Byron Flashcards
1
Q
How did Byron confess to have no interest in society?
A
Although in his letters Byron confessed to having no interest in society – ‘I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone,’ – his exploits and writings drew attention, at times adoring and at others deeply critical.
2
Q
How did Byron gain fame?
A
He attained considerable fame in 1812 while a young man in his twenties with his poem ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’: Byron famously commented that he ‘awoke one morning and found I was famous’
3
Q
How did Coleridge perceive Byron?
A
His fellow English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge commented in a letter on 10 April 1816 that Byron’s face was ‘so beautiful, a countenance I scarcely ever saw’ and ‘his eyes the open portals of the sun—things of light, and for light’.
4
Q
What was Byron’s early life like?
A
- Born in London in 1788, the poet George Gordon Byron, or Lord Byron as we know him, spent his life collecting sensations and courting controversy. While a student at Cambridge, for example, he kept a tame bear as a pet, taking it for walks as one would a dog. During his acrimonious and very public divorce in 1816, Byron was rumoured to be having a sexual relationship with his half-sister, an allegation he denied in public but less adamantly in his private letters.
- During his lifetime, Byron was notoriously protective of his image and directed his publisher John Murray to destroy any engravings of himself that he disliked.
- From a young age, Byron wished for a career in Parliament with poetry initially being only a secondary interest. He entered the House of Lords, his privilege for being born into British nobility, and in 1812 gave his first speech opposing the Frame Work Bill, which made the destruction of stocking frames, mechanical looms used in the textile industry, a crime punishable by death.
- The controversy over the bill had provoked riots in Nottinghamshire where use of the frames had left many men unemployed, and therefore hungry and desperate. In the historic speech, Byron laments that many of his fellow politicians view the rioters as an uneducated mob, failing to recognise the desperation of their situation - it is the mob that labour in your fields and in your houses – that man your navy and recruit your army – that have enabled you to defy all the world and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair .You may call the people a mob but not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people
- Byron was raised by his schizophrenic mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight, brought up an sexually abusive nurse in London. His father was absent and a drunk known as mad jack, having fled to France to escape creditors passing his debt onto Byron
- Lord Byron was born with a clubbed foot, which he was self-conscious of throughout his life
- Lord Byron had an older half-sister, Augusta, from his father’s first marriage. They were not raised together but became close when they met as young adults. It was widely speculated that he had an incestuous relationship with her, and private correspondence between Lord Byron and Lady Melbourne suggests that Byron may have fathered Augusta’s third daughter, Elizabeth Medora Leigh
- Until the age of 10, Byron and his mother lived in poor lodgings. In 1798, he inherited the barony becoming Lord Byron, which is when he moved to Newstead Abbey, tutored privately, and sent to Harrow alongside other aristocrats, where he learnt ancient Greek
- Catherine Byron raised her son in an atmosphere variously colored by her excessive tenderness, fierce temper, insensitivity, and pride. She was as likely to mock his lameness as to consult doctors about its correction. From his Presbyterian nurse Byron developed a lifelong love for the Bible and an abiding fascination with the Calvinist doctrines of innate evil and predestined salvation. Early schooling instilled a devotion to reading and especially a “grand passion” for history that informed much of his later writing
- When he became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, he enjoyed the role of landed nobleman, proud of his coat of arms with its mermaid and chestnut horses surmounting the motto “Crede Byron” (“Trust Byron”)
5
Q
What were Byron’s views towards Keats?
A
Byron was also famously dismissive of his fellow poet John Keats. In letters to his publisher Murray, Byron variously refers to ‘Jack Keats or Ketch or whatever his names are’ and to Keats’s writing as ‘a sort of mental masturbation’. In a letter from 1821, Byron again expresses dislike of Keats’s poetry, although this time, it is tempered by Keats’s recent death, which was rumoured to be hastened by a bad review: ‘Is it true – what Shelley writes me that poor John Keats died at Rome of the Quarterly Review? I am very sorry for it – though I think he took the wrong line as a poet.’
6
Q
What were Byron’s experiences with his wife?
A
- Byron’s wife sought the assistance of the solicitor John Hanson to legally separate from him, citing grounds including cruelty, incest, and sodomy. Finding himself socially humiliated, Byron left the UK for Europe in 1816 and never returned from his self-imposed exile
- Despite its outcome, his connection with Lady Caroline left him on friendly terms with her mother-in-law, the witty Elizabeth Milbanke Lamb, Lady Melbourne. Through her, in September, he proposed marriage to her niece, Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, as a possible means of escaping the insistent Caroline. A 20-year-old bluestocking, Annabella was widely read in literature and philosophy and showed a talent for mathematics. She declined the proposal in the belief that Byron would never be “the object of that strong affection” which would make her “happy in domestic life.” With good humor and perhaps relief Byron accepted the refusal; in a letter of October 18, 1812 he thanked Lady Melbourne for her efforts with his “Princess of Parallelograms.”
- Byron was incredibly cruel to his wife especially when she was heavily pregnant as he smashed bottles and fired his gun to prevent her from going to sleep
7
Q
What were Byron’s experiences with Allegra?
A
- Whilst staying with his friends Percy Bysshe Shelly and Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Byron had an affair with Mary’s step-sister Claire Godwin, which resulted in the birth of Alba. When she was fifteen months old, Lord Byron took responsibility for her and renamed her Allegra. Sadly, she died of a fever aged five
- By now Byron’s illegitimate daughter Allegra had arrived in Italy, sent by her mother Claire to be with her father. Byron sent her away to be educated at a convent near Ravenna, where she died in April 1822
- Early in June 1818, Byron moved into the Palazzo Mocenigo, with his daughter Allegra (brought to Venice by the Shelley party in April), whom he had agreed to support and educate. Here, too, he lodged his 14 servants, a menagerie, and a veritable harem
- Byron had placed his daughter Allegra in a convent school in Bagnacavallo in March 1821; on April 20, 1822 she died there at the age of five, after a brief illness. Following Byron’s instructions, she was buried in Harrow Church
- Referred to his daughter Allegra as that brat
8
Q
What was Byron’s education like?
A
- In 1805, Byron led a rebellion against a school master who he felt was socially beneath him
- He attended Trinity College, Cambridge where he accumulated debts of approximately £225,000 today
- He was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge. It was at Harrow that he experienced his first love affairs with both sexes. In 1803 at the age of 15 he fell madly in love with his cousin, Mary Chaworth, who did not return his feelings
- During “the most romantic period of [his] life,” in Cambridge, he experienced a “violent, though pure, love and passion” for John Edleston, a choirboy at Trinity two years younger than he
- At harrow, he was bullied for his clubbed foot and weight pushing him into a lifelong eating disorder as he replaced meals with tobacco
9
Q
How did Byron connect to Greece?
A
- In 1821, the Greek War of Independence broke out, followed by a wave of European sympathy from those more swayed by their classical education and the noble legacy of Pericles, Sophocles, and Socrates. In London, a Greek Committee was formed, represented by Byron. He contributed a large sum of his money and arrived in Greece in the autumn of 1823, narrowly avoiding a Turkish fleet. He was courageous but no military commander but he brought fame, sympathy, and support to the Greek cause
- When he turned 21 he took up his seat in the House of Lords; however the restless Byron left England the following year for a two-year European tour with his great friend, John Cam Hobhouse. He visited Greece for the first time and fell in love with both the country and the people as a philhellene
- His death was mourned throughout Greece where he was revered as a national hero
- In the summer of 1823, he told his guest “the most gorgeous” Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, that “he who is only a poet has done little for mankind”; he would therefore “endeavour to prove in his own person that a poet may be a soldier.”
- In November Byron agreed to loan 4,000 pounds to the Greek fleet for its activation. In January 1824 he joined the moderate leader Prince Alexander Mavrokordátos on the mainland in swampy Missolonghi. Wearing his red military uniform, Byron was enthusiastically welcomed by shouts, salutes, and salvos, and hailed as a “Messiah.”
- He wanted a sexual relationship with a 15 year old in Greece but the 15 year old rejected him making him feel dejected and unloved
10
Q
How was Byron’s hedonism perceived?
A
- Byron was extravagant in all things and drank a great deal. Often described as the most flamboyant of the major Romantics. Both celebrated and castigated for his aristocratic excesses, huge debts, and numerous love affairs
- Lady Caroline Lamb described George Gordon Noel as ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’.
- In 1812, Byron embarked on a affair with the passionate, eccentric – and married – Lady Caroline Lamb. The scandal shocked the British public. He also had affairs with Lady Oxford, Lady Frances Webster
- The sale of Newstead Abbey for £94,500 in the autumn of 1818 cleared Byron’s debts and left him with a generous income
- However, in 1819, he began an affair with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, only 19 years old and married to a man nearly three times her age. The two became inseparable; Byron moved in with her in 1820
- Thomas Babington Macaulay said of Byron: ‘He was himself the beginning, the middle, and end of all his own poetry…’
- He feared that he would go mad when he ages
- When Shelly drowned, Byron asked to have his skull
- Byron had a fandom that started by his wife Annabel called Byronmania as society hostesses wanted him to entertain at his parties and many women wrote to him wanting a lock of his hair placing him as a public figure
- Marchand observes that his poetry is evident of his, “romantic zest for life and experience,”
11
Q
How did he perceive Alexander Pope?
A
- He named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence
12
Q
How did he perceive the French revolution?
A
- Rousseau, whose writings helped to kindle the French Revolution, and Napoleon, whose campaigns doomed the hopes born of that struggle, relate directly to the canto’s theme of war. Byron despised wars of aggression waged for personal gain while championing as honorable those conflicts that defended freedom, such as the battles of Marathon and Morat and the French Revolution
- “I was born for opposition,” Byron proclaimed in Don Juan, Canto XV
13
Q
How did Byron repress his homosexuality?
A
- In his letters, he often repressed his homosexuality as he used female names to write about his male lovers in poetry
- After the bow street runners found homosexuality prevalent in the white swan pub in London, the hanging of 2 men pushed punishments of homosexuality which Byron could not escape further pushing him into a self – imposed exile as his friends feared he would by lynched in the streets
