Life & Background
George Gordon Byron was born in London in 1788, inherited the barony at ten, and grew up with a club foot he was acutely conscious of throughout his life. Cambridge, a Grand Tour through Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece, and the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812 made him famous overnight — his own account was that he awoke one morning and found himself famous. Scandal followed the fame: an unhappy marriage to Annabella Milbanke, rumours of an affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, and a permanent departure from England in 1816. He lived in Switzerland, where the ghost-story contest with the Shelleys produced Frankenstein, then in Italy. He joined the Greek war of independence and died of fever at Missolonghi in 1824, aged thirty-six.
Don Juan
An epic satire in ottava rima that inverts the legend: rather than a predatory seducer, Juan is a passive, good-looking young man whom women pursue. Discovered in an affair with a married woman in Seville, he is sent abroad, shipwrecked in a famous and grimly comic episode involving cannibalism, and washed up on a Greek island where he loves Haidée, the daughter of a pirate. He is sold into slavery in Constantinople, smuggled into a harem in women's clothes, escapes to the Russian siege of Ismail, becomes a favourite of Catherine the Great, and is dispatched to England, where the poem turns its satire on English society. Byron died with the poem unfinished at seventeen cantos.
Don Juan works by digression: the narrator constantly interrupts his own story to comment on politics, poets, marriage, and himself, so that the poem's real subject becomes the movement of a sceptical intelligence. The ottava rima stanza, with its closing couplet, is used to puncture — the first six lines build sentiment, the last two demolish it. This is where Byron separates himself from Romanticism as usually defined: he admired Pope, distrusted Wordsworthian solemnity, and mocked his contemporaries by name in the Dedication. Against this stands the Byronic hero of the earlier verse tales — proud, isolated, carrying a nameless guilt, contemptuous of social norms — a figure that passes into Emily Brontë's Heathcliff, Melville's Ahab, and modern popular fiction.
Why Byron Matters
Byron created the first genuinely European literary celebrity and a character type that outlived his own reputation. He was, in the nineteenth century, the most influential English writer on the Continent, admired by Goethe and Pushkin and adopted as a figure of political liberation. His satirical verse offers the strongest counter-argument to any tidy definition of Romanticism, which makes him useful in examination answers that need to complicate the movement rather than summarise it.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage1812–18
- The Giaour1813
- The Corsair1814
- Manfred1817
- Beppo1818
- Don Juan1819–24
- The Vision of Judgment1822