Lord Byron

In 1803, Lord Byron fell in love with Mary Chaworth but she rejected him as she was already engaged.

While at Cambridge, he became involved in various vices which were common among undergraduates and piled up a huge debt. He also got into an affair with a young chorister named, John Edleston.

He had a tumultuous love-affair with Lady Caroline Lamb and wanted to elope with her but was prevented from doing so by Hobhouse.

Lord Byron was born George Gordon Byron in Dover, United Kingdom, on January 22, 1788.

His father was Captain John Byron and his mother was Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress who was the captain’s second wife.

He was born with a club-foot which restricted his movements and made him extremely sensitive about it.

After his father died in France in 1791, his mother took him to live in Aberdeen where they lived on a meager income till he was ten years old.

In 1798 at the age of ten, Byron unexpectedly inherited his great uncle William, the fifth Baron Byron’s title and also the vast property left behind by him. The inheritance helped him come back to England with his mother and stay at the Newstead Abbey that had been presented to the Byrons by King Henry VIII.

Lord Byron published his early poems ‘Fugitive Pieces’ in 1806 with the help of a private publisher and also befriended John Cam Hobhouse.

His first collection of poems ‘Hours of Idleness’ published in 1807 received bad reviews in ‘The Edinburgh Review’. He wrote a satire ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ in 1809 in answer to this and gained much popularity.

In 1809, he sat in the House of Lords and then went on a grand tour of Malta, Spain, Greece, Albania, and the Aegean region with Hobhouse. He returned to London in July 1811 but his mother passed away before he could reach Newstead.

Byron tasted his first success with the publication of the first section of a collection of poems titled ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ in 1812.

He became a favorite of the London society when he opposed the harsh measures taken against the weavers of Nottingham during his first address at the House of Lords in 1812.

Lord Byron’s ‘The Corsair’ published in 1814 was a great hit and sold over 10,000 copies on the very first day of its publication.

Another of his greatest works was ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ which he began to write in 1812 and completed in 1818.

His greatest poem was ‘Don Juan’, which was started in 1818 and the first two cantos published in 1819. He could complete only 16 cantos of the poem; he had started the 17th one, but was taken ill and died before he could complete it.