Byron (of Rochdale), George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron known as Lord Byron 1788-1824
English poet of Scottish antecedents

Byron was born in London, the grandson of naval officer John Byron, and the son of Captain 'Mad Jack' Byron (1756-91) and Catherine Gordon of Gight, Aberdeen, a Scottish heiress. He was lame from birth, and this together with his early years in the shabby surroundings and the violent temper of his deserted mother produced a repression in him which is thought to explain many of his later actions. In 1798 he succeeded to the title on the death of his great-uncle.

He was educated at Aberdeen grammar school, then privately at Dulwich and at Harrow School, and went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1805, where he read much, swam and boxed, and led a dissipated life. An early collection of poems under the title Hours of Idleness was badly received, and Byron replied with his powerful Popian satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). He then set out on a grand tour, visiting Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece, and the Aegean, returning after two years with 'a great many stanzas in Spenser's measure relative to the countries he had visited'; these appeared under the title of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812 and were widely popular. This was followed by a series of oriental pieces, including the Giaour (1813), Lara (1814) and the Siege of Corinth (1816).

During this time he dramatized himself as a man of mystery, a gloomy romantic figure, derived from the popular fiction of the day and not least from Childe Harold. He became the darling of London society, and lover of Lady Caroline Lamb, and gave to Europe the concept of the 'Byronic hero'. In 1815 he married an heiress, Anne Isabella Milbanke, who left him in 1816 after the birth of a daughter, Ada (later Countess of Lovelace). He was also suspected of a more than brotherly love for his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and was ostracized. He left for the Continent, travelled through Belgium and the Rhine country to Switzerland, where he met Percy Bysshe Shelley, and on to Venice and Rome, where he wrote the last canto of Childe Harold (1817). He spent two years in Venice and there met the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, who became his mistress.

Some of his best works belong to this period, including Beppo (1818), A Vision of Judgment (1822) and the satirical Don Juan (1819-24), written in a new metre (ottava rima) and in an informal conversational manner which enabled him to express the whole of his complex personality. He gave active help to the Italian revolutionaries and founded with Leigh Hunt a short-lived journal, The Liberal. In 1823 he joined the Greek insurgents who had risen against the Turks, and died of marsh fever at Missolonghi.

His body was brought back to England and buried at Hucknall Torkard in Nottingham. His reputation declined after his death despite the championship of Matthew Arnold. On the Continent he had a far-reaching influence both as the creator of the 'Byronic hero' and as the champion of political liberty, leaving his mark on such writers as Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Giacomo Leopardi, Heinrich Heine, Jos� de Espronceda, Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.

Bibliography: Phyllis Grosskurth, Byron: The Flawed Angel (1997), which draws on the Lovelace Papers; P Quennell, Byron: A Portrait in his Own Words (1989) and Byron (1967); S Coote, Byron: The Making of a Myth (1988).