Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Exploits of Lord Byron

A Rocky Start to Life

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was born on the 22nd January 1788 on Holles Street in London, England. His parents, Captain John 'Mad Jack' Byron and Catharine Gordon, did not have a healthy relationship. Jack likely married Catherine solely for her money and to claim her estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He frequently borrowed money from her, which is believed to be the main reason why she experienced bouts of melancholy and extreme mood swings. She fell into debt as she struggled to finance her husband's exploits, one of which was a trip to Valenciennes, France, where he died of illness, likely tuberculosis, in 1791. 

Between 1801 and 1805, Byron was educated at Harrow School in London. Despite lacking any talent for cricket, he represented his school at the first Eton vs Harrow cricket match at Lord's Cricket Ground in 1805. He scored 7 and 2 and batted with a runner because he was born with a deformed right foot, and Harrow lost the game by an innings and two runs. I know nothing about cricket but I have it on very good authority (thanks, dad) that this means both Byron and Harrow did extremely badly. Nevertheless, the Eton vs Harrow cricket match is now one of the longest-running annual sporting fixtures in the world. 

Sexuality Speculation

There is evidence to suggest that Byron was bisexual. Over a dozen letters between him and Sir John Thomas Claridge, whom he met at Harrow, can be found in the John Murray Archive. These letters, covering a period from 1808 and 1811, strongly hint at a romance between the two. Furthermore, while at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Byron met and formed a very close friendship with the younger John Edleston, and it is believed the two were in love. Byron composed Thyrza, a series of elegies, in Edleston's memory after he died of a fever. 

Byron, his Bear, and Boatswain the Dog

Byron was also a great lover of animals. To protest the rule that forbade students to keep dogs at Cambridge University, Byron brought a bear to the university as a pet. He was angry with the Trinity College authorities for not allowing him to bring his favourite dog to university with him, and he treated the bear like a dog, walking it on a chain. He even went so far as to suggest the bear be enrolled as a student. Unfortunately for the long-suffering college authorities, they could expel neither Byron nor his bear, because there was no mention of bears in the college's statutes. Byron 1 - Trinity College 0. 

Aside from bears, Byron was extremely fond of his Landseer dog, Boatswain. When Boatswain contracted rabies, Byron apparently attempted to nurse the poor creature back to health with no fear of being bitten and infected. Boatswain died of his illness in 1808 and the distraught Byron commissioned an impressive monument at Newstead Abbey (Byron's estate) to commemorate him, despite being in debt at the time and hardly able to afford such a tribute. The monument is bigger than Byron's own, inscribed with Epitaph to a Dog, a poem written by Byron's friend, John Hobhouse, whom he met at Cambridge University. 

In the Footsteps (or Swimming Strokes) of Legends

From 1809 to 1811, Byron went on the Grand Tour, travelling Europe and the Mediterranean. On the 3rd of May 1810, the HMS Salsette, the ship that was supposed to be taking Byron from Smyrna to Constantinople (now Istanbul), was anchored and awaiting Ottoman permission to dock at Constantinople. A bored Byron and one of the Salsette's marines, Lieutenant Ekenhead, passed the time by swimming across the Hellespont (now known as the Dardanelles). Greek myth tells of Leander, a young man from Abydos, swimming across the Hellespont every night to visit Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite who resided in a tower in Sestos on the other side of the strait. 

One (Hundred) too many Love Affairs

Byron returned to England from Malta in July 1811. Between 1811 and 1815, he began searching for a suitable match for marriage. He had affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, who was the one to famously refer to him as 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know'. In 1813 Byron met his half-sister Augusta Leigh for the first time in four years, and rumours of incest surrounded the pair. It was even suspected that Augusta's daughter Medora was Byron's child. 

Desperate to escape the rumours and his growing debts, Byron married Annabella Millbanke on the 2nd of January 1815. Their daughter, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born in December of that year. You may know her as Ada Lovelace, the mathematician who is often cited as the first computer programmer, and who worked on Charles Babbage's 'Analytical Engine', the first computer. 

Unfortunately, Byron's continuing obsession with Augusta Leigh and his affairs with actresses such as Charlotte Mardyn led Annabella to leave Byron in 1816, beginning proceedings for a separation that was made legal in March of that year. The scandal of the separation, as well as persisting rumours and Byron's growing debts, led him to leave England in April 1816, never to return. He eventually settled in the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland that year, with his personal physician John William Polidori. 

The Births of Frankenstein and the Romantic Vampire

It was in Switzerland that Byron befriended poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and author Mary Godwin, who went on to marry Percy. He was also joined by Claire Clairmont, Mary's step-sister, with whom he'd had an affair while in London. (At this point, who didn't he have an affair with while in London?)

Over three days of wet weather that June, the five took turns reading fantastical stories and then creating their own. Most notably, Mary Godwin produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, while John Polidori devised The Vampyre, the originator of the Romantic vampire genre. 

The Vampyre was first published on April Fool's Day of 1819 by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine as 'A Tale by Lord Byron'. The story was not Byron's at all, and was written entirely by Polidori. Despite both Byron and Polidori repeatedly clarifying this, the authorship was often questioned. 

Byron and Polidori were not helped by the fact that the protagonist of The Vampyre is called Lord Ruthven, a name that was originally used by Lady Caroline Lamb (remember her?) in her novel Glenarvon for a character who was clearly meant to represent Byron: Clarence de Ruthven, Earl of Glenarvon. 

Love in the time of Gondola

In the winter of 1816, Byron stayed in Venice, pausing his travels because he fell in love with a married woman, Marianna Segati. She was soon replaced, however, by a different married woman (nice to have some variety), Margarita Cogni, who left her husband to move in with Byron. Near-constant fighting between the two often led to Byron spending the night sleeping in his gondola. 

When Byron eventually asked Margarita to leave his house, she did so... by throwing herself into the canal. 

Animals and Armies

Continuing his travels, Byron journeyed to Rome in 1817 and lived in Ravenna from 1819 to 1821. In a letter, Percy Shelley described Byron's Ravenna home as containing ten horses, eight dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon, all of which, with the exception of the horses, wandered freely about the house. 

In 1821, Byron left his Ravenna menagerie for Pisa. His last Italian home was in Genoa, but he left to travel to Kefalonia and then Missolonghi in 1823, where he became an important figure in the Greek revolution against the Ottoman empire. To help raise money for the revolution, Byron sold his estate in England, Rochdale Manor. By the end of March 1824, the 'Byron brigade', paid for entirely by Byron himself, had been formed. It consisted of 30 officers and approximately 200 men. 

A Tragic End

Byron fell ill in February 1824 and bloodletting, unsurprisingly, weakened him further. Despite making a partial recovery, he caught a cold that April and once again, bloodletting was the cure prescribed and carried out by his doctors. After contracting a fever, he died in Missolonghi on the 19th of April at the age of 36. 

It has been said that if Byron had survived his illness (and not been drained of blood at every opportunity by admittedly well-meaning doctors) and lived to defeat the Ottomans, he would have been declared King of Greece. I do have to point out that modern scholars find such a possibility highly unlikely.

Byron was pursued by debts and scandals all his life. He had innumerable affairs, a love of animals and, of course, an extraordinary writing talent. Even so, whenever I think of him, the first thing that springs to my mind is not the disastrous Harrow vs Eton cricket match, or his many, many sex scandals, or his writing, or his involvement in the Greek revolutionary war: it's the image of him sleeping peacefully in his gondola somewhere in Venice.

SOURCES:

• Conradt, Stacy, 'How a Friendly Writing Contest Resulted in Three Literary Classics', Mental Floss, (2011)

• Francis, Tiffany, 'Bears, Badgers and Boatswain: Lord Byron and his Animals', Wordsworth Grasmere, (2015)

• 'Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's Own Hand', The Paris Review, (2018)

• 'Lord Byron (George Gordon)', Poetry Foundation

• Marchand, Leslie A., 'Lord Byron', Britannica, (2025)