Lord Byron

Born George Gordon Byron on January 22, 1788, at 16 Holles Street, London, the son of Captain "Mad Jack" Byron and Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress whose fortune his father quickly squandered. Byron was born with a clubfoot, likely a form of talipes equinovarus, that caused him anguish and self-consciousness throughout his life, despite his later fame for physical beauty. His father fled to France to escape creditors and died when George was three. In 1798, at age ten, the boy unexpectedly inherited the title of 6th Baron Byron and the ruined estate of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, a former Augustinian priory granted to the family by Henry VIII. He was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he kept a pet bear in his rooms because dogs were forbidden. His first major poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), published after a grand tour of the Mediterranean, made him the most famous poet in England overnight, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous," he reportedly said. Scandals accumulated: an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, persistent rumors of incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, a disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke that lasted barely a year. In 1816, hounded by debt and disgrace, he left England forever. He lived in Italy for seven years, writing his masterpiece Don Juan (1819-1824), a sprawling comic epic in ottava rima. In 1823, he sailed for Greece to join the war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. He died of fever on April 19, 1824, in Missolonghi, aged thirty-six. Greeks revere him as a national hero.