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Lord Byron
1788–1824
Oh! the misery of doing nothing but make love, enemies, and verses.
George Gordon Byron was born with a club foot (his right), on 22 January 1788, just north of Oxford Street. His mother hailed from Scottish nobility. His father was a prodigal army captain, who died a few years later, in France, where he’d absconded with his wife’s inheritance. Byron’s mother moved to Aberdeen and raised her son with what remained. They lived in lodgings until a series of untimely accidents resulted in a Scottish grammar-school boy succeeding, at the age of ten, to the title of Baron Byron, and with it Newstead Abbey, a large estate in Nottinghamshire. As Lord Byron, author of Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he became an international celebrity. At twenty-eight he left England forever. He lived and travelled throughout Europe and the Levant, and died in 1824, aged 36, in Missolonghi, leading the Greeks in their War of Independence.
I got a wife and a cold on the same day – but got rid of the last pretty speedily. It went off very pleasantly – all but the cushions – which were stuffed with Peach-stones I believe – and made me make a face that passed for piety.
Curiosities
The Corsair, written in 1814, sold 10,000 copies, its entire first print run, in a single day.
Byron’s menagerie at the Palazzo Mocenigo included several cats, two mastiffs, a pair of cranes, a fox, a wolf, some monkeys and a sickly crow.
Byron made his men after his own image, said William Hazlitt, and his women after his heart.
Auden proposed that to tell the genuine from the disingenuous Byron, a student should leave the poems until they had read all the prose.
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