In the Dover hotel some women went so far as to disguise themselves as chambermaids to get a closer look at him, as if he had become an exhibit in a freak show. The violence of this public reaction resembles the hatred that, 80 years later, was hurled at Oscar Wilde.
Byron's ignominy was the more bitter because it followed a phase of unparalleled success. In , the publication of the first two parts of his philosophical travelogue Childe Harold's Pilgrimage brought instant accolades.
Byron described how he awoke one morning and found himself famous. Four exotic eastern tales, based on his own travels in Turkey, Albania and Greece, confirmed his popularity. In , 10, copies of The Corsair were sold on the day of publication - "a thing perfectly unprecedented" beamed his publisher John Murray. In his sudden fall from grace Byron was a victim of the hysterical opprobrium that often succeeds extreme celebrity, a cycle wearyingly familiar to us now.
The young Byron had revelled in his success. Fame at first had been sweet to the only child raised by his mother in relative obscurity in Aberdeen. His absentee father, a glamorous but dissolute ex-army captain known to his cronies as "Mad Jack" Byron, had died in penury in France when his son was only three, a suspected suicide.
At 10, Byron had succeeded his great uncle, the fifth lord, and inherited the vast Gothic pile of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. But even this was a mixed blessing: the building was dilapidated; there were no funds for its upkeep. Byron, acutely conscious of status, was aware that compared with, say, the future Duke of Devonshire, his school fellow at Harrow, he could be regarded as only a minor peer. Byron had been born with the deformity his contemporaries referred to as a club-foot, and his hunger for approbation had been heightened by this physical disability.
Modern medical experts have preferred to view Byron's malformation as a dysplasia, a failure of a bodypart to form properly. Byron's purpose-made boots, still in the archive collection at John Murray, were built up to counteract his abnormally small and inward-turning right foot and padded to disguise his grotesquely thin calf.
His foot had attracted cruel derision from the other boys at Harrow, later recalled by Byron with a shudder. Byron's attraction to adolescent boys had first become evident at Harrow, where he referred to his entourage of adoring younger pupils as his Theban band. At Cambridge, Byron fell in with a sophisticated group of like-minded friends fascinated by the theory and practice of sodomy. Their hero was William Beckford, author of the libidinous eastern dream novel The Caliph Vathek, who had been forced to flee the country rather than face possible criminal charges related to a homosexual scandal.
They called themselves by the codename Methodists. It is clear from Byron's correspondence of this period that one of his main motives in setting out on extended travels in was his hope of homosexual experience. In Greece and Turkey, sex with boys was more or less accepted as the norm and he found willing partners.
There was Eusthathius Georgiou, the volatile Greek boy with "ambrosial curls" whose parasol, carried to protect his complexion from the sun, made Byron's valet cringe.
There was the Franco-Greek Nicolo Giraud, with his limpid eyes, who taught Byron Italian in Athens, taking a whole day to conjugate the verb "to embrace". By the end of Byron's stay in Greece he was boasting to his Methodist friends that he had achievedmore than "pl and opt Cs", their code for unlimited sexual intercourse, taken from Petronius's Satyricon "coitum plenum et optabilem".
When Byron arrived back in England in summer , prejudice against homosexuals was on the increase after a police raid on the White Swan tavern in Vere Street, London. Of the men charged with "assault with the intention to commit sodomy", six were sentenced to be pilloried in the Haymarket, where they were pelted with mud and excrement by a savage crowd. Byron was lectured about the need for caution by Hobhouse, who had already persuaded him to burn his early journal, which presumably included an account of his love for the choirboy Edleston.
Byron later said the loss of this manuscript was "irreparable". From to , Byron's "curl'd darling" years of literary fame, he was swept up in the whirl of London social activity. For its readers in that period of moral and political uncertainty, two decades after the upheavals of the French revolution, the subversive energy of Byron's Childe Harold had struck an extraordinary chord.
Its success was entwined with the mysterious persona of its author, the year-old Lord Byron, the handsome, lame young aristocrat recently returned from the east.
Byron acquired an almost royal charisma in the period he would later refer to as his "reign". All doors were open to him: he frequented the great Whig houses of the period, mingling with the Hollands, the Melbournes, the Jerseys. He was lionised by the leading London hostesses, whose eagerness was intensified by Byron's remoteness, the "sort of moonlight paleness" manifested in some of his most famous portraits.
His translucent white face and high domed forehead was compared by one of his contemporaries to an alabaster vase lit up from within. Byron's admirers were by no means only aristocratic ladies of a certain age. As women later swarmed around the also bisexual Rudolph Valentino, fans from all social classes pursued Byron: young and old, uneducated and bluestocking, unloading their secret fantasies, excited and emboldened by Byron's poetry to seek out its originator.
Hundreds of these women wrote to Byron, often anonymously, furtively, entreating him for a sample of his handwriting, signed copies of his work, a curl of his dark auburn hair, a clandestine meeting, "an occasional place in your Lordship's thoughts". Many of these frantic letters are still in the Byron archives. Why did he hoard them?
Such proof of his power over women freed him from his consciousness of being the derided cripple and distracted him from the homosexual instincts he was, at this period, trying to repress. Byron worked at his image. He disciplined his tendency to plumpness by vigorous dieting and the use of purgatives. He controlled the uses of his portrait in marketing his poetry, instructing his publisher John Murray to destroy any version of which he disapproved.
Theatrically and gleefully, Byron camped it up, hovering malevolently on the edges of the ballroom, sneering at the fashionable waltzers, in the guise of the glamorous malcontent. He made himself available and then retreated.
His tendency to depression made him prone to the mood swings that still afflict celebrities, dependent on the signs of adulation yet detesting them. With false Ambition what had I to do? The poem, Byron's masterpiece, satirises English literature, society, and religion, and was open about sex to a degree that shocked his female readership, largely because he showed women taking the sexual initiative as the hero is pursued by a succession of voracious women.
Don Juan covers all aspects of human experience, from politics and war to hangovers, from heroism to farce, in a style that seems extraordinarily modern, using plain English which is both clear and colloquial.
It is full of jokes and outrageous rhymes like 'Plato' and 'potato', and casual subversion:. Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded That all the Apostles would have done as they did.
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, Is much more common where the climate's sultry. Don Juan is very long, yet remained unfinished, Byron having "not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest ".
Sales of Don Juan dropped off until cheap editions found a new readership, the radical working class, who saw Byron as the poet of freedom, both political and sexual. It is likely that through this huge readership that he had a considerable indirect influence on the radical politics of the nineteenth century.
Byron moved from Venice to Ravenna to live with his new mistress, the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, and her husband. He became increasingly interested in politics. In he had made two speeches in the House of Lords on contentious topics, one sympathetic to the machine-breakers protesting against the effects of the Industrial Revolution, and one on Catholic emancipation, but otherwise remained silent on political issues.
He may have been a radical, even — in some ways a revolutionary — but he was no democrat. As for democracy, it is the worst of the whole; for what is in fact democracy? An Aristocracy of Blackguards. The London Greek Committee had elected him their deputy, and in he sailed to Greece with munitions, hoping to help bring about Greek independence, but died of a fever at Missolonghi on 19 April He became, and remains, a national hero of Greece.
His character, wit, and charm were impressed upon virtually everyone who met him. His generosity, even when deeply in debt — which he nearly always was — was outstanding. To read the letters and journals which chronicle every aspect of his life in his own words, and which have all the liveliness of his best poetry, is to feel one has met him. We invite you to discuss this subject, but remember this is a public forum. Please be polite, and avoid your passions turning into contempt for others.
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