Lord byron gay
It’s July 5 1807. A drunk and tearful juvenile man sits in his college rooms at Cambridge writing in a “chaos of hope and sorrow” to his childhood ally, Elizabeth Pigot. He has just parted with the one he calls his “Cornelian”, who he loves “more than any human being” – and he is pouring out his heart.
The young man is Lord Byron and his Cornelian is the Cambridge chorister John Edleston. He appears as “the Cornelian” in Byron’s prose writing, named for a tribute he had given Byron. Gift and giver were immortalised in Byron’s first poetry collection, Hours of Idleness (1807), and Byron wore the Cornelian chime till the end of his life. This month marks 200 years since his death in 1824.
Researching LGBTQ+ history often means attempting to uncover and reconstruct evidence that has been excluded or erased, searching for queer traces that are frequently secret, obscured or disguised.
The letter Byron wrote that darkness is a rare survivor, preserved, along with another written to Pigot’s mother after Edleston’s death, in the Newstead Abbey archive. They are fragments that gesture towards a larger story of teenage love affair, loss and early-19th century queer life.
To unearth homosexual history
Lord Byron
Byron: Life and Legend by Fiona MacCarthy (640pp, John Murray, £25) was published in 2001. The book evidences Byron's love for male youths: it was those beautiful boys, from Clare at Harrow to Edleston at Cambridge and all those nameless sloe-eyed Portuguese and Greek youths, who were at the real centre of Byron's erotic life[1].
Life
The son of army officer "Mad Jack" Byron, he inherited the title of Baron Byron of Rochdale from his great-uncle "the Wicked Lord" Byron at the age of 10. Despite being born with a deformed foot, he was very athletic, and swam the Hellespont from Europe to Asia in 1810. This is sometimes taken to be the birth of the sport of unlock water swimming.
In 1809–10 he went on the"grand
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‘Temperate I am, yet never had a temper,’ Byron wrote in the unfinished seventeenth canto of Don Juan, whose fragments he took with him on his final expedition to Greece in 1823:
Small-scale I am, though with some slight assurance,
Changeable too, yet somehow idem semper,
Patient, though not enamoured of endurance
Cheerful, but sometimes rather apt to whimper,
Mild, but at times a sort of Hercules furens,
So that I almost think that the alike skin
For one without has two or three within.
The picture is both strangely boastful and disarmingly self-mocking, the complacent self-assessment of a man confident in the interest with which others assess him. He baffled himself, sometimes happily, sometimes less so, and left his existence ‘a problem, like all things’ to his future biographers, who have portrayed him in almost as great variety as he portrayed himself. Most of these versions are more or less familiar, and more or less incompatible with each other: the melancholy misanthrope, the people’s champion, the arrogant peer, the male of action, the play-soldier, the fool of women, the bane of women, the gay star, the Romantic, the anti-Romantic. He wrote
Lord Byron
As famous for his scandalous intimate life as for his work, Byron was born on 22nd January 1788 in London and inherited the title Baron Byron from his great uncle at the age of 10.
He endured a chaotic childhood in Aberdeen, brought up by his schizophrenic mother and an abusive nurse. These experiences, plus the fact that he was born with a club foot, may include had something to do with his constant need to be loved, expressed through his many affairs with both men and women.
He was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge. It was at Harrow that he experienced his first love affairs with both sexes. In 1803 at the age of 15 he fell madly in love with his cousin, Mary Chaworth, who did not return his feelings. This unrequited passion was the basis for his works ‘Hills of Annesley’ and ‘The Adieu’.
Whilst at Trinity he experimented with love, discovered politics and fell into debt (his mother said he had a “reckless disregard for mone