LORD BYRON :
LORD BYRON (1788-1824) Byron was the eldest of the second generation of the Romantic Poets. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey belonged to the first generation. You have already learnt about the first two. In the present and the succeeding two units vou will read about the second generation. i.e. Byron, Shelley and Keats. Byron was born in London on 22 January 1788 while his mother was on her way to Aberdeen. He was born in poverty and of a club foot. While the former disappeared by the time he was 10 years of age the latter remained permanently with him. Byron was the son of one captain Jack Byron often remembered as 'Mad Jack" He had run through the fortunes of two heiresses-a marchioness who gave birth to Augusta Byron, the poet's half sister, and Catherine Gordon of Gight, mother of the poet. It was while running away from her rapacious (typical of a person who takes everything he can, especially by force) husband that she gave birth to George.
When Byron was three years old his father died (1791). In 1794, when Byron was six, his cousin, the heir to the Byron title, was killed. So when the fifth Baron Byron died in 1798, Byron inherited the title at the age of ten and the mother and son moved to Newstead Abbey, a dilapidated Gothic inheritance. In Scotland, Byron attended the grammar School at Aberdeen. He later went to Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. Byron had always been a rebel. In order to avoid the regulation that forbad keeping dogs he kept a bear as a pet in his room at Cambridge. He also became a member of the Whig Club along with John Hobhouse, about whom you will read more later in this unit. and Lord Broughton. Later Byron went to the Parliament. He spoke in support of the "frame-breakers. or workers who had destroyed some textile machines through fear of unemployment. On another occasion he supported relief of Catholics in Scotland. He had sympathy for both Napoleon and George Washington. Byron almost wished that Napoleon were not defeated at Waterloo by the British. Byron lived a considerable part of his life on the continent. It was at Leghorm in Italy that Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) joined him and they produced The Liberal magazine in which was published The Vision of Judgement an extract from which you are going to read later in this unit. Byron, perhaps of all British poets, was the most European in outlook. Comparing him with Wordsworth, Bernard Blackstone, a eritic, wrote: Wordsworth's topos is a narrow one, the Lake District, and this limits his appeal to the European reader, Byron's is a very broad one, the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean world, and this makes him strange to the English reader. Mosques, temples, bazaars, dervishes, pashas, deserts, wadis, don't go down very easily to a palate accustomed to clergymen, farmers, public-houses, markets, churches and cottages. So that Byron has never seemed quite real to an English audience though his work was very real to himself.
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