Lord George Gordon Byron

(1788-1824)

Lord Byron was born in London in 1788. His father left his family in a poor situation because he used to drink, smoke, play and have sex with other women. Byron’s mother was a libertine. She was mental and Byron grown up with a Calvinist governess. The boy was born with a clubfoot, he was a cripple and so he grown up with the idea that he was damned. His lameness made him feel inferior to other people and he was extremely sensitive about his deformity. In 1801 he went to school at Harrow school then he passed to Cambridge where he started his devotion for poetry.

Lord Byron re-valued Augustan views, the classical taste. He became lord when he took a seat in the House of Lords in the English capital. After a brief he left for the “Grand tour.” The grand tour was a journey that made young men from good families to go abroad and visit Europe. Lord Byron visited Spain, Portugal, Malta and the Balkan peninsula (Greece, Albania,..). during the Grand tour the poet wrote the first two cantos of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” that had an enormous success.

“I awoke one morning and found myself famous”

In 1813 he spent a lot of time with his half-sister Augusta, with which he probably had a relation. In 1814 Augusta had a daughter from an unknown person. Rumors said that it was Byron’s child, so to avoid the scandal the poet left his sister and married a well-to-do woman. Lady Byron, as soon as she heard about those rumors, left his husband for England from which she did not return.

Byron went to Switzerland (Alps, the place of the sublime) where he met Shelley and Mary Godwin. In this period the poet wrote the third and the fourth cantos of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”

Lord Byron had a lot of love affairs after the 1818 and wrote the poem “Don Juan.” He initiated the Carbonary society and as a Champion of freedom he went with other intellectuals to Greece to set it free from the