From Australian poetry to British murder mysteries, from the Nigerian sun to the winter of Chernobyl…
William Brighty Rands (1823 – 1882) was a prominent writer of nursery rhymes in the Victorian Era, one of the grandest ages of printing, when literature and books circulated with the rapidity and constant evolution of the modern social media meme. Thomas Hood (1799 – 1845), whom I’ll be profiling soon, was a prolific magazine contributor in the first half of the 19th century, writing for, among others, Punch. And Lord Byron – well, we know all about him already.
“He taught us little, but our soul
Has felt him.”
– Matthew Arnold on Byron, Memorial Verses (1850)
On Easter Monday 1824, Lord Byron – the most famous man who had ever lived – died in Greece, where he had given up the bulk of his fortune to help the natives fight their Ottoman oppressors, having left behind his poetic career and his lady love, seeking solace in the unrequited advances being made to his teenaged Greek page boy. (As previously discussed.) After a period of mourning in Greece, Byron’s body was embalmed (the key organs having been removed and placed in spirits for the journey) and sent by ship to his native England.
When the news had reached home, the English-speaking world fell into a shock. Tennyson – who was a boy of fifteen at the time – later reminisced: “Byron was dead! I thought the whole world was at an end. I thought everything was over and finished for everyone – that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked out alone, and carved “Byron is dead” into the sandstone.”
It was one of those moments where all who had experienced it would remember where they were for the rest of their lives. As described at the Cult of Byron website, the procession garnered countless mourners; Mary Shelley was among those who watched the hearse go by.
I recently explored the life of Lord Byron. It’s worth noting (after all, he didn’t make my top 400) that Byron was often considered the greatest of his generation. For me, while his work has a profound beauty and a classical tenor, the bulk of his works don’t resound down the ages for me as much as his contemporaries like Keats and Shelley. But he very much captures the zeitgeist, and the self-reliant, tortured hero of his epics can be found – the Byronic mode, one might say – in Pushkin and the Brontë sisters among others.
Byronmania was perhaps unprecedented. Says Harold Bloom: “No celebrity… can compete with Byron, archetype of notoriety, scandal and erotic variety – all of them mixed together in a polymorphously perverse brew and then distilled into superb poetry.”
Byron, like Beethoven, is one of the heroes. So many of the other young radicals – Wordsworth and Coleridge among them – went conservative later in life. Byron, instead, refused to give up his ideals. The poet left a memoir but his published infamously burned it to cover up some of the more shocking elements of his life. It’s deeply frustrating, but has left the field open for great biographers to sink their teeth in. And in terms of fictional approaches, I have heard good things about Benjamin Markovitz’s Byron trilogy.
Said Byron of himself: “I am such a strange melange of good and evil that it would be difficult to describe me.”
My pen is at the bottom of a page,
Which being finish’d, here the story ends;
‘Tis to be wish’d it had been sooner done,
But stories somehow lengthen when begun.
— Lord Byron, Beppo
George Gordon, Lord Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was born to a philandering, profligate army captain and his melancholic wife in thrall to his constant needs to money. His father died shortly after his birth, and Byron’s relationship with his mother was contentious. She would often withdraw him from school, and their relationship was one of verbal abuse on both sides. Byron appears to have had both male and female crushes in school. He was a very sexual, free-wheeling student while at Cambridge; studiousness seems to have been a low priority. Suffering from a congenital limp and a tendency toward fatness (he called himself the limping devil, le diable boiteux) , Byron was nevertheless an incredibly beautiful and appealing young man, who inspired the kind of rabid loyalty that would later lead him to unprecedented fame.
At 19, Byron published Hours of Idleness, his first volume of poetry, and he followed this in 1812 with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the result of which – he said – was that “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Byron was the toast of London, invited to all the best parties, a guest in the most elegant drawing-rooms and upper-crust gentleman’s clubs across town. In 1815, he married Annabella Millbanke, who soon bore him a daughter, Ada. The marriage ended only a year later, in part due to Byron’s growing debts, and partly due to rumours that Byron had engaged in an incestuous affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. In 1816, to avoid said debts, Byron left England – as it would turn out, for the last time.
400 Favourite Books 