George Noel Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), was a British poet. He was one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest British poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
Byron was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Following graduation, he travelled extensively in Europe, living for seven years in Italy, in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa, as he was forced to flee England after receiving threats of lynching. During his stay in Italy, he would frequently visit his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence to fight the Ottoman Empire, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero. He died leading a campaign in 1824, at the age of 36, from a fever contracted after the first and second sieges of Missolonghi.
George Gordon Byron, later George Noel Gordon Byron, was born on 22 January 1788, on Holles Street in London; his birthplace is now supposedly occupied by a branch of the department store John Lewis. His family in the English Midlands can be traced back without interruption to Ralph de Buran, who arrived in England with William the Conqueror in the 11th century. His land holdings are listed in the Domesday Book of 1086.
Byron was the only child of Captain John 'Jack' Byron and his second wife, Catherine Gordon (of the Clan Gordon), heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice Admiral John Byron and Sophia Trevanion. Having survived a shipwreck as a teenage midshipman, Byron's grandfather set a new speed record for circumnavigating the globe. After he became embroiled in a tempestuous voyage during the American War of Independence, he became nicknamed 'Foul-Weather Jack' Byron by the press.
Byron's father had previously been somewhat scandalously married to Amelia Osborne, Marchioness of Carmarthen, with whom he was having an affair – the wedding took place just weeks after her divorce from her husband, and she was around eight months pregnant. The marriage was not a happy one, and their first two children – Sophia Georgina, and an unnamed boy – died in infancy. Amelia herself died in 1784 almost exactly a year after the birth of their third child, the poet's half-sister Augusta Mary. Though Amelia died from a wasting illness, probably tuberculosis, the press reported that her heart had been broken out of remorse for leaving her husband. Nineteenth-century sources blamed Jack's own "brutal and vicious" treatment of her.
Jack then married Catherine Gordon of Gight on 13 May 1785, by all accounts only for her fortune. To claim his second wife's estate in Scotland, Byron's father took the additional surname "Gordon", becoming "John Byron Gordon", and occasionally styled himself "John Byron Gordon of Gight". Byron's mother had to sell her land and title to pay her new husband's debts. In the space of two years, the large estate, worth some £23,500 (equivalent to £3,053,949 in 2023), was squandered, leaving the former heiress with an annual income in trust of only £150 (equivalent to £19,493 in 2023). In a move to avoid his creditors, Catherine accompanied her husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of 1787 to give birth to her son.
Byron was born in January 1788, and christened at St Marylebone Parish Church. His father appears to have wished to call his son 'William', but as he remained absent, Byron's mother named him after her own father, George Gordon of Gight, who was a descendant of James I of Scotland and who had died by suicide some years earlier, in 1779.
Byron's mother moved back to Aberdeenshire in 1790, and Byron spent part of his childhood there. His father soon joined them in their lodgings in Queen Street, Aberdeen, but the couple quickly separated. Catherine regularly experienced mood swings and bouts of melancholy, which could be partly explained by her husband's continuously borrowing money from her. As a result, she fell even further into debt to support his demands. One of these loans enabled him to travel to Valenciennes, France, where he died of a "long & suffering illness" – probably tuberculosis – in 1791.
When Byron's great-uncle, who was posthumously labelled the "wicked" Lord Byron, died on 21 May 1798, the 10-year-old became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale and inherited the ancestral home, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. His mother took him to England, but the Abbey was in a state of disrepair, and rather than live there she decided to lease it to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, among others, during Byron's adolescence.
Described by some biographers as "a woman without judgment or self-command", Catherine allegedly either spoiled and indulged her son or vexed him with her capricious stubbornness. Her drinking disgusted him and he often mocked her for being short and corpulent, so that it was difficult for her to catch him to discipline him. Byron had been born with a deformed right foot; his mother once retaliated and, in a fit of temper, referred to him as "a lame brat". However, Byron's biographer, Doris Langley Moore, in her 1974 book Accounts Rendered, paints a more sympathetic view of Mrs Byron as a staunch supporter of her son, who sacrificed her own precarious finances to keep him in luxury at Harrow and Cambridge. Langley-Moore questions the 19th-century biographer John Galt's claim that she over-indulged in alcohol.
Byron's mother-in-law, Judith Noel, the Hon. Lady Milbanke, died in 1822, and her will required that he change his surname to "Noel" in order to inherit half of her estate. He accordingly obtained a Royal Warrant, enabling him to "take and use the surname of Noel only" and to "subscribe the said surname of Noel before all titles of honour". From that point, he signed himself "Noel Byron", the usual signature of a peer being merely the name of the peerage, in this case simply "Byron". Some have speculated that he did this so that his initials would read "N.B.", mimicking those of his hero, Napoleon. Lady Byron eventually succeeded to the Barony of Wentworth, becoming "Lady Wentworth".
Byron received his early formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School from January 1795 until his move back to England as a 10-year-old. In August 1799 he entered the school of Dr William Glennie, in Dulwich. Placed under the care of a Dr. Bailey, he was encouraged to exercise in moderation, but could not restrain himself from "violent" bouts of activity in an attempt to compensate for his deformed foot. His mother interfered with his studies, often withdrawing him from school, which arguably contributed to his lack of self-discipline and his neglect of his classical studies.
Byron was sent to Harrow School in 1801, and remained there until July 1805. An undistinguished student and an unskilled cricketer, he nevertheless represented the school during the first Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lord's in 1805.
His lack of moderation was not restricted to physical exercise. Byron fell in love with Mary Chaworth, whom he met while at school, and she was the reason he refused to return to Harrow in September 1803. His mother wrote, "He has no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion. In short, the boy is distractedly in love with Miss Chaworth." In Byron's later memoirs, "Mary Chaworth is portrayed as the first object of his adult sexual feelings."
Byron finally returned in January 1804, to a more settled period, which saw the formation of a circle of emotional involvements with other Harrow boys, which he recalled with great vividness: "My school friendships were with me passions (for I was always violent)". The most enduring of those was with John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare—four years Byron's junior—whom he was to meet again unexpectedly many years later, in 1821, in Italy. His nostalgic poems about his Harrow friendships, Childish Recollections (1806), express a prescient "consciousness of sexual differences that may in the end make England untenable to him". Letters to Byron in the John Murray archive contain evidence of a previously unremarked (if short-lived) romantic relationship with a younger boy at Harrow, John Thomas Claridge.