Byron in love and in debt

The title seems rather silly - Byron, after all, was certainly flawed but he was no angel, and nobody to my knowledge has ever…

The title seems rather silly - Byron, after all, was certainly flawed but he was no angel, and nobody to my knowledge has ever pretended that he was. Perhaps there was a suggestion of schizophrenia about him, since the Romantic poet had to live under the same skin with a typical Regency rake and dandy who was always running up debts, drinking hard, acquiring mistresses, pistol-shooting and racketing about town. His mother had spoiled him from the start, but he was too easily spoiled and at college behaved as if he was the heir to a vast fortune instead of an overburdened Scottish estate.

Literary fame came early and for a time Byron was the drawingroom lion of London, but his marriage to Annabella Millbanke, an heiress, went wrong from the start. He was utterly unsuited to the role of loving husband and is generally believed to have carried on an affair with his half-sister Augusta, but some at least of Byron's erratic behaviour during his short-lived marriage appears to have been due to the sheer pressure of debt and the constant presence of bailiffs.

This biography, in any case, is rather over-sympathetic towards Annabella, who had good qualities but was also humourless, self-righteous and a prude. Their legal separation and the inevitable scandal drove him abroad, mostly to Italy where he mixed with Shelley's circle and lived a wild life in Venice, before becoming involved in the war for Greek independence. However, his famous expedition to Missolonghi was rather a fiasco and Byron, prematurely aged at 36, died of fever after days of misery and delirium.

His widow lived on for many years, self-righteous and self-justifying to the last. There have been many lives of Byron, and this one hardly adds much to them that is new.