Lord Byron: Even for the 19th Century, His Rapey, Incestuous Life was Next-Level White Male Privilege

The abysmal injustices perpetrated by men against women have a long, dispiriting history.

The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree
I planted,—they have torn me,—and I bleed:
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

I have an unseemly obsession with a small group of 19th century writers and poets known as the British Romantics, specifically John Keats (1795-1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), his wife Mary Shelley (1797-1851), and yes, George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron (1788-1824).

Technically, the writing of Mary Shelley, the only prose purveyor of the group, exhibits characteristics of both Gothicism and Romanticism, but I’m not here to split hairs. Hers was a remarkable and precocious talent that extended far beyond Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (which she authored at the age of nineteen). In fact, I wrote about the Shelleys’ tragic and tumultuous lives in this previous Cappuccino.

But it is George Gordon, Lord Byron I want to talk about, not only because it annoys me that his sexual depravity is conveniently brushed aside in our rush to praise his literary genius, but because it sometimes feels as though I, too, am willing to overlook it.

Why?

When disgraced movie producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein was hauled off to jail, I cheered. Director Woody Allen? I’ll never watch another movie of his. Even before it went public that Allen had molested his adopted daughter, I was appalled by self-reverential, hebephiliac offerings like Manhattan, which featured Mariel Hemingway in the role of Tracy, a 17-year-old girl who starts dating Allen, a twice-divorced, 42-year-old television comedy writer. Blech.

Caravaggio was a murderer, which I blithely gloss over in in this article. Picasso’s psychological and emotional abuse, best exemplified by his quote, “To make a dove, you must first wring its neck,” led his lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, to take their own lives—or perhaps more to the point, what was left of their own lives after Picasso’s cruel and unrelenting misogyny. Yet I concede that much of Picasso’s work continues to hold me spellbound, even though I refuse, on principle, to fork over twenty bucks to go see any of his exhibits.

When one of my favorite TV directors, Joss Whedon, was exposed as a lying, philandering, gaslighting, rage-a-holic scumbag, I gave his seminal work, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a hard pass for about six months. Then I remembered that there was a lot more to that series than just Joss Whedon.

So, yes, I realize that applying a purity test to any artist is not only foolish, it is also unfair. What do someone’s creative accomplishments have to do with their immorality as a human being? And yet who among us can “overlook” rap impresario R. Kelly’s predations on preteen girls and simply enjoy his music? Are you going to be watching reruns of The Cosby Show anytime soon?

You see the problem.

Regarding my reluctant admiration for the work of Lord Byron, I might be tempted to say that overlaying a palimpsest of “woke” 21st-century cultural norms on a wealthy 19th-century poet is the very definition of stupid, but it’s not my own ethical compass I’m referring to here: it’s his. Byron knew his actions were wrong; otherwise, he wouldn’t have gone to so much effort to conceal them.

In her spectacular biography, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, Benita Eisler writes, “[Byron’s] spirits quickened with a wild sense of transgression—of crossing boundaries before which others quailed.” That was certain true of his predilection for children. Byron, himself a victim of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a drunken nursemaid, went to a famous French entremetteuse who assisted gentlemen in their exotic tastes. Her letter to him offering these services is a study in obfuscation and innuendo, which Byron knew was absoluely necessary.

Byron’s emotionally abusive and volatile mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight

Years later, Byron was caught by his mistress, Lady Oxford, while attempting to force himself on her eleven-year-old daughter. Then there was a fourteen-year-old boy named Nicolo Giraud, Byron’s lover for several years, to whom Byron tried to bequeath £7,000 in his will before changing his mind. Byron became involved with a number of boys during his time in Venice, but eventually settled on Loukas Chalandritsanos, age 15, who was with him when he contracted the fever that killed him in Missolonghi, Greece, on April 19, 1824. Before him, there was Robert Rushton, a page in his mid-teens, and a raft of poor, impossibly young prostitutes, one of whom miscarried his child in a London hotel.

These were, perhaps, the least of his sins. Byron’s sexual and romantic obsession with Augusta Leigh, his paternal half-sister, was one of the reasons he was forced to leave England and never returned. She bore him a daughter, Elizabeth Medora Leigh (“Medora” was a reference to a character in one of Byron’s poems), and possibly a second child, which were passed off as the progeny of her husband, Colonel Leigh. Byron’s involvement in that incestuous relationship made it nearly impossible for him to form any proper attachment to his wife, Annabella Noel, (because of her aptitude for math, Byron referred to her as his “Princess of Parallelograms”) whom he subjected to a barrage of shocking and drunken abuse.

Annabella Noel, Lady Byron by Charles Hayter

“As soon as we got into the carriage, his countenance changed to gloom and defiance,” Annabella recalled fourteen months after their wedding day. Biographer Benita Eisler continues her story: “When their coach passed through Durham and the ‘joy bells’ pealed in their honor, Byron began singing and ranting. By refusing his offer of marriage two years earlier, Annabella had doomed him to nameless tragedy; he had only married her now to ‘outwit’ her and exact his revenge,” expressing impatience for her relations to die so she could inherit. “Now that I’ve got you in my power, I’ll make you feel it,” Byron reportedly told his young bride.

His revenge entailed inviting his sister, Augusta, to stay with them, shouting at Annabella, reviling her, and well into her pregnancy, attempting to viciously rape her. He slept in the bedroom beneath hers and threw objects at the ceiling to keep her awake, merely out of spite. In later years, Byron ruefully admitted that Annabella had been a faultless wife, but their marriage had unleashed a demon in him.

Augusta Leigh, half-sister and lover of Lord Byron

Byron, who felt himself entitled to anything and anyone, was shocked when after a year of marriage, his wife finally took their newborn daughter, Ada, and moved back in with her parents. Annabella’s efforts to blacken his reputation were met with great success, especially since Byron was carrying on with an actress at this point, and shortly thereafter the step-sister of Mary Shelley, a seventeen-year-old girl named Claire Clairmont, with whom he had another illegitimate child.

An admirer of the Marquis de Sade’s work, Byron inflicted every known torment he could on his wife. Her retaliation was not only personal, it was a defense maneuver to prevent him from taking her daughter. Not until The Custody of Infants Act of 1839 were women allowed to retain custody of their own children—and even then, only till the age of seven. Annabella didn’t possess the legal right to divorce Byron, instead settling for a loophole of “amicable” separation available only to the very wealthy.

Did Lord Byron likely suffer from bipolar disorder? Yes. Was he a violent alcoholic? Given his family history, again, I’d say yes. Was he gay, straight, bisexual, or pedophilic? Here, I would say yes and no. Byron was a depraved pansexual whose craving for transgressive sexual experiences led him down some very dark roads. As an obscenely wealthy English nobleman, he felt entitled to whatever body he chose—or could afford. When sober, he was proud, yet sensitive, painfully self-conscious of his physical deformity, a clubbed right foot.

He also wrote some of the most magnificent poetry in the English language. Here is an example from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, Canto IV:

In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone -- but Beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade -- but Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!

Or, arguably this, his most famous poem:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace

Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Unlike his friend and contemporary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron enjoyed enormous popularity in his own lifetime. If anything, his dissolute lifestyle and resulting exile burnished his reputation at home as a heartbroken, defiant, melancholy nomad. His fondness for animals, however, amusingly described here by Shelley, was the stuff of legend:

"Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom … at 12. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine forest which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it… . [P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … . I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes."

Per Wikipedia: “In 1969, 145 years after Byron's death, a memorial to him was finally placed in Westminster Abbey. The memorial had been lobbied for since 1907: The New York Times wrote, "People are beginning to ask whether this ignoring of Byron is not a thing of which England should be ashamed ... a bust or a tablet might be put in the Poets' Corner and England be relieved of ingratitude toward one of her really great sons."

A great poet? Few could argue that Byron wasn’t. But a “really great son” is something else, and that’s exactly where I find myself stuck between these horns of dilemma—my abhorrence of his actions and my appreciation for his poetry.

Do the centuries grant some kind of magical absolution? Is that why it’s harder for me to forgive contemporaries like Allen and Weinstein than it is Byron and Caravaggio?

Honestly, I don’t know. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Feel free to chime in below.