LORD BYRON, A LEADER OF THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron

The Grandma is still reclused at home. Gloria continues its devastation and she has decided to stay at home reading.

She has received the visit of her closer friend Jordi Santanyí. Jordi and The Grandma love Literature and they have been talking about Lord Byron, the English poet, peer, and politician who is considered one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement and who was born on a day like today in 1788.

George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron FRS (22 January 1788-19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet, peer, and politician who became a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence, and is considered one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement. He is regarded as one of the greatest English poets and remains widely read and influential. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.

He travelled extensively across Europe, especially in Italy, where he lived for seven years in the cities of Venice, Ravenna and Pisa. During his stay in Italy he frequently visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died of disease leading a campaign during that war, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died in 1824 at the age of 36 from a fever contracted after the First and Second Siege of Missolonghi.

His only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, is regarded as a foundational figure in the field of computer programming based on her notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Byron's illegitimate children include Allegra Byron, who died in childhood, and possibly Elizabeth Medora Leigh.

Ethel Colburn Mayne states that George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788, in a house on 16 Holles Street in London. His birthplace is now occupied by a branch of the English department store John Lewis. However, Robert Charles Dallas in his Recollections states that Byron was born in Dover.

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Byron received his early formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School, and in August 1799 entered the school of Dr. William Glennie, in Dulwich. Placed under the care of a Dr. Bailey, he was encouraged to exercise in moderation but could not restrain himself from violent bouts in an attempt to overcompensate for his deformed foot. His mother interfered with his studies, often withdrawing him from school, with the result that he lacked discipline and his classical studies were neglected.

His lack of moderation was not restricted to physical exercise. Byron fell in love with Mary Chaworth, whom he met while at school, and she was the reason he refused to return to Harrow in September 1803. His mother wrote, He has no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion. In short, the boy is distractedly in love with Miss Chaworth. In Byron's later memoirs, Mary Chaworth is portrayed as the first object of his adult sexual feelings.

Lord Byron

Byron finally returned in January 1804, to a more settled period which saw the formation of a circle of emotional involvements with other Harrow boys, which he recalled with great vividness: My school friendships were with me passions for I was always violent. The most enduring of those was with John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare -four years Byron's junior- whom he was to meet unexpectedly many years later in Italy (1821). 

His nostalgic poems about his Harrow friendships, Childish Recollections (1806), express a prescient consciousness of sexual differences that may in the end make England untenable to him."Letters to Byron in the John Murray archive contain evidence of a previously unremarked if short-lived romantic relationship with a younger boy at Harrow, John Thomas Claridge.

The following autumn, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met and formed a close friendship with the younger John Edleston. About his protégé he wrote, He has been my almost constant associate since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him for ever.

In his memory Byron composed Thyrza, a series of elegies. In later years, he described the affair as a violent, though pure love and passion. This statement, however, needs to be read in the context of hardening public attitudes toward homosexuality in England and the severe sanctions, including public hanging, against convicted or even suspected offenders. The liaison, on the other hand, may well have been pure out of respect for Edleston's innocence, in contrast to the probably more sexually overt relations experienced at Harrow School. The poem The Cornelian was written about the cornelian that Byron received from Edleston.

Byron spent three years at Trinity College, engaging in sexual escapades, boxing, horse riding and gambling. Also while at Cambridge he formed lifelong friendships with men such as John Cam Hobhouse, who initiated him into the Cambridge Whig Club, which endorsed liberal politics, and Francis Hodgson, a Fellow at King's College, with whom he corresponded on literary and other matters until the end of his life. 

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From 1809 to 1811, Byron went on the Grand Tour, then customary for a young nobleman. He travelled with Hobhouse for the first year and his entourage of servants included Byron's trustworthy valet, William Fletcher. Fletcher was often the butt of Hobhouse and Byron's humour. The Napoleonic Wars forced him to avoid most of Europe, and he instead turned to the Mediterranean. The journey provided the opportunity to flee creditors, as well as a former love, Mary Chaworth the subject of his poem from this time, To a Lady: On Being Asked My Reason for Quitting England in the Spring.

Byron became a celebrity with the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). During this period in England he produced many works, including The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos (1813), Parisina, and The Siege of Corinth (1815).

In 1813 he met for the first time in four years his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Rumours of incest surrounded the pair; Augusta's daughter Medora (b. 1814) was suspected to have been Byron's. To escape from growing debts and rumours, Byron pressed his determination to marry Annabella, who was said to be the likely heiress of a rich uncle. They married on 2 January 1815, and their daughter, Ada, was born in December of that year.

Lord Byron

However, Byron's continuing obsession with Augusta and his continuing sexual escapades with actresses and others made their marital life a misery.

Annabella considered Byron insane, and in January 1816 she left him, taking their daughter, and began proceedings for a legal separation. Their separation was made legal in a private settlement in March 1816.

The scandal of the separation, the rumours about Augusta, and ever-increasing debts forced him to leave England in April 1816, never to return. After this break-up of his domestic life, Byron left England and never returned. Despite his dying wishes, however, his body was returned for burial in England. He journeyed through Belgium and continued up the Rhine river.

In the summer of 1816 he settled at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with his personal physician, John William Polidori. There Byron befriended the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley's future wife, Mary Godwin. He was also joined by Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he had had an affair in London. Several times Byron went to see Germaine de Staël and her Coppet group, which turned out to be a valid intellectual and emotional support to Byron at the time.

Kept indoors at the Villa Diodati by the incessant rain of that wet, ungenial summer"over three days in June, the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including Fantasmagoriana, and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and Polidori produced The Vampyre, the progenitor of the Romantic vampire genre. The Vampyre was the inspiration for a fragmentary story of Byron's, A Fragment.

Byron's story fragment was published as a postscript to Mazeppa; he also wrote the third canto of Childe Harold.

Byron wintered in Venice, pausing his travels when he fell in love with Marianna Segati, in whose Venice house he was lodging, and who was soon replaced by 22-year-old Margarita Cogni; both women were married. Cogni could not read or write, and she left her husband to move into Byron's Venice house. Their fighting often caused Byron to spend the night in his gondola; when he asked her to leave the house, she threw herself into the Venetian canal.

 

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In 1816, Byron visited San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, where he acquainted himself with Armenian culture with the help of the monks belonging to the Mechitarist Order. With the help of Father Pascal Aucher (Harutiun Avkerian), he learned the Armenian language and attended many seminars about language and history. He co-authored Grammar English and Armenian in 1817, an English textbook written by Aucher and corrected by Byron, and A Grammar Armenian and English in 1819, a project he initiated of a grammar of Classical Armenian for English speakers, where he included quotations from classical and modern Armenian.

Byron later participated in the compilation of the English Armenian dictionary (Barraran angleren yev hayeren, 1821) and wrote the preface, in which he explained Armenian oppression by the Turkish pashas and the Persian satraps and the Armenian struggle of liberation. His two main translations are the Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, two chapters of Movses Khorenatsi's History of Armenia, and sections of Nerses of Lambron's Orations.

Lord Byron on the Shore of the Hellenic Sea

In 1817, he journeyed to Rome. On returning to Venice, he wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold. About the same time, he sold Newstead and published Manfred, Cain, and The Deformed Transformed. The first five cantos of Don Juan were written between 1818 and 1820.

During this period he met the 18-year-old Countess Guiccioli, who found her first love in Byron, and asked her to elope with him. Led by love for the local aristocratic, young, and newly married Teresa Guiccioli, Byron lived in Ravenna from 1819 to 1821. Here he continued Don Juan and wrote the Ravenna Diary and My Dictionary and Recollections. Around this time he received visits from Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as from Thomas Moore, to whom he confided his autobiography or life and adventures, which Moore, Hobhouse, and Byron's publisher, John Murray, burned in 1824, a month after Byron's death.

He travelled to Greece to help raise money for the revolution. On 15 February 1824, he fell ill, and bloodletting weakened him further. He made a partial recovery, but in early April he caught a violent cold, which therapeutic bleeding, insisted on by his doctors, aggravated. This treatment, carried out with unsterilised medical instruments, may have caused him to develop sepsis. He contracted a violent fever and died in Missolonghi on 19 April.

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Byron is considered to be the first modern-style celebrity. His image as the personification of the Byronic hero fascinated the public, and his wife Annabella coined the term Byromania to refer to the commotion surrounding him. His self-awareness and personal promotion are seen as a beginning to what would become the modern rock star; he would instruct artists painting portraits of him not to paint him with pen or book in hand, but as a man of action. While Byron first welcomed fame, he later turned from it by going into voluntary exile from Britain.

Byron was a bitter opponent of Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon marbles from Greece and reacted with fury when Elgin's agent gave him a tour of the Parthenon, during which he saw the spaces left by the missing friezes and metopes. He denounced Elgin's actions in his poem The Curse of Minerva and in Canto II (stanzas XI-XV) of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

The figure of the Byronic hero pervades much of his work, and Byron himself is considered to epitomise many of the characteristics of this literary figure. Scholars have traced the literary history of the Byronic hero from John Milton, and many authors and artists of the Romantic movement show Byron's influence during the 19th century and beyond, including the Brontë sisters. His philosophy was more durably influential in continental Europe than in England; Friedrich Nietzsche admired him, and the Byronic hero was echoed in Nietzsche's superman.

The Byronic hero presents an idealised, but flawed character whose attributes include: great talent; great passion; a distaste for society and social institutions; a lack of respect for rank and privilege although possessing both; being thwarted in love by social constraint or death; rebellion; exile; an unsavory secret past; arrogance; overconfidence or lack of foresight; and, ultimately, a self-destructive manner. These types of characters have since become ubiquitous in literature and politics.

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What should I have known 

or written had I been a quiet,

mercantile politician or a lord in waiting?

A man must travel, and turmoil, 

or there is no existence.

Lord Byron