Lord Byron

Biography

Youth

George Gordon is the son of John Byron, Capitaine with the guards, called “Mad Jack”, and of his second wife Catherine Gordon de Gight (1765-1811), of a family of Aberdeenshire going down from the Stuarts. After having fought in America, the captain had allured Amelia, marchioness of Carmarthen, which had divorced to marry it, and had fled with it in France, where it had given rise to a girl, Augusta (born in 1784), before dying. He wasted the fortune of his second wife, was obliged once again to pass to France; he died in Valencian in 1791. Enclosure, Catherine had given up her husband to make his layers in London, where his/her son George Gordon was born on January 22nd, 1788, in 16 Holles Street, Cavendish Square. Then, having only few means, it was withdrawn with her son with Aberdeen, in Scotland, where it lived with a mean income of one hundred thirty books.

Orphan of father as of the three years age, Byron studied initially near a tutor, before entering to a college of Aberdeen, where he was a poor pupil, but started to read enormously. It is thus in the mountains of the Scotland that Byron passed its first childhood which was sad and morbid; its voice was to always keep Scottish intonations. The character turned sour, proud, capricious and carried his/her mother, who overpowered it in turn caresses and ill treatments, developed in him this excessive irritability and this susceptibility which were the principal defects of its character. Of a remarkable beauty (still that passably chubby-checked fellow during his youths), it had a foot twisted following an accident to its birth and this deformity, though light, was for him a constant source of bitternesses.

It was not nine years old that it fell in love with a young person Écossaise, Marie Duff, and when it learned its marriage afterwards a few years, it was, as it tells it itself, as struck the lightning. One of his/her cousins, Margaret Parker, thirteen year old young girl, was its second passion. It was, says it, one of the most beautiful creatures and most transitory which lived. Any peace and beauty, it seemed to leave a rainbow. She died in fourteen years, following an accident, whereas one year Byron younger was with the Collège of Harvard, and this death inspired its first to him towards. In May 1798, it inherited fortune and the Pairie of its great-uncle Lord William, fifth baron Byron off Rochdale, as well as field of Newstead-Abbey (in the middle of the forest of Sherwood), given to the one of its ancestors by Henri VIII. Installed with Nottingham in August, his/her mother sent it in April 1801 to the Public School of Harrow (thanks to a pension of the Chancellery), where it was pointed out by its indiscipline and its hatred of any imposed task, but also by its sporting exploits (in spite of its club-foot) and tied a friendship impassioned with its school-fellow Lord Clare. At the time of holidays with Newstead-Abbey, in 1803, it éprit of an young girl of the vicinity, Mary Chaworth. It was only fifteen years old and Mary, two years older, scorned this lame child who however had, like Dante with Béatrice, to give him a poetic immortality. His/her father, killed in duel by the uncle William, made besides any marriage impossible; it became engaged to another, and the teenager, envoy with the Trinity College of Cambridge, comforted himself by many loves and scandalized soon the University by his usual indiscipline and of the eccentricities which its fortune returned to him easy. He éprit of young a seventeen year old chorus-singer, John Edleston, in 1805 (whose death, five years after, was to touch it particularly), bound with John Cam Hobhouse and became with him member of the Whig Club of Cambridge.

It is with Cambridge that it published in 20 years its first collection of poetries, printed with Newark in 1807, under the title of Hours off Idleness ( Free times ), where its early passions are spread out and where bore already its odd mood, its Scepticisme and its scornful Misanthropie. Lord Henry Brougham, in the Review of Edinburgh , made of it a violent criticism to which the young poet retorted by a satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers ( English Bardes and Critics Scot ) in 1809, where it is attacked, with a liveliness equal to that of Pope, with all the outstanding personalities of then. He regretted this joke later, because he tried, vainly, to withdraw this Pamphlet circulation. To leaving the Université, where, in spite of the irregularity of its control, it made good studies, it launched out in all extravagances of the young jet set and became the hero of many scandalous adventures, then, in 1809, took its place with the House of Lords, having inherited the title of Lord whom one of his uncles had carried, on the benches of the opposition. But, tired of the parliamentary debates, it left England in June 1809, from which the goals (whimsical) were to write a treaty on manners, whose chapter would have been entitled: “Of the sodomy simplified as a practice worthy of praises, according to the old authors and the modern practices”. In two years, he visited successively the Portugal, the Spain, the traditional shores of the the Mediterranean, resided some time in Greece and Turkey. He left Falmouth the July 2nd 1809 for Lisbon, then Seville, Cadiz and Gibraltar. Arrived at Malta the August 19th 1809, it remained one month there before leaving for Prevesa, reached the September 20th 1809. Then it approached with Ioannina, in Albania, where it was accepted by Ali Pasha, which offered to him an escort until Patras, then it visited Delphes, Thèbes and Smyrna, before joining Constantinople, where it crossed the Hellespont to the stroke.

It left Constantinople the July 14th 1810, made stopover with Zéa for a correspondence towards Athens the July 17th. To the Pirée, it crossed the roads several times to the stroke. It was with Malta the May 22nd 1811. His/her companion during part of the first voyage was Hobhouse. He was according to Byron his companion preferred and often under consideration at the time of the attempts at following voyages. He also travelled with his Fletcher servant and a Greek, two Albanians and an orthodoxe priest, and a year later, after the departure of Hobhouse, by Tatare, two soldiers Albanian and a Drogman. In its luggage, it brought marbles, craniums found in sarcophagi, four tortoises and a flask of conium. Of return in England, where his/her mother had just died, in 1811, it published the first two songs of a poem who consequently placed it at the head of the British poets, the Pèlerinage of the knight Harold ; it described there, under a borrowed name, its own adventures and its impressions of voyage. Among its papers, it found a trust that the poet Thomas Moore, moved by English Bardes and critics Scot had sent two years to him earlier, reconciled himself with him and tied a deep friendship.

Glory

It evolved/moved in its opinion on the Greeks: initially without opinion, it drew more and more poetic inspiration in ancient Greece and its myths. It then became philhellene, combatant for their freedom. He learned the modern Greek with a young beautiful young man of which he made his travelling companion. The first two songs of Childe Harold' S Pilgrimage ( the Pilgrimage of the knight Harold ), appeared in 1812, are the account of its impressions of voyage and its own adventures. Success was immense: “I awoke one morning , says it, and I learned that I was famous. ”

Its popularity still increased repercussion of a speech which he made with the House of Lords against measurements of rigor lately taken to choke the riots of workmen. By 1812 with 1814, the publication of the Giaour , Support off Abydos ( Been engaged of Abydos ), Corsair and of Lara , increased enthusiasm. Byron became the idol of the circles of the aristocratic and viveuse youth of London. Lastly, tired this dissipated life, satisfied pleasures, thinking of thus solving the imbroglio its love affairs by a marriage of convenience, he wanted to line up and married Annabella, the girl to sir Ralph Milbanke, baronnet county of Durham, known under the nickname of “the mathematician”, who had pushed back it first once. The marriage was celebrated the January 2nd 1815 with Seaham, the residence of his/her father-in-law. It was a great surprise for those which knew the character of Lord Byron, who declared besides in The Dream that, the day of its weddings, all its thoughts were for the young lady of honor of his wife, that it found placed between her and him in the car. However, of its own consent also, it was some happy time, though “extremely annoyed by its piles father-in-law” which had offered to the young couple one its residences, in the county of Durham, to pass their honeymoon there. But, as of March, the husbands settled in London, close to Hyde Park, and it is there that their mutual incompatibility burst. Byron lady, pretty, intelligent, distinguished, but imbue of all the prejudices of cant British, excessively pious woman and of a haughty virtue, could not make approvals of the hearth of a man who professed the major contempt for all the social conventions, the hatred of the religious dogma as well as of the political creed of “respectability”. Also as of its pregnancy she lives herself forsaken by her husband, who sought illicit distractions with the outside, although he had written of her before his Mariage: “It is so good that I would like to become better” . Correct, without temperament, incompetent to fail dries and to forgive, it was of these women who make the virtue unbearable. It is necessary to add the unceasingly increasing financial embarrassments and which undoubtedly turned sour its character. The debts of Byron did not decrease of anything the figure of its expenditure. In November 1815, it had been obliged to sell its library and, in less than one year, the ushers had made nine times irruption at his place.

December 10th, 1815 the young woman was confined of a girl, Augusta Ada (Ada de Lovelace), and, on January 6th, her husband, who did not communicate any more with it that by letters, wrote to him that it had to leave London as soon as possible to live with her father while waiting for that he took arrangements with his creditors. She left eight days after joining her parents with Kirkby Mallory and, although she wrote to him with her departure an affectionate letter, she dealt with making declare her husband “ insane ”, affirming that she would never re-examine it again. This separation made scandal. Some repeated remarks excited an explosion of public indignation. Byron was shown of all kinds of monstrous defects and was compared, in the British press, with Néron, Héliogabale, Caligula, Henri VIII. He did not dare any more to show himself as a public, of fear of the insults of the crowd and brutalities of the rabble. The cause of this fury, secret behavior by the following generation, was revealed only fifty-five years later by Harriet Beecher Stowe: Byron would have had incestueuses relations with his/her Augusta half-sister, become mistress Leigh, and they would have had together a girl who bears the name of the heroin of the poem the Corsair , Medora (born on April 14th, 1814). However Augusta continued until in 1830 being in good terms with Byron lady, being used as intermediary between it and her husband as long as he lived. She died in 1851, and it was only in 1856 that Byron lady would have entrusted this secrecy to the American novelist, and that by evangelic charity. She thought that by tarnishing the memory of the poet, she would decrease the harmful influence of her writings and consequently her atonement in the other world. Mistress Stowe published these confidences only in 1869 in the Macmillan' S Magazine and in The Atlantic Monthly . In its book The Real Lord Byron , J.C. Jeaffreson reconsidered this question of the Inceste, which should not however leave any doubt, to judge some by stanzas written with his/her Augusta sister during the stay of the poet to the Villa Diodati (1816), and of the worms addressed to My Sweet Sister ( My soft sister ), destroyed with its death about its express will. Byron beseeched the forgiveness of his wife, addressing a pathetic poem to him, Porte well , but she refused implacably it to him, and separation by amicable agreement took place the February 2nd 1816. To finish, it published a Test , a diatribe against controlling of Annabella, which it showed to have served near its mistress. Haï by the politicians for its liberal ideas and its sympathy to Napoleon, it embarked in Douvre with Hobbouse, Rushton and its servant Fletcher on April 24th, 1816 and left the the United Kingdom not to return more there, after having made appear The Siege off Corinth ( the Seat of Corinth ) and Parisina . The first work was composed during its year of marital cohabitation, because the entire manuscript is copied hand of Byron lady. The Murray editor sent, for both, a check of thousand Guineas that Byron turned over to him.

The exile on the continent

He visited the France and the Belgium, where the sight of the battle field of Waterloo inspired to him one of its more beautiful songs, went in Suisse bound with the poet Shelley, whose agitated and short life had so many similarities with his. It divided for three months, during the year without summer (which it describes in the poem Darkness ), the Diodati villa with Shelley, its partner Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, future Mary Shelley and the half-sister of this one, Claire Clermont, whom it put pregnant (a girl, Allegra, were born in 1817), made with Shelley of the excursions on the Léman, in particular with the Château of Chillon. With Geneva, it composed the third song of Childe Harold and The Prisoner off Chillon ( the Prisoner of Chillon ), and took as a starting point the sight of the glaciers of the Oberland for its dark drama of Manfred , written in 1817, as Lament off Tasso ( the Lament of the Tasse ). It remained with Coppet, at Madam de Staël and met Matthew Gregory Lewis, the author of the Roman Gothic the Monk .

Then it crossed the Bernese Alps and gained Milan, where it crossed Stendhal and Venice, where it was installed (for a stay cut by a visit with Rome) with the Mocenigo palate, on the Large Channel, with fourteen servants, of the horses and a true menagerie, took part in several successive carnivals, learned the Armenian with the seminar from San Lazzaro, had an adventure with Marianna Segati, then Margarita Cogni, called “Fornarina”, however which it supplemented Childe Harold (songs IV and V), wrote Beppo, Venetian history and began Don Juan, epic satire . In 1819, it éprit of the countess Teresa Guiccioli, twenty years old, which he followed to Ravenne, where he settled in top of the Guiccioli palate. But, when the husband put outside Byron, Teresa left to take refuge in his/her father, the count Gamba, which obtained from the pope Pie VII, on July 6th, 1820, the separation of the couple. Friend of the count and its son Pietro, member of the Carbonari who aspired to shake the yoke of the Habsbourg, Byron joined their projects of emancipation of the Italy, financing the movement (thanks to the sale of Newstead Abbey, with its royalties and a heritage) and storing weapons. But the arrival of the Austrian troops and the defection of Neapolitan, in 1821, made fall through the revolt. The Gamba, exiled States of the pope, took refuge with Pisa, where Byron joined them afterwards three months. At that time appeared Marino Faliero , Sardanapale , Both Foscari , Caïn , but especially songs II and IV of the Don Juan , most extraordinary of its works, and one of most personal, than it completed in Pisa in 1822; gift Juan, hero scoffer, cynical, impassioned, enthusiastic, adventurous and mobile like him. With Shelley, the Trelawny adventurer and the essay writer Leigh Hunt, it founded a periodical, the Liberal , who had only some numbers. In April, Allegra, the girl of Byron and Claire Clermont died, at the five years age, in the Italian convent where it was in pension. In July, Shelley drowned at sea, with Leghorn; Byron and Trelawny burned with the ancient manner its corpse on one to rough-hew, on the beach of Viareggio.

At the end of 1822, the Tuscan Gamba being exiled of , settled with Genoa, where Byron joined them. There, it bound friendship with Lady Blessington, which collected its remarks, that she was to publish later.

Depity and dissatisfied, seeing its forces wearing, its Génie to impoverish itself and its fortune to melt itself, it solved to put at the service insurrection Greek S for their independence all that remained to him. In front of asks committee philhellene of London, it left with Pietro Gamba, Trelawny, a young Italian doctor and five servants for the island of Céphalonie on a brig freighted with its expenses. Seeing the Greeks divided into irreconcilable and sometimes suspect factions of personal ambitions, it remained four months in the island, acting as well as possible for the committee, helping the refugees, giving 4.000 books to the legal Greek government for the maintenance of the fleet. Finally, grateful in the prince Mavrokordátos “Washington” of Greece, it decided to join it on the continent and unloaded with Missolonghi the January 4th 1824 (after having escaped accuracy with a Turkish frigate and a shipwreck), finding everywhere only confusion, discord, anarchy, rapacity and fraud. People face but without discipline, a rabble armed, cruel, yelling, idiotic and turbulent, jealous, antagonistic and badly obeyed chiefs. For three months, with its heart of Poet and his money of large lord, it tested remedies. It recruited a body souliote which it took responsibility for its, equipped and exerted. At the request of Mavrokordátos, it prepared to attack Lépante with the governmental forces when, the April 9th, it contracted in one of its daily races with Cheval the fever of the marshes. Weakened by vain bleedings, he died on April 18th, in the evening. The Greeks took mourning. A mass was known as the 23 in Missolonghi, and one greeted thirty-six blows of guns (the age of dead) the departure of the boat which carried its body towards England, on May 2nd. Arrived on July 5th at London, it was deposited, the 16, in the vault of its family, in the small church of Hucknall, close to Newstead Abbey.

The advertisement of its death resounds soon in all Europe. In England, Tennyson, fifteen years old, flees in wood and engraved: “Byron died. ” With Paris, Lamartine (which wrote the Last song of the Pilgrimage of Childe Harold ) and Hugo made a personal mourning of it.

Literature

Lord Byron is one of largest British poets the, with equal of Keats or of Shelley, and, at a given time, it eclipsed the glory of all, even that of Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Thomas Moore and Campbell. One sometimes compared it with Robert Burns; both, the par and the peasant, wrote according to their personal impressions and their feelings, showing any entireties in their works; slaves of pressing passions, also delivered to the doubt and the melancholy, they died prematurely, after a life of extraordinary physical-activity and intellectual. The writings of Byron it is itself, and of him one can say: the poet and the man do only one. He has much haï the British, he admired Bonaparte, it is perhaps why he was so popular in France, but here the epigraph which he at the head transcribed in French of Childe Harold: “the universe is a species of book whose one read only the first page when only his country was seen. I have of it laminated a rather great number, which I found also bad. This examination was not unfruitful to me. I hated my fatherland. All impertinences of the various people among which I lived me reconciled with it. When I would have drawn from another benefit of my voyages only that one, I would regret neither the expenses of them nor tirednesses. ” Starting from Childe Harold , it wrote several works which corresponded more to the taste of its time than to its own sensitivity, and strongly marked Orientalisme, like Giaour , Been engaged of Abydos , the Corsair or Lara . Among his most personal works, one can note Beppo and Don Juan , unfinished satirical epopee left with the sixteenth song, where it makes watch of a real burlesque talent and is devoted to humorous reflections or assassinate (with the regard, in particular, of Castlereagh, Wellington or the poet prize winner Southey), through digressions where the flashes of wit fuse. Of a bold imagination and fertilizes, its style is energetic and full with brilliant images, it is a virtuoso of the worms. Traditional of temperament, with the manner of Pope or Swift, it is the revolt which makes romantic.

Works

Poetry

Free times, original and translated poetries (1807)
English Bards and critics Scot (1809)
curse of Minerve (1811)
Memories of Horace (1811)
the pilgrimage of the knight Harold (1812 - 1818)
Giaour (1813)
Been engaged of Abydos (1813)
the waltzer (1813)
the corsair (1814)
Ode in Napoleon Bonaparte (1814)
Lara (1814)
Hebraic Mélodies (1815)
the seat of Corinth (1816)
Parisina (1816)
Goes well (1816)
a Test (1816)
Stances in Augusta (1816)
the prisoner of Chillon (1816)
the Lament of the Cup (1817)
Beppo, Venetian history (1818)
Mazeppa (1819)
Don Juan (1819 - 1824)
Thought scattered (1821)
the Irish misadventure (1821)
the prophecy of Dante (1821)
vision of the judgment (1822)
the Bronze Age (1823)
the island (1823)

Theater

Manfred (1817)
Marino Faliero, Doge de Venise (1821)
Sardanapale (1821)
both Foscari (1821)
Cain (1821)
sky and the ground (1821)
Werner (1823)
the deformed one transformed (1824)

Prose

parliamentary Speeches (1824)
Life, letters and the diary of Lord Byron (1830)

Posthumous editions

One published a great number of editions of the Œuvres of Byron:

the most estimated is those:

of London, 1833, 17 volumes in-18, with a Life by Thomas Moore
of Paris, published by Baudry, 1832, 4 volumes in-8.

Works of Byron were translated by Amédée Pichot (1822 - 1825), by Paulin Paris (1830 - 1832), and by Benjamin Laroche (1837). Hunter in translated a part into French worms (1841). Byron had left seventy layers of a Vie which were destroyed on the request of its family. Villemain devoted to him a note in the universal Biographie .

The complete theater of Byron was republished in 2006.

Around its work

The life of Byron, and to a lesser extent its work, inspired by many writers and realizers.

Literature

the doctor of Lord Byron , Paul West, Shores, 1991
Byron with the madness , Sigrid Combüchen, Actes Sud, 1993

Cinema

Gothic , Ken Russel, 1986

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