Lord Byron and Why He Was Like That
Okay, so I am deep in a Lord Byron research foxhole at the minute (I'm writing a book, I'll bore anyone who wants me to about it with pleasure) and I wanted to offer some important context about Tumblr's most hated man. Sort of - Byron's villain origin story, part 1. This is because, although he was a complex and often unpleasant individual, he faced a lot of personal tragedy in his life that I feel lends us some perspective on his attitudes to women, parenting, and of course - his raison d'etre - sex.
First, a vital disclaimer: I am not absolving Lord Byron of being a tool. He definitively was. Bad childhood experiences do not negate poor adult choices etc., but I think if you're going to hate him (I do not, but I have bad taste) then you should probably also know at least that he was set up to fail from an early age. My next blog post will probably be about lovely things people had to say about him because he contained multitudes but this one is purely 'oh god, oh god' fodder.
Second: I will list the books I have found most helpful in this research at the end for anyone who is interested.
Third: this most will discuss child sexual assault, abandonment, physical and mental abuse, financial abuse, alcohol abuse, religious abuse, incest, and general no-good stuff. Just as a heads up.
Here goes.
1. His Childhood Was Bananas and His Parents Were Dicks
Byron's father, 'Mad Jack' Byron, was a known alcohol abuser and gambler, who sought out a new rich young victim to marry after the death of his first wife and second child. He had a daughter from this first marriage, Augusta Leigh, who he didn't seem to lose much sleep over abandoning. He met Catherine, Byron's mother and a very wealthy young Heiress of Gight, in Bath, where he swiftly relieved her of her virginity and most of her money in a whirlwind 'romance'. Later in life - though he had a habit of labelling his mother's recollections as his own - Byron claimed that his mother and father had such violent screaming matches that it left him with 'little taste for matrimony'.
After a few hellish years wherein he burned through Mrs Byron's money via gambling, sex workers, and other run of the mill profligacy, Daddy Byron once again abandoned Catherine and their son when Wee Byron was three. Fleeing debtors, he ran to Paris where he had an affair with his own sister and later died. Most sources suggest this was from disease but Byron always maintained his father committed suicide. Traits of gambling and incest ran through the Byron line, as it appeared did mental illness - Ada, his daughter and noted mathematician, purportedly suffered with depression and so did Byron, both of which (and I'm editorialising with context) self medicated to excess with alcohol.
Byron's life did not improve overmuch with the departure of his father. Catherine's income had been decimated by Jack's incessant overspending and borrowing, which led to them taking meagre rooms in whatever places they could afford- certainly not the lifestyle Catherine would have been accustomed to. With a small son to care for and educate, she was reduced to begging her late husband's relatives to sponsor Byron and give her an allowance with which to educate and clothe him. She was disposed to melancholy and wild mood swings (today she might be labelled bipolar, or possibly with BPD, which would certainly also be applicable to some of Byron's behaviour if we were foolhardy enough to retrospectively diagnose) and drank heavily to manage her moods - though her temper grew explosive after imbibing. Simply put, she was an abusive alcoholic who beat Byron regularly (occasionally with fire irons) and made fun of him for being disabled (she regularly called him Caliban, and 'that lame brat'. Fun!
NB: Catherine is also a victim in this story. But victims can be assholes too. Nuance.
2. Being Disabled And Surrounded By Cunts
Byron was labelled with the vernacular of the time as 'club footed', which meant in this instance that his foot and calf on his right side were not fully formed and turned slightly inward, possibly with some overlapping of the toes. From birth, his father labelled him a 'cripple' and said that he would never walk. His mother did not have the money to pay for medical treatment that might have helped his gait when he was a baby (not her fault) and by the time she did have some money it was too late to 'correct' the issue. She instead had a local 'quack' doctor make him braces and massage his leg with hot oil in an attempt to repair this gait when he was around 7/8. He wore the brace constantly even though it was very painful (one tutor said that he would sit with it on throughout his full day's lessons even though it visibly caused him agony), until one day he just gave up and threw it in a lake. Byron maintained throughout his adult life that his mother had been so vain that she had worn too-tight stays throughout her pregnancy, and that his 'deformity' was the result.
The foot was a source of great torment to him and he hid it even from his many lovers - very few people saw it while he was alive, but he used a small cane and suffered from back and hip pain due to the disability, though he was very physically fit otherwise and an excellent swimmer. At school, the disability made him a target for bullying and resulted in him very quickly becoming aggressive and resentful. Later in his school career, he would take up boxing and become such a fearsome fighter that other students would befriend him for protection.
3. Sexual Assault (What The Fuck Is Wrong With People)
Byron was molested by his nurse maid, May Gray, for approximately two years from the age of nine. This nursemaid replaced her purportedly kindly sister, who resigned from nannying him after getting married. May Gray was (confusingly) steadfastly religious. She regularly beat Byron and would perform improper acts on him whilst giving him Calvinist sermons. She would also get in his bed with him at night, and when he lived alone with her for a year (his mother stayed at his ancestral pile, Newstead Abbey, trying to repair it with their limited funds), she would leave him alone in the house for hours and then come home drunk with men, who she would sleep with. Yikes. Apparently this sexual molestation was something Byron defined as his 'passions' being 'developed early', which is a supremely sad thought.
Additionally, because he was (in his own words) 'lame', when he went to Harrow Boys School, he was regularly bullied, beaten, and raped by older boys because he couldn't get away (there was/ still is a culture of sexual assault being a form of 'hazing' in all boys' boarding schools). 'Fagging' was defined as being treated as a servant by older/bigger boys, and the 'prettier' students (which Byron was) were given girls names and 'made bitches'. This also could have informed Byron's later habit of forming sexual relationships with teenage boys throughout his teen years and young adulthood - though he maintained a taste for pedarasty throughout his life. He also suggests in some of his recollections being casually sexually assaulted by male teachers, and he was often beaten for impertinence throughout his school career.
4. Title: What Happens When You Make a Ten Year Old a Lord
Byron's relatively humble beginnings meant that his titling as the Sixth Baron of Byron at the tender age of 10 would have been a fairytale outcome for him and his mother. Byron's great uncle, 'the Wicked Lord' (yeah, the whole family is full of winners) had lost his son as his successor in battle and died an eccentric hermit. Though Newstead Abbey and the surrounding estate was large and had once been very profitable, the fifth baron had let it become run down and not collected tax on the surrounding lands properly for years, letting the abbey go to ruin and leaving the coffers pretty well empty and a mountain of debt owed by the estate. By the time the new Lord Byron arrived, the patchwork property was barely liveable, the roof caved in, the cloisters used to house cattle, and the once lush forests around the house stripped down to stubs to sell the timber in leaner times. Though he viewed it as his own private castle, he was not safe in the house, and initially slept with loaded pistols under his pillows due to fear of banditry (and probably May Gray). He was paranoid for his entire life that people were going to attack him and carried loaded pistols everywhere he went.
Additionally, his mother quickly decided - against his wishes - that he could not live in the property in its poor condition. As a result she sent him to live in a house in Nottingham initially with his pervert nurse maid, which understandably led to a lot of friction. Byron was so unhappy that he eventually refused to return home during the school holidays and instead stayed with the family lawyer, to whom he finally admitted what had transpired between him and May Gray. Initially his mother did not believe him, and would not dismiss MG. By the time she finally did so, the damage was done, and Byron was sent to live with cousins in Southwell while the Abbey continued to be made livable. This portion of his life was the point in which he discovered, away from his mother's watch, that young women considered him rather attractive. He wasn't mad about it.
Later when he went to college, his refusal to go home became an expensive situation where he would rent hotel rooms outside of term time, which immediately put him in debt. (He also had very expensive taste and had apparently discovered very quickly that buying new things made him happy when little else did. Oh dear. Me too Albie).
Predominantly his issue with his title seemed to be that he had not inherited the accompanying wealth, and had not inherited a single ounce of good sense in money matters, either. He insisted on being addressed according to his rank and was easily moved to anger if he suffered any perceived slight. By the time he turned eighteen he was already in tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt from borrowing, and was still set on maintaining a lavish lifestyle that he felt befitted a man of his noble rank. Can you say inferiority complex?
5. Eating Disorders and Alcohol Abuse: Exactly What This Situation Needs!
It tends to be common knowledge that Byron had a wretched self-image and had been a chubby child. This tendency to corpulence was one he shared with his mother and something he battled throughout his life with the aid of eating like a fucking scabby raccoon. He went through an intense period of starvation in his teenage years and added to the effect by wearing dozens of layers and exercising viciously to 'shave off' some of his weight. At his thinnest he was under ten stone, which for a man of 5'8" is… alarming. He would eat nothing but water biscuits for days at a time (though he kept things balanced with grapes, liquified) before downing fish and potatoes doused in vinegar to keep his appetite at bay. Some sources also suggest he would go through stages of dousing himself with purgatives. This then gave way to binging episodes that he would punish himself for with starvation. Countess Blessington recorded an example of this even in his later life - he came for dinner and ate huge quantities of everything, until she was worried he might be ill, and then he went home where he presumably accounted for the lapse. Following this instance, he informed her he wouldn't be able to join her for dinner again because he'd get too fat.
He was known to abuse alcohol for his entire adult life. This appeared to begin at Cambridge where he would drink vast quantities of anything he could get his hands on, which sponsored many a knees-up with his cronies at both college and Newstead Abbey. He had a tendency toward brandy in his mid-life which made him a fucking demon, and on two noted occasions he drank so much of either one or both that he gave himself a seizure. One record of his behaviour post imbibement (while he was married to Annabella, lucky her) showed him becoming convinced that friends were trying to kill him, resulting in him barricading himself in one of their guest rooms with a table. By the time Hobhouse broke into the room, he was sobbing and confused about his whereabouts.
6. Homosexuality/Bisexuality (I Don't Know His Life)
This is an enormous topic, because as we know LB had a voracious sexual appetite for both men and women (especially if one resembled the other). I might expand on the more notable examples of this at some point in a separate blog post, specifically the debates between who and when etc, but the fact of the matter was that Byron was a queer man trying to have queer encounters in the Regency Era and mostly ending up in emotional turmoil as a result.
One of the most noted is his relationship with John Edelston, a choirboy, while he was at Cambridge Trinity College. Edelston was a couple of years younger and Byron described him as "one whom I once loved more than I ever loved a living thing". He and Edelston talked of living together and exchanged vows and cornelian rings, and Byron wrote dozens of poems about his 'Thyrza' after their eventual separation. When Edelston died a few years later from consumption, Byron was devastated, writing to many of his friends to lament the fact and revisiting his grief in the form of poetry once more.
Byron's appetite for gay sex (though he maintained his love for Edelston was 'pure') was further whetted by his tour to the Mediterranean, where he experimented with 'puppyish sexual cavorting' with a Greek teenager called Nico (among others), and went on to sample the pleasures of 'boys and opium' in Turkey for many months. He even had code for gay sex - "pl and opt Cs", which has a root in Greek or Latin that I frankly can't remember right now sorry. He used this in letters to his friends back home, the slattern. One of the most notable recipients in this regard is his friend Charles Skinner Mathews who was a known homosexual. CSM was one of LB's closest confidantes and, whilst Byron was on tour, took his own life by drowning in the Cam river. Whether this was as a result of the attitudes toward homosexuality at the time is unknown, but his death affected Byron greatly.
Like all good disaster gays, he was deeply moved by Greek classics that described male love, and had a special interest in characters such as Achilles & Patroclus, Nisas & Euryalus, and Pylades & Orestes, etc. (if only he'd gotten to read Song of Achilles, it might have fixed him). He referred often to these in letters to those in his confidences (he also once noted some famed lesbians he and the Shelleys held up as a model of romantic perfection, solidarity). He seemed especially fond of the 'Greek model' or dynamic of same sex love in which he was generally a patron and sexual guide to a (usually) younger or lower status boy. He also seemed to be acutely aware of the pain that queer love carried with it, and gravitated toward that tragic aspect even in his own reflections of Edelston and other male lovers in his poetry.
His love for men - especially boys - persisted throughout his life, though he shrank from discussing it much even with friends after his forced expatriate flight from England in 1816. Despite this, he wore the cornelian ring Edelston had given him until his death in 1824, and used a lot of his energy in his last six months desperately trying to get a Greek lad called Lukas to bounce on it (fruitless), god bless.
Conclusion:
While he remains a controversial and morally grey (well, charcoal) character in the landscape of Romantic and Literary figures, Byron was a product of his circumstances. Child abuse, the bizarre pressures of titling a ten year old and bestowing him with familial debt, an arguably genetic tendency toward self destruction, and the suppression of sexual identity might all have been working against a Byron who could have - with at least one non-dickhead parent - been a little less of a prick.
A few of the books, and other sources, I'd recommend for more info on LB and ones I've recently read or reread that informed this post:
Byron, A Self Portrait In His Own Words (loads of these knocking about but this one was edited by Peter Quennell)
Byron: Life and Legend, Fiona MacCarthy (Commissioned by Byron's publishers, John Murray, and so with incredible detail from their archives)
Byron: A Portrait, Leslie A. Marchand (not my favourite but informative)
Byron and Greek Love , Louis Crompton (a really in depth look at the homophobic context of the Regency Era, but a slightly dry read).
Byron In Love, Edna O'Brien (absolutely crammed full with Byron's words from his letters, creating a really lavish insight into how he was with his partners and showcasing the yearning - and clap backs - that he specialised in very effectively)
In Byron's Wake, Miranda Seymour (a rather melancholy look into what became of Annabella Millbanke and Ada Lovelace, very interesting from the perspective of generational trauma, familial cycles, and genetics).
Young Romantics, Daisy Hay (Lovely for an overview of some of the other characters in this set)
Mary Shelley, Miranda Seymour (fantastic, so in depth and really asks some interesting questions about Mary and Byron's relationship, and gives some intriguing insights about Claire and Allegra).
Lady Caroline Lamb, Antonia Fraser (very bloody interesting, a big focus on LB & Caroline, I'd love to do a post about their relationship)
Conversations With Lord Byron, The Countess of Blessington (quite a sad read to me, really showing Byron's deterioration in terms of mental health, his loss of status, his paranoia, and a man who knows he Super Fucked Up but tries to hide it by being a gossipy bitch. Ageing queen vibes).
Letters from Byron to his best friend Elizabeth reveal the intense emotions of one of his first queer relationships.
