Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was born in London on 22 January 1788 and became one of the major figures of the Romantic movement. A British poet, he is regarded as among the greatest British poets, with a public life as dramatic as the verse that made him famous. His best-known works include the long narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, while many of the shorter lyrics collected in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.

Byron came from an old family whose English Midlands line was traced back to Ralph de Buran, who arrived in England with William the Conqueror in the 11th century. He was the only child of Captain John “Jack” Byron and Catherine Gordon, heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. His father’s debts damaged the family’s finances, and Catherine sold her land and title to pay them. Byron’s father died in France in 1791, when Byron was still a small child.

In 1798, at the age of 10, Byron became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale after the death of his great-uncle, and he inherited Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. The house was in disrepair, and during Byron’s youth it was leased rather than lived in. His childhood was marked by strain at home. His mother could be indulgent and changeable, and Byron, who was born with a deformed right foot, grew up with both physical difficulty and a strong desire to overcome it.

His education began at Aberdeen Grammar School, followed by Dr William Glennie’s school in Dulwich, Harrow School, and then Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. After graduating, Byron travelled widely in Europe. He later lived for seven years in Italy, in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa, after he was forced to flee England following threats of lynching. During his years in Italy, he often visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Late in life, Byron turned from literary fame toward armed political action. He joined the Greek War of Independence to fight the Ottoman Empire, and for this he is revered by Greeks as a folk hero. He died in 1824, aged 36, while leading a campaign, from a fever contracted after the first and second sieges of Missolonghi. His words still speak to readers because they are tied to a life of movement, danger, ambition, and public risk, and because his best-known poems remain central to British Romantic poetry.