Although a prodigy, sexually promiscuous, and pugnacious, Byron was a poetic genius who worked his gifts and himself hard. Before his early death, at age 36, he had conquered peaks of literature and renown that contemporaries who lived to twice his years viewed only on the horizon.
Byron’s character was formed by strong, conflicting currents; his turbulent childhood, his precocious wit, his sudden accession to wealth (or at least, its expectation), his startling good looks and his always-present-never-mentioned lameness.
After his drunken, gold-bricking, father had deserted them, George Gordon’s mother sometimes smothered her son with affection and generosity but, at other times, with rage and abuse. His scottish nurse, May Grey, terrorised her young charge with superstitious Calvanist tales of damnation and (according to Byron) beat him savagely before climbing into the bed to interfere with him sexually. The boy suffered physical assault too, for his lameness — not a “club foot” but a congenital dysplasia (withering) of the right calf and a foot that twisted inward — that a series of medical quacks tortured with useless “correcting” devices.
When eventually he was sent to a formal school (Harrow), he was treated kindly and even deferentially by the Masters. But Byron was a lazy student, reckless and disruptive. Although fiercely intelligent, and sporting — he was a great swimmer and despite his lameness played cricket for the school in the 1805 match against Eton — the school had to be dissuaded from sending him away in his final year for, among other misdeeds, composing a poem slandering the new headmaster.
It was only later, during his Cambridge years, that he showed he could settle into periods of steady, hard work, especially on poetry and drama that distracted him from feelings of guit and insecurity brought on by debt and sometimes mad indulgence.
Byron was sexually ‘ambidextrous’, taking both male and female lovers at university and later in a “gap year” spent in Greece (he was probably the victim, too, of a sexual assault by his noble tenant at Newstead Abbey, Lord Grey). Thanks, probably, to his Nurse’s abuse of the pre-teen Byron, was — as he acknowledged — sexually precocious. He was promiscuous, not predatory, but his attempts to manage his (unconscious?) need for both comfortable, unchallenging sexual intimacy and the thrill of illicit relations led to his social disgrace. Early in 1815 he married a woman he respected little and loved less chiefly to distract himself from a strong, mutual, intimate liaison with his pretty, adoring, older half-sister, Augusta Leigh. The marriage was a disaster, over shortly after the birth of his daughter, Ada, at the end of that same year.
For most of his life, Byron alternately over-indulged food and drink until he became fat and pudgy, then starved himself with bizarre diets or (after his first year at Cambridge) took up violent exercise with a pair of fashionable pugilists as personal trainers.
He hobbled when he walked or tried to run but he attempted to compensate his shame with feats of athletic bravado such as swimming the Hellespont, or along the Grand Canal at Venice. Or with feats of military adventure such as his final expedition to Greece where he funded a nationalist militia and died of disease (probably typhus) and barbarous medical treatment.
At Cambridge he became a religious sceptic. He was never openly agnostic but he valued science above religion where there was any conflict.
Troubled? Possibly. Neurotic? Of course; who would not be, saddled with his reputation, his belief in himself, his debts, his upbringing?
Dangerous? Chiefly to himself.
