Subject: george gordon byron's revolutionary romantic impressions in the novel "don juan" table of contents plan: Introduction chapter I. Bayron's political free thought

Picture 1. George Gordon Byron


Lord Byron died in Greece during his 36th year. He was, and is, regarded as a national hero by the Greeks due to his involvement in their War of Independence, fought against the Ottoman Empire and mourning took place throughout the land.
After a funeral service, during which Byron's helmet was placed on a temporary coffin, his body was shipped back to England. It laid in state for a period at the London home of one of his friends but his remains were resolutely denied a funeral in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey. His transgressions, real and imagined, had not been forgotten by the Establishment. The body was carried from London in a carriage pulled by six plumed black horses back to Nottinghamshire, where he was buried in the family vault at St. Mary's Church, Hucknall. Thousands lined the route to watch the coffin pass, including his former lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb and the Countess of Oxford. Some of the social elite sent empty coaches to the procession as a final snub. In Nottingham, close to the Market Square, his body was greeted with respect by the local people, who had not forgotten his support for the Nottingham Frame Breakers in his famous maiden speech to the House of Lords. From Nottingham, the coach traveled the short distance to Hucknall.
Although in his letters Byron confessed to having no interest in society – ‘I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone,’¹ – his exploits and writings drew attention, at times adoring and at others deeply critical.
It was in 1812 after the publication of the first part of his long narrative poem about a young aristocrat’s travels, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, that Byron became widely known, a celebrity in fashionable circles. With a noticeable limp due to a club-foot – a disability he had suffered with from birth – and a striking face, Byron’s physical presence also commanded attention. His fellow English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge commented in a letter on 10 April 1816 that Byron’s face was ‘so beautiful, a countenance I scarcely ever saw’ and ‘his eyes the open portals of the sun—things of light, and for light’. During his lifetime, Byron was notoriously protective of his image and directed his publisher John Murray to destroy any engravings of himself that he disliked. One portrait he endorsed was completed in 1813 by the artist Thomas Phillips.
It shows Byron wearing Albanian dress, ‘the most magnificent in the world,’ Byron thought, which he had acquired while on a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean in 1809. The portrait alludes to his travels and adventurous spirit while presenting the face of a calm and pensive Byron.
Known to be moody, by turns gregarious and then sullen, Byron was a man of extremes, both in terms of his character and his deeds.


In a candid moment of self-reflection Byron wrote, ‘I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long, - I am such a strange mélange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me’².
From a young age, Byron wished for a career in Parliament with poetry initially being only a secondary interest. He entered the House of Lords, his privilege for being born into British nobility, and in 1812 gave his first speech opposing the Frame Work Bill, which made the destruction of stocking frames, mechanical looms used in the textile industry, a crime punishable by death.
The controversy over the bill had provoked riots in Nottinghamshire where use of the frames had left many men unemployed, and therefore hungry and desperate. In the historic speech, Byron laments that many of his fellow politicians view the rioters as an uneducated mob, failing to recognise the desperation of their situation:
“it is the mob that labour in your fields and in your houses - that man your navy and recruit your army - that have enabled you to defy all the world and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair .You may call the people a mob but not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people”.
Despite the eloquence and passion of Byron’s speech opposing the bill, the bill passed. Seen as a radical, Byron became the enemy of the more conservative forces as made clear by his representation as the devil with a cloven hoof in The Dorchester Guide; or, a house that Jack Built (1819), an anti-radical satirical pamphlet. The anonymous publication warns that ‘the mind is corrupted’ by Byron’s ‘sweet and harmonious’ poetry and says to ‘look at his feet’, a reference to his club-foot, for proof of his association with the devil.
This criticism was especially harsh given his lifelong sensitivity about his disability. Byron allegedly refused to sleep overnight in the same bed as many of his lovers so that they would not have an opportunity to observe his twisted foot.
‘I cannot exist without some object of Love’. (Lord Byron to Lady Melbourne, 9 November 1812).
By his own account, Byron had many lovers, and most biographers agree that he had relationships with both women and men. Lady Caroline Lamb, the woman who famously labelled him ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ in her journal, demanded to meet Byron after reading Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and went on to have a short-lived but zealous affair with him in 1812. After Byron ended the relationship because he felt it had become too public and intense, Lamb tried to stab herself and then sent Byron a snippet of her pubic hair in a letter signed ‘from your wild antelope’.³
From his early publications, Byron provoked his contemporary poets by denouncing their writings. After receiving a harsh review of an early edition of his own poetry, Byron wrote the satire ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ (1809), which took aim at various poets, including Robert Southey, Walter Scott, and William Wordsworth whom he described variously as ‘little wits’ or ‘knaves and fools.’ A letter to his publisher John Murray from 25 March 25 1817 when he was living in Venice includes an amusing poem that comments on the poems and novels of his contemporaries: Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ William Lisle Bowles’ ‘The Missionary,’ Margaret Holford’s ‘Margaret of Anjou,’ and, most entertainingly, his ex-lover Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon, which is a thinly veiled portrait of Byron.
Romanticism set a trend for some literary stereotypes. Byron’s Childe Harold (1812-1818) described the wanderings of a young man, disillusioned with his empty way of life. The melancholy, dark, brooding, rebellious ‘Byronic hero’, a solitary wanderer, seemed to represent a generation, and the image lingered. The figure became a kind of role model for youngsters: men regarded him as ‘cool’ and women found him enticing! Byron died young, in 1824, after contracting a fever. This added to the ‘appeal’.
The fame to which Byron awoke in London in 1812 was spread rapidly throughout Europe and the English-speaking world by scores of translations and editions. He was delighted to see his merits argued in a Java gazette in 1814 and gratified some years later to find himself described as "the favourite poet of the Americans." His influence was pervasive and prolonged. Alfred de Musset was his disciple in France, Aleksandr Pushkin in Russia, Heinrich Heine in Germany, Adam Mickiewicz in Poland. His poetry inspired musical compositions by Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; operas by Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi; and paintings by J. M. W. Turner, John Martin, Ford Madox Brown, and Eugène Delacroix.
His spirit animated liberal revolutionary movements: most of the officers executed following the unsuccessful 1825 Decembrist uprising in Russia were Byronists; the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini associated Byron with the eternal struggle of the oppressed to be free. Shelley, Heine, and others adopted Byron’s open-necked shirt, which he wears in Thomas Phillips’s striking 1814 painting.

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