George Gordon Byron was born in London
at 16 Holles Street, Cavendish Square, on the 22nd of January,
1788. The Byrons were of Norman stock, but
the founder of the
family was Sir John Byron, who entered into possession of the priory and
lands of Newstead in the county of Nottingham in 1540. From him it
descended to a great grandson. The first Lord Byron died
childless, and was succeeded by his brother Richard and was succeeded by his great-nephew, the poet. Admiral the Hon. John Byron
(q.v.) was the poet’s grandfather. His eldest son, Captain John Byron,
the poet’s father, was a libertine by choice and in an eminent degree.
He caused to be divorced, and married (1779) as his first wife, the
marchioness of Carmarthen (born Amelia D’Arcy), Baroness Conyers in her
own right. One child of the marriage survived, the Hon. Augusta Byron
(1783 - 1851), the poet’s half-sister, who, in 1807, married her first
cousin, Colonel George Leigh.
His second marriage to Catherine Gordon
(b. 1765) took place at Bath on the I3th of
May 1785. He is said to have squandered the fortunes of both wives. It
is certain that Gight was sold to pay his debts (1786), and that the
sole provision for his wife was a settlement of £3000. It was an
unhappy marriage. There was an attempt at living together in France,
and, when this failed, Mrs. Byron returned to Scotland. On her way
thither she gave birth to a son, christened George Gordon after his
maternal grandfather, who was descended from Sir William Gordon of Gight, grandson of James
I of Scotland. After a while her husband
rejoined her, but went back to France and died at Valenciennes on the
2nd of August 1791. His wife was not a bad woman, but she was not a good
mother. Vain and capricious, passionate and self indulgent, she
mismanaged her son from his infancy, now provoking him by her foolish
fondness, and now exciting his contempt by her paroxysms of impotent
rage. She neither looked nor spoke like a gentlewoman; but in the
conduct of her affairs she was praiseworthy. She hated and avoided debt,
and when relief came she spent
most of it upon her son. Fairly well educated, she was not without a
taste for books, and her letters are sensible and to the point. But the
violence of her temper was abnormal. Her father committed suicide, and
it is possible that she inherited a tendency to mental derangement. If
Byron owed anything to his parents it was a plea for pardon.
The poet’s first years were spent in lodgings at Aberdeen. From 1794
to 1798 he attended the grammar school, “threading all classes” till he
reached the fourth. It was a good beginning, a solid foundation,
enabling him from the first to keep a hand over his talents and to turn
them to a set purpose. He was lame from his birth. His right leg and
foot, possibly both feet, were contracted by infantile paralysis, and,
to strengthen his muscles, his mother sent him in the summers of 1796,
1797 to a farm house on Deeside. He walked with difficulty, but he
wandered at will, soothed and inspired by the grandeur of the scenery.
To his Scottish upbringing he owed his love of mountains, his love and
knowledge of the Bible, and too much Calvinism for faith or unfaith in
Christianity. The death of his great-uncle (May 19, 1798) placed him in
possession of the title and estates. Early in the autumn Mrs Byron traveled
south with her son and his nurse, and for a time made her home
at Newstead Abbey. Byron was old enough to know what had befallen him.
"It was a change from a shabby Scotch flat to a palace," a half ruined
palace, indeed, but his very own. It was a proud moment, but in a few
weeks he was once more in lodgings. The shrunken leg did not improve,
and acting on bad advice his mother entrusted him to the care of a quack
named Lavender, truss-maker to the general hospital at Nottingham. His
nurse who was in charge of him maltreated him, and the quack tortured
him to no purpose. At his own request he read Virgil and Cicero with a
tutor.
In August 1799 he was sent to a preparatory school at
Dulwich. The
master, Dr Glennie, perceived that the boy liked reading for its own
sake and gave him the free run of his library. He read a set of the
British Poets from beginning to end more than once. This, too, was an
initiation and a preparation. He remained at Dulwich tifi April 1801,
when, on his mother’s intervention, he was sent to Harrow. His school
days, 1801 - 1805, were fruitful in two respects. He learned enough Latin
and Greek to make him a classic, if not a classical scholar, and he made
‘friends with his equals and superiors. He learned something of his own
worth and of the worth of others. “ My school-friendships,” he says,
“were with me passions.” Two of his closest friends died young, and from
Lord Clare, whom he loved best of all, he was separated by
chance and circumstance. He was an odd mixture, now lying dreaming
on his favorite tombstone in the churchyard, now the ring-leader in
whatever mischief was afoot. He was a record swimmer, and, in spite of
his lameness, enough of a cricketer to play for his school at Lord’s,
and yet he found time to read and master standard works of history and
biography, and to acquire more general knowledge than boys and masters
put together.
In the midsummer of 1803, when he was in his sixteenth year, he fell
in love, once for all, with his distant relative, Mary Anne Chaworth, a
"minor heiress" of the hall and park of Annesley which marches with
Newstead. Two years his senior, she was already engaged to a neighboring
squire. There were meetings half-way between Newstead and Annesley, of which she thought little and he only too much. What was
sport to the girl was death to the boy, and when at length he realized
the "hopelessness of his attachment," he was " thrown out," as he said,
"alone, on a wide, wide sea." She is the subject of at least five of
his early poems, including the pathetic stanzas, Hills of Annesley,
and there are allusions to his love story in Childe Harold
and in The Dream (1816).
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