George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) is a “Romantic poet.” That tells us little, for Romanticism meant different things to different poets. For Wordsworth it was the morality of mountains, for Coleridge metaphysical musings, for Keats the stimulation of the senses. For Byron it was luxuriating in secret sins. The “Byronic hero”—Childe Harold, the Giaour, Manfred—is dark, brooding, and thrillingly wicked, all the more so in that we are never quite sure what he has done. As Fiona MacCarthy shows in this splendid book, that applied to Byron himself in his lifetime. Byron: Life and Legend was published in Britain by John Murray, seventh in line from Byron’s own publisher of that name (the house has now, alas, been bought out by a conglomerate). Successive Murrays imposed censorship on Byron’s biographers, from the first, Thomas Moore in 1830, to Leslie Marchand in the 1950s. MacCarthy has worked under no such restrictions, and she has drawn on extensive manuscript and archive materials, some of them still kept at Murray’s London office. The result is racy and colorful, bursting with vitality and transmitting a real sense of the Regency, a period of British history distinguished by its combination of the extravagant, the exhibitionist, and the tawdry, a weird interval between the demise of Augustan order and the descent of the Victorian carapace of respectability.

For a future luminary of the Regency, Byron could hardly have had a better, or worse, start. He was born with a deformed right foot which inflicted psychological as well as physical pain; his father, “Mad Jack” Byron, died, possibly by his own hand, when the boy was three, and his relations with his feckless mother were tense; his upbringing was a mixture of strict Calvinism, brutality, and licentiousness. He was certainly abused physically, and possibly sexually, by his nurse; he was initially mocked for his lameness and backwardness at Harrow, his public school; he may have been seduced, when a teenager, by the (male) tenant of his ancestral home, Newstead Abbey; he had a series of relationships, not all platonic, with fellow-schoolboys; as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, he fell in love with a fifteen-year-old chorister, John Edleston, the addressee of his poem “To Thyrza”:

Whether or not it did is left delicately ambiguous, but there is nothing rakish in the tone here. When Edleston died of consumption in 1811, aged twenty-one, Byron was heartbroken. At his death he was still wearing a ring the boy had given him.

Byron’s psychosexual coordinates were fixed by these experiences.

Byron’s psychosexual coordinates were fixed by these experiences: his hatred of religious hypocrisy and cant, his combined yearning for, and fear of, emotional commitment, his suspicion of predatory females, his excitement at the amatory chase and his boredom after the capture. Reversing the emphasis of previous biographies, MacCarthy plausibly argues that Byron’s crucial relationships were with boys rather than women. Psychologically this would be, I suggest, because he associated the boys with his memories of himself first as a victim, then as a protector/patron, whereas his defining experiences with women (his mother and his nurse) cast them as untrustworthy exploiters. His later incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta is a symbolic exaction of revenge for this, while equally demonstrating his dependence on the familiar and “safe.” The boys in his life called forth feelings of tenderness, gentleness, admiration for fragile innocence, which were never unlocked by women. (Not that one should be too high-minded; Byron was physically active with both sexes.)

Poetically, the legacy of Byron’s formative years is a compound of lyricism and melodrama corresponding to the blend of sentiment and posing in his personality, and producing verse which can be sententious, tedious, and overblown. He found his genius in satire, a mode which can hold emotional genuineness in solution whilst obliquely suggesting a morally or socially corrective impulse. His first commercial publication, Hours of Idleness (1807), is a pallid thing compared to his defense of it against lukewarm reviews, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a rollicking production in heroic couplets more reminiscent of the roughness of Dryden than the urbanity of Pope, although it was the latter whom Byron idolized. This valuation is a product of modern taste; it may look obvious to us that Beppo (1818), Don Juan (1819–24), and The Vision of Judgment (1822) outclass Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), the interminable Eastern tales, or the Promethean closet drama Manfred (1817), but, as MacCarthy shows, that was not at all clear to Byron’s contemporaries. It was Childe Harold which made him famous overnight, and acquainted him with Lady Caroline Lamb, whose unstable temperament first excited and then wearied him. He trusted her with the secrets of his sexual history, to his subsequent regret, since she publicized them when the affair cooled, and they were ammunition for Byron’s wife, Annabella Milbanke, when she demanded a legal separation. The marriage had been a disaster from the outset, developing into a bizarre ménage à trois with Byron’s half-sister, Augusta. Regency England, unmoved by infidelity and adultery, was still capable of being shocked by homosexuality and incest; the swirling rumors ejected Byron permanently from the country in 1816. Amid the bleak grandeur of the Swiss mountains he wrote his most startlingly modern poem, “Darkness,” an apocalyptic vision of cosmic extinction which MacCarthy interprets as a projection of his own mental state:

MacCarthy follows Byron round Belgium, the Rhineland, and Venice, where he began Don Juan in 1818, working on it for the rest of his life. It is the greatest comic epic in English, greater even than Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the only other work remotely like it. Here was a form (ottava rima) flexible enough to accommodate any tone or effect, a theme at once traditional (the éducation sentimentale of the libertine) and radical (morality as relative rather than absolute), a mode capable of grandeur or farce, rhodomontade or garrulous intimacy, satire or passionate sincerity: a poem, in short, which, like its author, was both committed to and detached from the contemporary world. Byron has a genius for comic bathos which is at the same time worldly-wise:

No other great poem has been so outrageously cheeky. Byron’s female fans were offended by his unromantic depiction of women; priggish reviewers deplored what they took for exculpations of wickedness. Murray, a Victorian before his time, became so uneasy that the exasperated Byron had the later instalments published by someone else.

MacCarthy invokes Oscar Wilde as Byron’s spiritual heir. One can see why: the flamboyant teasing, the narcissistic streak, the self-dramatization which can be mawkish but also perceptive, the insistence that art was a matter of style rather than principles; above all, the talent so complete that it blinded its possessor to his course of self-destruction. The great technical triumph of Don Juan is that Byron creates a narrative persona which can analyze his own contradictions and not be merely an expression of them, as his earlier, more solemn masks had been. The last completed cantos are a ferocious satire on Regency England, unsurpassed except by Dickens (who must surely have known the poem) in Bleak House:

(We notice, too, the Dickensian brilliance at comic names.) As with Tristram Shandy, the work could have gone on indefinitely had the author not died. It breaks off after fourteen stanzas of Canto XVII, which were found posthumously among his papers.

Byron had been caught up in the anti-Austrian revolutionary movement in Italy some years before he intervened in the Greeks’ struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. He had cut an indifferent figure in the House of Lords, but here was a chance to make a significant impact on international politics. He was assailed, again like Wilde, not only by ennui, but by a terror of pointlessness: in 1822, shaken by the deaths, in quick succession, of his five-year-old illegitimate daughter and of his great friend Shelley, he was roused to action. He lent the Greek government £4,000 and traveled to the strategically important town of Missolonghi (accompanied by the last of his idolized boys, Lukas Chalandritsanos). Fêted as a hero, he could indulge his lifelong tendency to compare himself to Napoleon. MacCarthy admires his patience in dealing with competing factions and the ugly reality of warfare; all dilettantism was renounced. He raised a private army for an assault on the Turkish-occupied town of Lepanto, but internal squabbles forced the abandonment of this project. On January 22, 1824, his thirty-sixth birthday, he wrote his last known major poem, which begins as a veiled complaint to the heartless Lukas: “Yet though I cannot be beloved/ Still let me love.” The sad truth was, as MacCarthy observes, that the aging Byron was an unattractive figure, as much to himself as to others. The poem ends in stoic acceptance of “a soldier’s grave” should that be the allotment of fate; but fate had other plans. Three months later, the revolution crumbling around him, Byron died in his bed, of an infection probably exacerbated by his doctors’ over-investment in leeches; they extracted altogether 43 percent of his blood volume. His last coherent words were, “I must sleep now.”

 The poem ends in stoic acceptance of “a soldier’s grave” should that be the allotment of fate; but fate had other plans.

Had he lived, MacCarthy doubts, surely rightly, that he would have found the Victorian age congenial (his ex-wife survived until 1860, and there is a pathetic photograph of her as a respectable dowager, her eyes haggard with boredom). His unnecessary death became the stuff of legend, indistinguishable from the careless heroism of his early literary creations. MacCarthy has a brisk chapter on his literary inheritance, though she misses his influence on the best of Tom Stoppard’s plays, Arcadia. He was better appreciated and assimilated on the continent than in England, as we can see simply by setting Eugene Onegin against Jane Eyre. The Victorians were excited by the early, brooding Byron, and merely pained by Don Juan, whose meter is as hard to imitate as its mood; even W. H. Auden, no mean metrist, used rhyme royal rather than ottava rima in his “Letter to Lord Byron.” Among modern practitioners of light verse, only the late Gavin Ewart came near to matching Byron’s range and technical ingenuity, and political correctness has made a modern Byron virtually unthinkable.

MacCarthy ends her book with a macabre description of the opening of the Byron family vault in 1938 and the viewing of his partly skeletal remains by the local vicar and a party of select friends. One spectator reflected on the pathos of beholding “all that remained of one who had been young, handsome and the most famous man of genius of his age”; another noted the “quite abnormal development” exhibited, even in death, by the poet’s phallus. Byron could not have wished for a more Byronic reaction.