Portrait of Byron from the waist up by Thomas Phillips. Byron is a young white man with short wavy brown hair. He wears a white collared shirt under a dark jacket. He looks away.
Content warning for ableism, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and incest
"Particularly in the late twentieth century, for many, the poet was the only god who hadn't yet failed." – Julia Markus, Lady Byron & Her Daughters
Lord Byron was a star in his time, the first modern celebrity as we think of them. His poems and plays drew fervent admirers, and he was an enchanting persona pursued by waves of variously-gendered lovers. For many, his malformed right foot and frequently sour temper only added to his mysterious allure. Byron was a revolutionary in Greece during their War of Independence and died of a fever there.
However, for his contemporaries and for us, beneath that flaking gilt beats a tainted heart. He offended the European society of his timeless by his sexuality than his refusal to be discreet about it. To a present-day audience, the modern importance of respect for one’s intimate partners renders many of his relationships distasteful. Byron is a fairly well-known figure amongst lovers of poetry and queer history even today, but just like his contemporary fans, we must wrestle with separating an artist’s personal failings from his art.
His father was Captain “Mad Jack” Byron, who many women had refused to touch because madness ran so strongly in his family. Oof. Shortly after his birth as George Gordon Byron in 1788, his father left his mother Catherine Gordon to raise him and his half-sister, Augusta, on her own. Byron was often placed in the care of his nanny, May Gray, who sexually abused him when he was very young. Byron was also a target of torment from his peers due to being born with one leg “deformed,” likely a club foot. His mother tried to make him wear painful braces and casts to correct the shape of his leg, but it didn’t work, and he remained insecure about it his entire life. It is covered or hidden in the paintings of him, even as an adult. Despite this, many biographies claim he was “cured” or erase his disability alongside his bisexuality, such as his IMDB page as of this writing. To add to his physical ailments, he reported recurring fevers throughout his life, from 1810 onward, which were likely due, at least in part, to malaria.
Byron’s first relationships with men were with the other boys at Harrow School as an adolescent. His surviving writings about his time at school describe other boys not only as “principal friends” but also “juniors and favourites” and, most undeniably queerly, “passions.” In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and his love poems to Thyrza, he inserts a fictionalized version of one of his early male lovers, John Edelston, with his gender changed from man to woman.
He attended Trinity College after Harrow. Attitudes toward queerness were becoming more hostile, and he kept his continued love affairs with other men secret. Byron’s fondness for animals showed during his years at Trinity. When he was told he couldn’t bring his beloved dog, Boatswain, he brought a bear instead.
While frequently ridiculed and called “lame brat,” “lame boy” and similar, once Lord Byron came into his inheritance and began writing, his fortunes changed. He woke up one morning in March of 1812 to “find himself famous,” his celebrity peaked two years later, and two years after that, he left for Italy. Byron only lived to age 36 and his short life moved fast.
That initial burst into fame in 1812 was sparked by Childe Harold, a more or less autobiographical account of his young, aristocratic life. Byron’s poetry was lyrical and had a distinctive energetic rhythm. It also relied heavily on visuals over other senses, and illustrations depicting scenes from his works were commonly bought and sold. Aside from the fanart trade, some of his fans expressed their admiration by trying to pass off their imitation works as Byron’s and writing him into their works as a fictional character, even during his brief lifetime.
““The public didn’t just want to get to know his art, they wanted to get to know the artist who made it.””
However, it wasn’t just his art but himself that was so alluring to his fans. One of his contemporaries, Walter Scott, attributed his novel level of celebrity to the fact that he appeared before the public as “an actual living man” who expressed his personal thoughts and feelings. In other words, part of his sudden fame was due not only to his craft but also to the fact that he appeared as a complex, real human. The public didn’t just want to get to know his art, they wanted to get to know the artist who made it. This desire marked the birth of celebrities as we know them: people admired not just for their art, but because the public wants to feel like they have a friend in famous figures.
Byron’s The Corsair outsold six months of sales of the previous most popular work, The Lady of the Lake, by more than double in a single day in 1814. Contemporary critics attributed this to witchcraft and immoral selection of women, which Byron himself parodied in his 1814 work The Giaour.
All this fame brought him an even grander following. While he had few or no friends to speak of, a list of all his love affairs would be longer than this article allows; he carried on a series of them with variously-gendered people throughout his life. His years of poor health are partially attributed to sexually transmitted infections.
While Byron remained active in sports like horseback riding, his mixing with the aristocrats at balls never included dancing due to his lifelong limp. Instead, he languished on couches, drawing his admirers to him. It was at one such event in 1812 where he met Annabella Milbanke, an intelligent, independent young woman who was to somehow become his wife. Annabella’s aunt, Lady Melbourne, showed her selections from his letters in an effort to win her over on his behalf. He proposed, she rejected him the same way she had many other suitors, and they parted as friends at the end of that year. Later, Annabella reflected that “I did not pause - there was my error - to enquire why he was friendless.”
The following spring, when they began to come into contact once again, Annabella fell hard for this brooding, elusive poet. Around this time, Byron was carrying on an affair with Caroline Lamb, who was married and is remembered by history as a woman though her habitual crossdressing - she once entered Byron’s bedroom dressed as a pageboy - hints at a genderqueer, nonbinary, or transgender spirit underneath. Whatever else she may have been, Caroline was certainly obsessed, once sending Byron her blood and pubic hair, as well as eventually stalking him. In a moment of clarity, she famously described Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
Byron’s next major affair, beginning shortly prior to his engagement to Annabella, was with his sister Augusta. Incest was one of the few unjustifiable sins in the Regency era, and he was prone to becoming particularly furious when this particular taboo was mentioned, even when it wasn’t in reference to him. Byron was also very jealous, at points becoming territorial when his sister tried to shake hands with a male cousin. In 1814, Augusta gave birth to Byron’s first child, Elizabeth Medora Leigh.
Byron proposed to Annabella in 1815 and they were married the following year. His affair with his sister continued, and his wife wrote that it put her “imagination on the rack.” Annabella fell pregnant a few months later, hoping that his verbal abuse toward her would soften with time, or with the birth of his child. Instead, Byron declared baby Ada to be an “implement of [his] torture” and within days ordered Annabella out of the house, baby in tow. Their legal separation began roughly a year after their wedding day. Byron himself was forced out of England in April of 1816 due to the scandals surrounding his marriage and his incestuous relationship with his sister, as well as his mounting debts.
Lord Byron remains an intriguing figure, and it’s tempting to overlook his various misdeeds and lionize him. However, we can be fascinated by the turbulent details of his life, enjoy reading his poetry or learning about his life, and still acknowledge that he is not, in most respects, a role model worth following. Those of us within the queer community tend to want to show the outside world only our best to counteract our various slanderers, so there’s further temptation to paint over the flaws of people like Byron. Nevertheless, doing so will eventually hurt us. As a community, we need to acknowledge that there were morally questionable and even repugnant queer folk in history, not least because it helps us see that there are similar people within the community today. Being queer shouldn’t be criminalized, but neither does it absolve us of our mistakes.
Lord Byron left England, reeking of scandal, in 1816. Regency aristocracy in the years right after Napoleon tried to appear impeccable, with shows of support for the military and other conventional appeals to virtue. However, the morality of the Regency era emphasized discretion overall. Byron’s endeavors were less of an issue than the fact that he was open about them. The opposition to any form of queerness, simply for existing, is a construction that has drifted in and out of favor.
One of Byron’s earlier flings, Claire Clairmont, introduced him to her stepsister and her husband: Mary and Percy Shelley. Their resultant polyamorous love affair was most likely a triad and perhaps included Claire as well. Mary Shelley, daughter of Mary Wollenstonecraft, was a believer in free love like her husband. They both carried on other consensually non-monogamous relationships; Percy had previously been involved with Claire and encouraged Mary to seek additional lovers as well. Most likely bisexual herself, Mary eventually formed close bonds with Jane and Edward Williams. While these relationships were likely not up to modern standards of consent and mutual respect, they were still a notable break from the Regency model of political marriages with secret cheating.
During the drug-infused summer of 1816, the Shelleys’ shared fling with Byron brought them to a vacation home in Switzerland, on Lake Geneva. It was drizzly and cool, which often kept the group indoors debating science and medicine. It was in this climate that Byron proposed that they all try to write horror stories. Byron’s physician wrote a vampire story that may have inspired some of Byron’s own vampire tales. The dare also inspired Mary Shelley to create Frankenstein. This summer, with all its intriguing taboos, has been fictionalized in several B-movies, including “Frankenstein Unbound” and “Haunted Summer.”
However, this polyamorous group soon broke apart, as did all Byron’s romances, and he became bitter and sexist in his writings to Mary. She wrote little of him during and shortly after their relationship, but her later writings remember him fondly. Byron continued to be close to Percy, who often visited him until Shelley died in 1822.
Claire had Byron’s child shortly after the 1816 polycule split up and named her Alba. Byron asked for the child to be sent to him, and Claire, penniless and hoping for better for the baby, agreed. Byron had written doting poetry to Ada, who he abandoned shortly after her birth, but when given another chance at fatherhood, he quickly tired of it. Byron handed his daughter off to whoever would take her, keeping her barely long enough to change her name to Allegra. She bounced between homes before landing at a convent. Despite her letter to him, penned on her behalf by the nuns, he never once visited her and moved her farther away from Claire after she begged to see her daughter, overcome with the fear that she never would again. Claire’s sudden premonition came true: Allegra died aged five of an illness that was likely either typhus or malaria.
Another child, named Elena Adelaide Shelley, may also have been Byron’s child by one of the Shelleys’ servants. Another possibility is that she was a foundling the Shelleys tried to adopt to help Mary cope with her grief over losing her previous children.
Among Lord Byron’s works from this period is a satirical retelling of Don Juan, often considered his magnum opus. It portrays the central character as passive and easily seduced instead of as a notorious womanizer. It was initially self-published due to its scandalous themes and social commentary.
As his fame increased, Byron became increasingly fearful of it. He developed neuroses around eating and seeing people eat. Some of his writings compare fans hungry for more to vampires devouring him. Byron was also insecure about his weight, which fluctuated throughout his life, and would sometimes fall into binging and purging behavior. He eventually became generous with his money, allowing his publisher Murray to keep all literary profits.
Late in his life, Byron became steadily more fascinated by Mediterranean and Middle Eastern culture and politics and left for Greece in 1823. Once there, he quickly became invested in the Greek struggle for independence and sold his English estate, Rochdale Manor, to raise money. Byron generously invested the equivalent of many millions of dollars into the Greek cause. He also adopted an orphan child, Hato, whose parents had been killed in the fighting. However, Greece was a dangerous place for any Muslim, even a nine-year-old girl, so he sent her to the island Cephalonia for safety. One of Byron’s final love interests was Lukas Chalandritsanos, his teen pageboy. Even though he spoiled the boy, Lukas was only interested in the poet’s wealth, and Byron’s affections were unrequited.
Shortly after, in 1824, Byron became ill with a fever while in command of part of the Greek rebel army. Despite being “treated” with bloodletting, he partially recovered before falling sick again and dying on April 19th. His medical “treatments” had been conducted with unsterilized instruments and sepsis may have been part of his cause of death.
After his death, his publisher burned his salacious memoirs, but Lord Byron’s memory lives on. His continued influence is seen twofold in today’s media. Firstly, Byron’s writings popularized the “Byronic hero,” brooding, tortured lone men who are redeemed by the innocence and purity of their childlike love interests. Secondly, his vampire imagery has touched and inspired many of today’s portrayals. Bran Stoker’s Dracula likely had literary ancestors in Byron’s vampires.
Baby Ada grew up to become the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace.
Lord Byron was survived by his wife and at least two of his three daughters, though the information is lacking on the fate of his fourth, adopted daughter. Despite her continued love for him, his wife Annabella knew what was best for herself and her baby and maintained her distance. Many previous historians have indicted her for her coldness, but under the law at the time, almost any warmth toward him could be used to void their separation and put her back into Byron’s control. Divorce was out of reach, but at least she and Ada were free. Annabella is a historical figure in her own right, a reformer who long outlived her husband and championed schooling for girls and methods that would seem current or even progressive today, such as opposition to corporal punishment.
Baby Ada grew up to become the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace. She had an enduring fascination with her famous father, even insisting on being buried next to him. Annabella eventually also took in young Medora, raising her alongside her own daughter and noting her resemblance to Byron. Medora eventually left for France but moved back in with Ada after surviving a sexual assault and giving birth to a daughter, Marie.
Lord Byron was charming in life and in some ways remains likeable even now, for his humor, art, and generosity later in life. His flaws make him a morbidly intriguing literary figure, those many missteps and errors fascinating in the same way a car crash is compelling to observe. His influence on many later works, from vampire novels to anything where a male hero’s infantilized love interest saves him with her innocence, is indisputable. Byron’s story is that of the first modern celebrity, and it becomes current again in the era of #MeToo when we must also grapple with the complex and sometimes distasteful lives and doings of the people who have made great art. How much can we separate these people from the works they have produced? Can or should we attempt to separate the artist from the art? There are no simple answers to questions like these, and the discussion continues.
[Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material]
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About the author
Arden is a wildlife biologist and multimedia artist trying to escape the pull of the US Midwest. This is their first published article since writing for the school paper in high school. More of their art and adventure stories can be found on their Instagram.