Lord Byron: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

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“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” With these words, Lady Caroline Lamb carved out a literary epitaph that would last centuries, written in reference to Lord Byron. They sum up everything that still appeals about the brooding libertine poet. George Gordon Byron was young, charismatic, and talented. At the age of just 24, he published one of the biggest hits in English poetry, becoming famous overnight. He was daring, traveling the Mediterranean, becoming embroiled in secret societies, and joining revolutions. He was also handsome and sexually adventurous. In England, he shocked high society with his affairs with married women, while on the continent, he found comfort in the embrace of beautiful young men. He was, in short, the archetype of a romantic poet—a decadent bohemian aristocrat living a scandalous life, even as he produced some of the greatest poems the world has ever known.

Yet there was more to Lord Byron than this simple portrait would suggest. Beneath the dashing exterior lurked a soul riven by insecurity, plagued with body image problems, and capable of treating his family in the most appalling way imaginable. Awful and wonderful, both hero and villain—this is the life of Lord Byron, literature’s original bad boy.

For nearly all his adult life, Lord Byron was gripped with an unhealthy fear that he would one day go mad. Rather than the affected pose of a languid aristocrat, this worry was very real, stemming from deep within the poet’s heart. After all, with the parents he had, it’s perhaps a wonder that he had any sanity at all. Born George Gordon Byron on January 22, 1788, the future poet was the product of a match made in a difficult environment. His father was a dissolute drunk known as “Mad Jack,” who gambled all of his wife’s money away before fleeing abroad while she was pregnant. As a result, Byron’s mother gave birth to him completely alone in a rented room, driven near bankruptcy by the man she married. Not that Katherine Gordon was exactly a model parent herself—moody, aggressive, and capable of staggering cruelty. The boy’s mother would swing between smothering him with love and belittling his disability. Byron had been born with a withered right leg that caused constant pain and left him horribly self-conscious. Rather than accept her boy for who he was, his mother used this self-consciousness as a weapon. In her darker moods, Katherine would zero in on the boy’s leg, calling him “lame brat” or “limping devil,” while her casual cruelty would give her son lifelong hang-ups. As an adult, he wore special boots designed to hide his disability.

Incredibly, this wasn’t even the worst of it. In 1791, when Byron was only three, “Mad Jack” died in France, passing all of his debts onto his young son. Despite his father’s shortcomings, Byron would always consider him a free-spirited adventurer. In 1797, Katherine hired a strict Calvinist named Mary Gray as her son’s nurse. Sadly, Gray was one of those Christians who used religion not as a way to reflect and better themselves, but rather as a way to browbeat others. Violent and drunken, she liked to hit the boy, telling him how sinful and wretched he was. Far worse than the physical abuse, though, was the sexual abuse. When Byron was either nine or ten, Mary Gray began grooming him, culminating in a sustained sexual assault. It took two years for the boy to muster the courage to tell anyone, but even then, there was no great reckoning. Gray was dismissed from the family’s employ and simply vanished from the pages of history. Yet the hurt she caused didn’t vanish with her.

In his later life, Lord Byron would become capable of breathtaking acts of cruelty towards his lovers, especially when they were female. As bad as his behavior became, it’s important to bear in mind this dreadful childhood, growing up in a household filled with both mental and sexual abuse. It’s remarkable Byron didn’t turn out any worse than he actually did.

On May 21, 1798, the family’s fortunes suddenly turned. That day, Byron’s great-uncle, known as the “wicked lord,” died, having outlived all his heirs. With no one else to take it, Byron inherited his great-uncle’s aristocratic title. More gratifying, though, was the second part of his inheritance: Newstead Abbey, a grand pile badly in need of repair. Young Byron fell in love with the place, enchanted by its vast corridors and crumbling walls.

In 1801, Byron was sent to study at Harrow, an elite boarding school that was also a hotbed of bullying. The other boys seized on Byron’s disability, torturing him over his withered leg and his weight. As he got older, Byron had fleshed out, but rather than accept this, the accumulating fat instilled in him an eating disorder. He began eating starvation amounts of food, fighting off his hunger with tobacco.

By the time he entered Cambridge in 1805, Byron was already aware that he had romantic feelings for both men and women. It was at university that he met his first love, a choir boy named John Edelston. Byron loved the boy with a passionate, albeit unrequited, love.

In 1806, Byron ran out of cash, abandoning Cambridge for London. He borrowed money from his estranged half-sister, Augusta, to make ends meet. While there, he began compiling his early poems, finally publishing them in 1807 as “Hours of Idleness.” The press were merciless with the 21-year-old’s verse. The Edinburgh Review gleefully took a hatchet to the book, portraying Byron as a talentless hack. Instead of abandoning poetry, Byron went on the attack. Over the winter of 1808 to 1809, he composed “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” a poem that attacked not just the Edinburgh Review but also pretty much every major poet in England. It was brilliant, and suddenly, Lord Byron could no longer be dismissed as just a rich idiot.

The summer of 1809 saw Byron and his friend John Hobhouse depart England for a grand tour around the Mediterranean. Byron’s main motivation was to seduce many young men across Greece and Albania. He reveled in how open Mediterranean societies were about homosexuality.

Byron’s thoughts at this time were mostly occupied with his writing. The critical success of “English Bards” triggered a creative hot streak, and he began working on “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” a work that would become a pillar of European Romanticism.

In 1811, Byron returned to England to be informed that his mother was gravely ill. He raced from London to Newstead but was too late. His mother’s death nearly broke him. At first, he went into isolation, but when that didn’t help, he went on a violent spree of seduction. His friends pushed him into working on “Childe Harold,” and it was a decision that would change everything.

The release of “Childe Harold’s” first two cantos in March 1812 was perhaps the biggest literary event of the Regency era. Byron became famous almost overnight.

By the spring of 1812, Byron only had eyes for one person: Lady Caroline Lamb. Unfortunately, this new obsession would wind up a disaster for both of them. In later life, Byron would recall the years 1812 to 1815 as his prime, but they could just as easily be called the years of dangerous relationships.

Byron’s marriage to Annabella Milbanke in January 1815 was a more cursed match than even that of his parents. Byron seemed to find Annabella loathsome in some undefined way. The night they married, he was found wandering about with a loaded pistol, muttering about blowing his brains out.

Things finally culminated in December of 1815. Annabella gave birth to their daughter, Ada Byron, better known as Ada Lovelace. Two days later, while she was still recovering, Byron allegedly entered the room and assaulted her.

Aware the winds were shifting against him, Caroline Lamb began spreading her own stories about Byron, turning him from the darling of English society into a desperate wounded exile.

On April 25, 1816, Lord Byron boarded a ship for the European mainland. Although he traveled in style, this departure marked the last time Byron would ever see his home country.

Shunned by society, Byron began working harder than ever, writing with an anger that pushed his poems to new heights. It was during this time that he made his most important artistic friendship.

Byron seduced Claire Claremont, knocked her up, and then got bored of her. He sent for their daughter, Allegra, only to quickly get bored of the child and pass her off to friends.

Byron settled into a new life in Italy and began work on his masterpiece, “Don Juan,” a satirical epic drenched in sex and scandal.

By 1820, Byron was getting restless. He thought about traveling to South America or returning to England to lead a revolution.

In 1821, Greece exploded in revolt against its Ottoman occupiers. Byron declared he’d sail for Greece immediately, using his own money to improve the Greek navy and fund a small mercenary force.

In early 1824, Byron arrived in Missolonghi to join the forces of Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos. However, Byron’s health nosedived that spring. On April 10, 1824, he was stricken with fever.

Byron died on April 19, 1824, at the age of 36. The news of his passing spread quickly across Greece, becoming a rallying cry for battle.

When his body was returned from Greece, crowds lined the streets to pay their last respects to the poet who defined an entire era. With 200 years of hindsight, we can see that Byron’s legacy was even longer lasting than anyone could have imagined.

Today, he’s likely the best-known English poet after Shakespeare, with his influence visible across multiple generations. The romantic Byronic myth lives on.

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