Life and Contexts

1 Life and contexts Introduction This part attempts to sketch Byron’s life as a writer and show how his poetry was produced through interaction with specific literary cultures in Regency London and abroad. The circumstances of the composition of the verse will be mentioned here briefly but the major poetry will be discussed in more detail in Part 2 and different critical views of it will be indicated in Part 3. Byron’s adventurous life has inspired many biographies, discussed in the ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this section. Reference will be made to these in parenthesis and also to Byron’s Letters and Journals (BLJ) and to accounts of the poet written by his contemporaries. Childhood and family background, 1788–1805 George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788 at 16 Holles Street, Cavendish Square, London, the son of aristocratic parents: Captain ‘Mad Jack’ Byron and Catherine (née Gordon). His father was a handsome English fortune hunter who soon ran through his plain Scottish wife’s money, and the marriage disinte- grated not long after the birth of the baby. Mrs Byron returned to Scotland and took lodgings in Aberdeen in 1789, then in 1791 rented an apartment at 64 Broad Street. Captain Byron died in the same year and she was left to bring up her son alone on only 150 pounds a year. At this time 500 pounds per annum was considered the minimum income for the gentry, and a nobleman needed 10,000 pounds per annum to participate fully in the social season, so this modest lower- middle-class standard of life was considered akin to poverty by an aristocrat such as Catherine Byron. George had been born lame, perhaps with a club foot, and suffered throughout his childhood both from the stares and taunts of others and from the painful contraptions and treatments ordered by doctors who tried to straighten out his foot. He grew to be handsome like his father yet self-conscious about his disability and also about his tendency to put on weight because of the inability to take much exercise. Yet he loved swimming and riding and also cricket, where another boy ran when he batted. He was spoilt by his mother and did not take kindly to 2 LIFE AND CONTEXTS teachers’ discipline but was an omnivorous reader with a retentive memory. He would later look back nostalgically on his Scottish childhood and occasional visits to the wild countryside of the Highlands (see Works, p. 32). In 1794 he had begun his education at Aberdeen Grammar School, but when the news came in May 1798 that, through a succession of unforeseen deaths, he had inherited the Byron title and family estates, he and his mother moved to England. When they arrived at Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, they found the mansion to be near derelict but were nevertheless enchanted with the scene of picturesque desolation, which would later inspire Byron’s earliest verses. On both his Scottish mother’s side (the Gordons of Gight) and his English father’s (the Byrons of Lancashire and Nottinghamshire), the noble families from which Byron was descended had lost their wealth and importance. This was largely as a result of their own profligacy, but also because power was beginning to pass from the landed aristocracy to the mercantile classes in the nineteenth century (Rowse 1978: 117–52). His mother was a fervent Whig and supporter of the French Revolution, and the young Byron inherited both her aristocratic pride (made hypersensitive by their impoverishment) and the radical politics which seemed so incompatible with it. Byron’s social status is an important clue to his interest in creating characters who are proud outsiders or out of joint with the times. Because of his rapid transformation from middle-class schoolboy to becoming the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, Mrs Byron and her young son were both extremely sensitive about their rank. This was exacerbated by the fact that in the eighteenth century the Byrons had become a disreputable family and were, anyway, only on the lower rungs of the nobility, so young George would not have been welcome in the very highest circles had he not made a name for himself in literature. His income from the estate was inadequate to pay for the necessary repairs to the mansion and to fund an aristocratic lifestyle, so Newstead Abbey had to be rented out. His mother stinted herself to fund Byron’s education at Harrow (1801–5) and then at Cambridge (1805–7) in accordance with his rank. But for all his early life, until Newstead was sold and the purchase money for the mansion finally paid in Feb- ruary 1819, Byron was plagued by lack of ready money and amassed large debts by attempting nevertheless to live in a suitably lordly style (Beckett 2001: 126– 28). He was also uneasy for a long time as to whether a nobleman was lowering himself by engaging in the trade of publishing. Religious heritage Byron had been brought up by his mother and tutors in Scotland as a Presbyterian and knew his Bible inside out, particularly the Old Testament (Looper 1978: 287–95). Scots Presbyterians, like English Dissenters, identified with the Jews, having been persecuted and deprived of full civil rights in the historical past because of their religious beliefs. Byron would grow up to be critical of the way the Tory government made loyalty to the Anglican church and monarchy the cornerstone of British patriotism at this time of the Napoleonic wars, when Britain was at war with France. He advocated religious toleration instead. When he became sceptical about orthodox religion as a young man, Byron would LIFE AND CONTEXTS 3 vehemently reject the Calvinist belief in which he had been educated: that only a few, ‘the Elect’, were predestined by God to be saved, while the majority were consigned to eternal damnation regardless of their good works. Nevertheless, he could not entirely shake off the pessimism and fatalism which were the heritage of this austere theology. This was exacerbated by his belief in aristocratic ‘blood’: he knew that his own father had been a dissolute rake, and his great uncle another, who had also killed his neighbour in a duel in dubious circumstances and was tried by the House of Lords and disgraced. When his volatile mother shouted at her headstrong son, she reproached him for following in the footsteps of the Byrons. She was superstitious and probably also saw his club foot as a taint. The lame boy was a prodigious reader (Moore 1860: 20) and particularly fascinated with Gothic fiction such as William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), John Moore’s Zeluco (1789) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), in each of which the sinful protagonist was drawn on by fate to commit evil deeds. He would later find decadent aristocrats portrayed as guilt-ridden villains in the Gothic novels of Mrs Radcliffe and Walter Scott’s poetry, and the younger sons of minor aristocrats turning to banditry in the Sturm und Drang plays of Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. When he became a writer himself, he explored his own ambivalence towards aristocracy through elaborating and combining the characteristics of such anti-heroes, result- ing in the creation of a succession of noble outlaws (see Works, p. 51). Critics have labelled this character ‘the Byronic hero’, not because it originated with Byron, but because he created a memorable series of such protagonists and many readers imagined they had something of the poet’s own personality (Thorslev 1962). Education and reading, 1794–1807 It was clear that Byron could not rely on an empty title to provide him with a place in the world. He needed to make his own way through merit. In Scotland, he had attended a day school and then the Grammar School at Aberdeen, but on inheriting the title he was sent to Dr Glennie’s school at Dulwich to prepare him for entrance to public school. In 1803 his mother rented out Newstead and took a house at nearby Southwell, economising in order to provide him with the requis- ite upper-class education at Harrow and then Cambridge. Byron took some time to settle at Harrow, but eventually made close friends there and looked back nostalgically at his schooldays in his early verse (see Works, p. 31). Byron was judged an indifferent scholar in the classics, then central to the curriculum at public school and university, by his chosen biographer; but the nineteen-year-old made a memorandum of an astonishing number of books he claimed to have read for his own amusement: mainly histories, biographies and literature in English and French (Moore 1860: 29, 46). History was then domin- ated by accounts of heroic men of action shaping the destiny of nations. Such a role seemed barred to a youth with a club foot. But a writer was an equally masterful figure: the French revolution had demonstrated the intoxicating power of ideas, disseminated in print, to inspire the populace to action. The public schools of Byron’s day, which trained their upper-class pupils to become leaders of their country, specialised in oratory. Many boys grew up to 4 LIFE AND CONTEXTS become statesmen, and the future prime minister, Robert Peel, was Byron’s class- mate. Byron himself would be entitled to take his seat in the House of Lords at the age of twenty-one, and, though it was less important politically than the House of Commons, it was still a vital part of government. In fact, his mother cherished ambitions that he would become a political leader.

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