed an extreme sensitivity to his lameness. In 1798, at age 10, he
unexpectedly inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle William, the
5th Baron Byron. His mother proudly took him to England, where the boy fell in
love with the ghostly halls and spacious ruins of Newstead Abbey, which had
been presented to the Byrons by Henry VIII. After living at Newstead for a
while, Byron was sent to school in London, and in 1801 he went to Harrow, one
of England’s most prestigious schools. In 1803 he fell in love with his distant
cousin, Mary Chaworth, who was older and already engaged, and when she rejected
him she became the symbol for Byron of idealized and unattainable love. He
probably met Augusta Byron, his half sister from his father’s first marriage,
that same year.
In
1805 Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he piled up debts at an
alarming rate and indulged in the conventional vices of undergraduates there.
The signs of his incipient sexual ambivalence became more pronounced in what he
later described as “a violent, though pure, love and passion” for a young
chorister, John Edleston. Alongside Byron’s strong attachment to boys, often
idealized as in the case of Edleston, his attachment to women throughout his
life is an indication of the strength of his heterosexual drive. In 1806 Byron
had his early poems privately printed in a volume entitled Fugitive Pieces, and
that same year he formed at Trinity what was to be a close, lifelong friendship
with John Cam Hobhouse, who stirred his interest in liberal Whiggism.
Byron’s
first published volume of poetry, Hours of Idleness, appeared in 1807. A
sarcastic critique of the book in The Edinburgh Review provoked his retaliation
in 1809 with a couplet satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he
attacked the contemporary literary scene. This work gained him his first
recognition.
On
reaching his majority in 1809, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords, and
then embarked with Hobhouse on a grand tour. They sailed to Lisbon, crossed
Spain, and proceeded by Gibraltar and Malta to Greece, where they ventured
inland to Ioánnina and to Tepelene in Albania. In Greece Byron began Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he continued in Athens. In March 1810 he sailed with
Hobhouse for Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), visited the site of Troy,
and swam the Hellespont (present-day Dardanelles) in imitation of Leander.
Byron’s sojourn in Greece made a lasting impression on him. The Greeks’ free
and open frankness contrasted strongly with English reserve and hypocrisy and
served to broaden his views of men and manners. He delighted in the sunshine
and the moral tolerance of the people.
Byron
arrived back in London in July 1811, and his mother died before he could reach
her at Newstead. In February 1812 he made his first speech in the House of
Lords, a humanitarian plea opposing harsh Tory measures against riotous
Nottingham weavers. At the beginning of March, the first two cantos of Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage were published by John Murray, and Byron “woke to find
himself famous.” The poem describes the travels and reflections of a young man
who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction
in foreign lands. Besides furnishing a travelogue of Byron’s own wanderings
through the Mediterranean, the first two cantos express the melancholy and
disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary
and Napoleonic eras. In the poem Byron reflects upon the vanity of ambition,
the transitory nature of pleasure, and the futility of the search for
perfection in the course of a “pilgrimage” through Portugal, Spain, Albania,
and Greece. In the wake of Childe Harold’s enormous popularity, Byron was
lionized in Whig society. The handsome poet was swept into a liaison with the
passionate and eccentric Lady Caroline Lamb, and the scandal of an elopement
was barely prevented by his friend Hobhouse. She was succeeded as his lover by
Lady Oxford, who encouraged Byron’s radicalism.
During
the summer of 1813, Byron apparently entered into intimate relations with his
half sister Augusta, now married to Colonel George Leigh. He then carried on a
flirtation with Lady Frances Webster as a diversion from this dangerous
liaison. The agitations of these two love affairs and the sense of mingled
guilt and exultation they aroused in Byron are reflected in the series of
gloomy and remorseful Oriental verse tales he wrote at this time: The Giaour
(1813); The Bride of Abydos (1813); The Corsair (1814), which sold 10,000
copies on the day of publication; and Lara (1814).
Seeking
to escape his love affairs in marriage, Byron proposed in September 1814 to
Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke. The marriage took place in January 1815,
and Lady Byron gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada, in December 1815. From
the start the marriage was doomed by the gulf between Byron and his
unimaginative and humorless wife; and in January 1816 Annabella left Byron to
live with her parents, amid swirling rumours centring on his relations with
Augusta Leigh and his bisexuality. The couple obtained a legal separation.
Wounded by the general moral indignation directed at him, Byron went abroad in
April 1816, never to return to England.
Byron
sailed up the Rhine River into Switzerland and settled at Geneva, near Percy
Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley), who had eloped and
were living with Claire Clairmont, Godwin’s half sister. (Byron had begun an
affair with Clairmont in England.) In Geneva he wrote the third canto of Childe
Harold (1816), which follows Harold from Belgium up the Rhine River to
Switzerland. It memorably evokes the historical associations of each place
Harold visits, giving pictures of the Battle of Waterloo (whose site Byron
visited), of Napoleon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and of the Swiss mountains and
lakes, in verse that expresses both the most aspiring and most melancholy
moods. A visit to the Bernese Oberland provided the scenery for the Faustian
poetic drama Manfred (1817), whose protagonist reflects Byron’s own brooding
sense of guilt and the wider frustrations of the Romantic spirit doomed by the
reflection that man is “half dust, half deity, alike unfit to sink or soar.”
At
the end of the summer the Shelley party left for England, where Clairmont gave
birth to Byron’s daughter Allegra in January 1817. In October Byron and
Hobhouse departed for Italy. They stopped in Venice, where Byron enjoyed the
relaxed customs and morals of the Italians and carried on a love affair with
Marianna Segati, his landlord’s wife. In May he joined Hobhouse in Rome,
gathering impressions that he recorded in a fourth canto of Childe Harold
(1818). He also wrote Beppo, a poem in ottava rima that satirically contrasts
Italian with English manners in the story of a Venetian menage-à-trois. Back in
Venice, Margarita Cogni, a baker’s wife, replaced Segati as his mistress, and
his descriptions of the vagaries of this “gentle tigress” are among the most
entertaining passages in his letters describing life in Italy. The sale of
Newstead Abbey in the autumn of 1818 for £94,500 cleared Byron of his debts,
which had risen to £34,000, and left him with a generous income.
In
the light, mock-heroic style of Beppo Byron found the form in which he would
write his greatest poem, Don Juan, a satire in the form of a picaresque verse
tale. The first two cantos of Don Juan were begun in 1818 and published in July
1819. Byron transformed the legendary libertine Don Juan into an
unsophisticated, innocent young man who, though he delightedly succumbs to the
beautiful women who pursue him, remains a rational norm against which to view
the absurdities and irrationalities of the world. Upon being sent abroad by his
mother from his native Sevilla (Seville), Juan survives a shipwreck en route
and is cast up on a Greek island, whence he is sold into slavery in
Constantinople. He escapes to the Russian army, participates gallantly in the
Russians’ siege of Ismail, and is sent to St. Petersburg, where he wins the
favour of the empress Catherine the Great and is sent by her on a diplomatic
mission to England. The poem’s story, however, remains merely a peg on which
Byron could hang a witty and satirical social commentary. His most consistent
targets are, first, the hypocrisy and cant underlying various social and sexual
conventions, and, second, the vain ambitions and pretenses of poets, lovers,
generals, rulers, and humanity in general. Don Juan remains unfinished; Byron
completed 16 cantos and had begun the 17th before his own illness and death. In
Don Juan he was able to free himself from the excessive melancholy of Childe
Harold and reveal other sides of his character and personality—his satiric wit
and his unique view of the comic rather than the tragic discrepancy between
reality and appearance.
Shelley
and other visitors in 1818 found Byron grown fat, with hair long and turning
gray, looking older than his years, and sunk in sexual promiscuity. But a
chance meeting with Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, who was only 19 years old
and married to a man nearly three times her age, reenergized Byron and changed
the course of his life. Byron followed her to Ravenna, and she later
accompanied him back to Venice. Byron returned to Ravenna in January 1820 as
her cavalier servente (gentleman-in-waiting) and won the friendship of her
father and brother, Counts Ruggero and Pietro Gamba, who initiated him into the
secret society of the Carbonari and its revolutionary aims to free Italy from
Austrian rule. In Ravenna Byron wrote The Prophecy of Dante; cantos III, IV,
and V of Don Juan; the poetic dramas Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two
Foscari, and Cain (all published in 1821); and a satire on the poet Robert
Southey, The Vision of Judgment, which contains a devastating parody of that
poet laureate’s fulsome eulogy of King George III.
Byron
arrived in Pisa in November 1821, having followed Teresa and the Counts Gamba
there after the latter had been expelled from Ravenna for taking part in an
abortive uprising. He left his daughter Allegra, who had been sent to him by
her mother, to be educated in a convent near Ravenna, where she died the
following April. In Pisa Byron again became associated with Shelley, and in
early summer of 1822 Byron went to Leghorn (Livorno), where he rented a villa
not far from the sea. There in July the poet and essayist Leigh Hunt arrived
from England to help Shelley and Byron edit a radical journal, The Liberal.
Byron returned to Pisa and housed Hunt and his family in his villa. Despite the
drowning of Shelley on July 8, the periodical went forward, and its first
number contained The Vision of Judgment. At the end of September Byron moved to
Genoa, where Teresa’s family had found asylum.
Byron’s
interest in the periodical gradually waned, but he continued to support Hunt
and to give manuscripts to The Liberal. After a quarrel with his publisher,
John Murray, Byron gave all his later work, including cantos VI to XVI of Don
Juan (1823–24), to Leigh Hunt’s brother John, publisher of The Liberal.
By
this time Byron was in search of new adventure. In April 1823 he agreed to act
as agent of the London Committee, which had been formed to aid the Greeks in
their struggle for independence from Turkish rule. In July 1823 Byron left
Genoa for Cephalonia. He sent £4,000 of his own money to prepare the Greek
fleet for sea service and then sailed for Missolonghi on December 29 to join
Prince Aléxandros Mavrokordátos, leader of the forces in western Greece.
Byron
made efforts to unite the various Greek factions and took personal command of a
brigade of Souliot soldiers, reputedly the bravest of the Greeks. But a serious
illness in February 1824 weakened him, and in April he contracted the fever
from which he died at Missolonghi on April 19. Deeply mourned, he became a
symbol of disinterested patriotism and a Greek national hero. His body was
brought back to England and , refused burial in Westminster Abbey, was placed in
the family vault near Newstead. Ironically, 145 years after his death, a
memorial to Byron was finally placed on the floor of the Abbey.
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