On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron’s Death, 1824 – 2024
Update: “Mad, bad and dangerous to know”: Poems in Honour of Lord Byron for the Bicentenary Year of his Death (2024) was published with Gothic Keats Press. You can read these brilliantly Byronic poems for free here.
Today is the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death. On 19 April 1824, while fighting in support of the Greek War of Independence in Missolonghi, Byron died from a fever at the age of 36. His death came before entering the fray, but he gave his life, and much of his wealth, to the Greek cause. While in and out of consciousness on his deathbed, Byron was recorded saying that he had “given her [Greece] my time, my means, my health — and now I give her my life!” Byron’s reputation might be complicated in Britain, where his name is tainted with scandal, but in Greece he is celebrated as a national hero. According to the mayor of Vyronas (an Athenian town named after Byron), “Without him, it [a free Greece] might not have happened.”
Byron led a most extraordinary life. He was a celebrity in every sense of the word, famed for his poetry just as much as he was infamous for his personality, the latter, according to his own words, was “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.” And yet described he was, frequently, in life and in death, by many notable characters including Lady Caroline Lamb (whom Byron had a scandalous affair with) who rather infamously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, and even Mary Shelley who, knowing him as a friend, understood his more positive contradictions, describing him as a “fascinating — faulty — childish — philosophical being” who, quite characteristically, “[dared] the world”, and yet she continues that he was “docile in a private circle — impetuous and indolent — gloomy and yet more gay than any other”.
The contradictions in Byron’s own persona — captivating, yet tragically flawed — paired brilliantly well with characters from his poetry, notably the titular characters from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) and Manfred (1817), and, perhaps especially, in the character of Conrad from The Corsair (1814) which sold ten thousand copies on its first day of publication. Although Bryon denied the association of a “real personage”, writing that “Harold is the child of imagination”, the reading public was fascinated and believed these tragically romantic characters were based on Byron himself, and thus the literary archetype of the Byronic Hero was born. Byron epitomized these romantic characteristics of the solitary figure tortured by some unknown secret, the “sublime misanthrope”, mercurial, cynical, egotistical, the brooding romantic of “loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh”, and yet intensely passionate, talented in every way, and capable of deep feeling.
In honor of Lord Byron and all his contradictions, from the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” aristocrat-poet to the fighter for freedom and national hero, I am pleased to announce that I will be co-editing a collection of poetry to commemorate the bicentenary of his death. The collection is to be published with Gothic Keats Press on 16 July 2024, which is the anniversary of Byron’s burial at the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire. I will post an update at the top of this unusually brief essay when the poems are published.
Unlike my Keatsian essays inspired by John Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne, or even my piece on the funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley, I want to conclude this brief essay on the bicentenary of Byron’s death not with lines from one of his poems or letters, but, instead, with a rather heartbreaking journal entry by Mary Shelley. On 15 May 1824, whilst working on The Last Man (1826), a dystopian novel that includes many allusions to both her beloved Percy as well as Byron, Mary first learned of Byron’s death and wrote the following lines in her journal:
This then was the coming event that cast its shadow on my last night’s miserable thoughts. Byron had become one of the people of the grave — that miserable conclave to which the beings I best loved belong. I knew him in the bright days of youth, when neither care nor fear had visited me — before death had made me feel my mortality, and the earth was the scene of my hopes. Can I forget our evening visits to Diodati? our excursions on the lake, when he sang the Tyrolese Hymn, and his voice was harmonised with winds and waves. Can I forget his attentions and consolations to me during my deepest misery? Never.
Beauty sat on his countenance and power beamed from his eye. His faults being, for the most part, weaknesses, induced one readily to pardon them.
Albé — the dear, capricious, fascinating Albé — has left this desert world! God grant I may die young! A new race is springing about me. At the age of twenty-six I am in the condition of an aged person. All my old friends are gone, I have no wish to form new. I cling to the few remaining; but they slide away, and my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world. “Life is the desert and the solitude — how populous the grave” — and that region — to the dearer and best beloved beings which it has torn from me, now adds that resplendent spirit whose departure leaves the dull earth dark as midnight.