Lord Byron’s life did not end at twenty-three, forcing him to put up with the pains of life as an eighteenth-century celebrity. “How very disagreeable it is to be so stared at!” he once complained. “I pay the price of passing through the town, and exposing myself to the gazing multitudes.”
Novelist Lady Blessington, who spoke at length with Byron, wrote, “There were days when he seemed more pleased than displeased at being followed and stared at. When gay, he attributed the attention he excited to the true case—admiration of his genius. But when in a less good-natured humor, he looked on the spotlight as an impertinent curiosity, caused by the scandalous histories circulated against him.” He also “suffered from” an unending deluge of fan letters, the “anonymous amatory letters and portraits” that he received from his adoring fans. Byron nonchalantly dismissed them, confessing to Blessington that he “has never noticed any of them”—the women or the letters, one cannot be sure.
Byron did, however, have a thing for his admirers’ hair. Like a child tossing aside the birthday card and ripping open the wrapped present, Byron plundered his fan letters for the locks of hair that women routinely sent him. He catalogued more than one hundred locks of hair in envelopes meticulously labeled with the women’s names.
One of the most notorious additions to his hair collection was Lady Caroline Lamb, a married aristocrat with whom he had a brief and fiery affair. Rumors spread that the fair Lady Lamb had herself delivered naked on a serving tray to Byron’s dining room. Pleased with what he saw, Byron indulged himself with Lamb—repeatedly, and with great passion. Lamb was a writer as well, and they seemed like the perfect intellectual and physical match. (Her husband apparently didn’t give either of them pause.) Their affair was cut short, however, when Lamb let on that she was in love with the notoriously commitment-phobic lord. “I will kneel and be torn from your feet before I will give you up,” Lamb wrote to him. Byron immediately dumped her.
Lady Caroline Lamb refused to give up on her quarry. She would “make” him love her, she said, and sent Byron a lock of her pubic hair as a ploy to get him back. “I cut the hair too close and bled,” she wrote in an accompanying letter.
Byron was amused at Lamb’s attempts to rekindle their romance. He responded with the taunt “Any woman can make a man in love with her, but show me her who can keep him so!” Byron sent her a lock of hair—not from his own head, but from the head of Lady Oxford, another of his many lovers. Then Byron promptly married Lamb’s cousin, Anne Isabella Milbanke. He was in desperate need of the property and influx of cash his new bride would bring, but he was none too eager to wed. “I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness,” he wrote. Although Lamb pledged to buy a pistol and kill herself in front of Byron and his new bride, she instead sent them a letter of congratulations. Lamb was nothing if not polite.
Unsurprisingly, Byron’s lifestyle of “bling, booze, and groupie sex” proved to be incompatible with married life. His unhappiness reached its apex when his wife gave birth to their first and only child, and he proclaimed that he was in hell. He had predicted as much years earlier when, plotting his poem Don Juan, he contemplated whether his hero should “end in hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest.”
His wife may have preferred eternal damnation.
During his first and only year of wedded bliss, Byron engaged in several trysts with other men and women. He also impregnated his own half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron carried a curl of his half-sister’s chestnut hair with him, writing on an accompanying piece of paper that she was “the one I most loved.” But that gesture wasn’t conspicuous enough for Byron, who had identical gold brooches fashioned for himself and his sister using locks of their hair. Byron even invited Augusta on his honeymoon with Anne—she politely declined—and moved in with his sister at one point, all to his wife’s horror. After they separated, Anne discovered further evidence of her husband’s depravity: a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine.
Anne was granted a legal separation from Byron just a year into their marriage. She was not going to stand by her man, as Sade’s wife had done. In addition to the charges of incest, Anne alleged that her husband had sodomized her—a far more serious crime in the eyes of the law, punishable by death.
Byron’s only friend during this difficult time was his trusty vial of Black Drop, an opium compound that calmed his nerves and numbed his emotions. He fled England to avoid the ensuing scandal and possible legal ramifications of his actions. “I was unfit for England; England was unfit for me,” he wrote, later telling Lady Blessington, “Nothing so completely serves to demoralise a man as the certainty that he has lost the sympathy of his fellow creatures; it breaks the last tie that binds him to humanity.”
Byron contemplated publicly rebuking his wife’s allegations, but declared such a crusade hopeless. “Our laws are bound to think a man innocent until he is proved to be guilty, but our English society condemns him before trial,” he said. “I was thought a devil, because Lady Byron was allowed to be an angel. There are neither angels nor devils on earth.” Of course, the real reason Byron did not try to refute her charges was that the truth was indisputable.
And so Byron set off for foreign shores with his entourage of animals and trusty pistols. He had places to go, people to do...
5
The Romantics
“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”
—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) were among the few contemporaries whom Byron ever considered friends. “Poets have no friends,” Lord Byron once said. “We sometimes agree to have a violent friendship for each other, but we do not deceive each other.”
Much like Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley had been characterized by his temperamental behavior as a child. Despite being a withdrawn and quiet bookworm, Shelley was prone to fits of rage when provoked. His classmates loved to torment him by pelting him with mud, pointing at him and chanting his name, and, most unforgivably, knocking his books from his hands. After one bully taunted him, a teenaged Shelley slammed a fork through the tormentor’s hand. Such occasional violent outbursts earned him the nickname “Mad Shelley.”
Shelley’s father, a wealthy landowner, sent his son to University College, Oxford. While there, Shelley wrote and published two gothic novels and a book of poetry without much success before cowriting and distributing a pamphlet titled “The Necessity of Atheism.” The self-published manifesto did not go over well with university officials, who promptly expelled Shelley after he refused to admit his authorship. After some arm twisting by Shelley’s father, the administration agreed to let the young author back on campus under one condition: that he recant his atheist views. Shelley refused to compromise, an act of defiance that led to a falling-out between father and son.
Following his abbreviated university career, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen-year-old friend of his younger sister. Harriet came from a poor family, which outraged Shelley’s father. The division between father and son widened, and Shelley was cut off from his allowance as a result. The newlyweds were poor, but Shelley wrote in a letter that they would “live on love.” In truth, he lived on borrowed funds from moneylenders, who either were unaware his father had cut ties with him or were confident the inheritance he received after his father passed away would cover the loans.
Shelley continued writing and self-publishing pamphlets, often distributing them in unorthodox manners, such as sailing them inside bottles or as paper boats over water and releasing them into the skies inside balloons. Around this time, Shelley began using laudanum to control panic attacks. Strung out on opium, with no money to speak of, Shelley was a frightful caricature of the proverbial starving artist. His wife, raising their firstborn child and pregnant with another, moved back in with her parents.
Shelley missed his wife so much that he
fell in love with another woman. The new object of his heart’s desire was Mary Godwin, the sixteen-year-old daughter of novelist William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (who had died just days after giving birth to her daughter). The Godwin household was an ideal situation for a literary young mind: as a child, Mary Godwin had hid behind the family sofa and listened to Samuel Coleridge recite his opium-inspired poetry to her parents. Prophetically, Mary’s mother had once written, “Many innocent girls become the dupes of a sincere, affectionate heart, and are ruined before they know the difference between virtue and vice.” Little did she know that her words would one day apply to her own daughter, who fell head over heels for Shelley.
Godwin forbid his daughter from seeing Shelley; Harriet tried to assert herself, warning Mary to stay away from her husband. Even so, there would be no keeping them apart. Shelley showed up on Mary’s doorstep with laudanum and a pistol on July 28, 1814. In good times, he looked “wild and unearthly, like a demon risen that moment out of the ground.” That night, he may have very well appeared to be the Devil himself. Against the backdrop of a raging thunderstorm, Shelley threatened to take his own life if they couldn’t be together. Mary relented and ran off with her suicidal lover. Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, joined them on the run.
The trio sailed from England to mainland Europe. Shelley swam naked in streams while the stepsisters gazed on admiringly. Life was grand. Although Claire at first seemed like a third wheel, they were fortunate to bring her along: when they crossed France on foot, Mary’s stepsister was the only one who could speak French. They were having such a great time, in fact, that Shelley wrote a letter to his wife, asking her to join them. Harriet, still pregnant, declined.
The trio ended their trek in Switzerland. They had no money; they were homesick. After six weeks they returned home. Shelley immediately got to work setting up a second family with Mary. In 1815, she gave birth to a girl, who died within a few weeks. They had another child the following winter. He made no attempt to reconcile with his wife. “To promise forever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed,” Shelley once wrote. His estranged wife continued to raise their children, but had no recourse in the British legal system to extricate herself from the marriage.
In May 1816, Shelley and Mary (“Mrs. Shelley” on hotel ledgers) traveled to Switzerland with their infant son to meet Lord Byron, who was in self-imposed exile from England. The Shelleys rented a house near Byron’s on Lake Geneva for the summer. Once again, Claire tagged along. Her arrival was unwelcome news for Byron: months earlier, a chance encounter between Claire and Byron had resulted in her becoming pregnant. He likely never expected or wished to see her again. “I never loved her nor pretended to love her,” Byron wrote. “But a man is a man—and if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night ...” Well, what could he do? Their reunion at Lake Geneva was mostly free of drama, although the shit hit the fan after Claire gave birth later in the year. Against Claire’s wishes, Byron placed their daughter, Allegra, in foster care, where she died of a fever five years later. Claire never forgave Byron. She would later say that Byron had given her ten minutes of pleasure for a lifetime of pain.
But let’s return to happier times. On June 16, 1816, Shelley, Mary, Claire, Byron, and Byron’s doctor, John Polidori, capped off an evening by the lakeside by sitting around a campfire, telling ghost stories. Byron kicked things off by reciting Coleridge’s supernatural poem Christabel. Shelley, frightened out of his mind, thought he saw a pair of eyes opening in Mary’s breasts. He screamed in terror and fled. After Shelley returned and thoroughly inspected Mary’s bosom, Byron suggested that each of them write their own story of the supernatural.
Later that night, Mary was awakened by a dream. “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion,” she wrote. With her husband’s careful editorial eye and encouragement, Mary fleshed her dream out into a full novel. She was only nineteen, but she had writing in her blood. The resulting novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was widely seen as an allegory for the Enlightenment. “I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth,” Victor Frankenstein laments in its pages.
Reality soon interrupted Shelley and Mary’s placid lake holiday. Byron hadn’t been able to relax in Switzerland: he was still under the public’s watchful eye—literally, as curiosity seekers with telescopes, eager for a glimpse of the scandalous poet in action, watched his every move. He bid Shelley (and his unborn child) adieu and left for Italy. Then Mary learned that her twenty-two-year-old half-sister, Fanny Godwin, had checked herself into a hotel room and fatally overdosed on laudanum.
In December, there was further bad news: Shelley’s estranged wife Harriet, pregnant from an affair of her own that had gone sour, had thrown herself into the freezing waters of the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. Authorities fished her body out of the water on December 10; twenty days later, Shelley and Mary tied the knot. Their haste was warranted, for legal purposes. Shelley wanted custody of his children and hoped that having a legitimate household with a husband and wife would help him sway the court’s opinion.
Unfortunately, the court ultimately awarded custody of the children to foster parents on grounds of Shelley’s unrepentant atheism. Shelley had done himself no favors by waving his atheist flag proudly at a time when England was predominately Christian. He was fond of signing his name in hotel ledgers with the addendum “democrat, great lover of mankind, and atheist.” The Shelleys had two children of their own over the next five years.
In 1818, the Shelleys moved from England to Italy, where Shelley planned to start a radical journal called The Liberal with Byron and one of his chief supporters, Leigh Hunt. The trio envisioned a controversial, groundbreaking collaboration.
Shelley’s health, however, took a severe downturn in 1820. Although he had always been prone to hypochondria and disturbed moods, his mind showed signs of rapid deterioration. Shelley believed he encountered his doppelganger one evening on his house’s terrace. “How long do you mean to be content?” his ghostly twin asked him. A visitor described Shelley as “tall, emaciated, stooping, with grey streaks in his hair.” The Shelleys were reeling from the deaths of their son, Will, in 1818 and their daughter, Clara, in 1819.
Shelley’s hallucinations continued for the next several years. He was troubled by visions of a naked child rising out of the sea, clapping its hands. Things took a violent turn when Shelley awoke in the middle of the night to find his hands clenched around Mary’s neck, strangling the life from her. (It’s not clear whether this was his imagination or if he actually tried to kill his wife in his sleep.) All of this, the superstitious Shelley believed, foretold his death in some way.
On July 8, 1822, less than a month before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley drowned at sea.
While some speculate that he committed suicide or was attacked by pirates, the historical record tells a less fanciful tale: Shelley had been sailing with two shipmates from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, Don Juan (a nod to Byron), when a storm overtook them and sank the boat. All three men onboard drowned.
Shelley’s body was cremated in a funeral pyre on a beach. (His friends weren’t being dramatic—this was a quarantine regulation made necessary by the plague.) Mary Shelley did not attend, as it was the custom that women not attend funerals at the time. Byron very nearly saved his friend’s skull, though it fell to pieces before he could snag it from the flames. According to one legend almost too gruesome to be believed, Shelley’s friend Edward Trelawny is said to have snatched Shelley’s heart from the funeral pyre before it was set ablaze. An envelope allegedly containing the ashes of Shelley’s heart was discovered among his daughter-in-law’s possessions and is now buried at the family vault.
Shelley’s final, unfinished poem was ironically called “The Triumph o
f Life.” A London newspaper reported, “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned. Now he knows whether there is a God or no.”
But Shelley’s story doesn’t end there: according to Lady Blessington, the poet “had an implicit belief in ghosts. Byron also told me that Mr. Shelley’s specter had appeared to a lady, walking in a garden, and he seemed to lay great stress on this. I was at first doubtful that Byron was serious in his belief as he assumes a grave and mysterious air when he talks on the subject.”
In the wake of Shelley’s death, his widow, Mary Shelley, continued to write. She did her feminist mother proud: Mary became well-known in her time as a short-story writer, novelist, and political writer. She succumbed to a brain tumor at the age of fifty-three.
When novelist Lady Blessington met Lord Byron in 1823, the year after his friend Percy Shelley’s death, she found him a broken man. “The impression of the first few minutes disappointed me, as I had, both from the portraits and descriptions given, conceived a different idea of him,” she wrote in her journal. “I had fancied him taller, with a more dignified and commanding air; and I looked in vain for the hero-looking sort of person with whom I had so long identified him in imagination.” His nose was well shaped but “a little too thick,” she continued, and his coat and garments were ill-fitting and worn. By this time Byron had been in exile from his homeland some four years.
He was still on the run—from his critics, from his ex-wife, from the law, from everyone. Following a failed love affair with a married Italian countess, Byron declared himself “done with women. For though only thirty-six, I feel sixty in mind, and am less capable than ever of those nameless attentions that all women require. I like solitude, which has become absolutely necessary to me.”
Despite such melodramatic declarations of loving solitude, the truth was that his exile from England had only served to deepen his depression. Writing to his friend, the poet Thomas Moore, Byron said, “I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her.” Perhaps a bit more honestly, he wrote that he had thought about killing himself on occasion but was “too lazy” to shoot himself.
Literary Rogues Page 4
