Scottish Authors > Lord Byron Poet 1788-1824

George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron, was the son of Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron (1756-91) and his second wife Catherine Gordon of Gight (d.1811) whom he married for her money (around GBP 25,000) in 1785 and whose fortune he promptly set about ravaging. The poet was born in London on 22nd January 1788. His parents' unhappy marriage (although it is doubtful if "Mad Jack" cared whether it was happy or not) was sufficiently spectacular to enter the ballad record of Scotland's north east:

This youth is a rake, frae England is come,

The Scots dinna ken his extraction ava;

He keeps up his misses, his landlords he duns,

That's fast drawn the lands o'Gight awa'.

Catherine Gordon of Gight - north of Aberdeen in the valley of Ythan - could claim descent from King James I, although the poet was to be more exercised by his Byron progenitors. His grandfather was Admiral John Byron, known as "Foulweather Jack", whose brother, the 5th Lord (1722-98) also rejoiced a nickname - "The Wicked Lord". Had circumstances fallen out such that the poet inherited a Huntly or Gordon title then a less tormented attitude to his Scottishness could have been the result. However, it's a big "if only". Byron was a mere three-and-a-half when his prodigal father died, and six when through the death in action in Corsica of the direct heir to the Byron title, he became its heir presumptive. He attended Aberdeen Grammar School where he is remembered in GS Fraser's Home town elegy:

... Or I can make my town that homely fame

That Byron has, from boys in Carden Place,

Struggling home with books to midday dinner,

For whom he is not the romantic sinner,

The careless writer, the tormented face,

The hectoring bully or the noble fool,

But, just like Gordon or like Keith, a name,

A tall, proud statue at the Grammar School

While this seems reductive and Aberdonian in its way of remembering, it might be noted that Byron's romantic sinning began in Aberdeen with his first sexual experience in 1797 and his first moment of idealised love the year before. Of his cousin (distant) Mary Duff, he was to write in his journals in 1813 that he doubted if he had ever really been as sincerely attracted since. In 1798, though, with the death of the "Wicked Lord" Byron, his mother, and her maid, May Gray (she of Byron's premature sexual awakening), moved to Newstead Abbey. Within a period it became clear that hopes of enrichment or decent security were false. The Wicked Lord died skint.

Byron's status as a Scottish poet is perhaps best seen as complicated. In suggesting his Scottishness (in 1937, but collected in On poetry and poets, 1957) TS Elliot - who was not noted for his wisdom on Scottish matters - introduced an argument that has been simplified since. Although harried by debt and penury until his success with Childe Harold's pilgramage (1812) from late 1798 on Byron was a scion of the English aristocracy - he attended Harrow School, and Trinity College, Cambridge where he was celebrated for extravagance and outrageousness. Turbulent marriage and numerous bi-sexual amours underline the extent to which his "Mad Jack" and "Wicked Lord" antecedents were foregrounded in an extraordinary personality in which the pride of his Gordon blood and the liberal sympathies of his mother played their part. His early poem Lachin y Gair is fulsome but retrospective:

Ah! There my young footsteps in infancy wander'd;

My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid;</p>

On chieftains long perish'd my memory ponder'd,

As daily I strode through the pine-cover'd glade;

Near-Wordsworthian sentiments are filtered through the yearnings of a mind already devoted to aristocratic priorities.

The complication is enforced in Canto II of Childe Harold's pilgrimage where Lord Elgin's removal of Greek statuary from the Athenian acropolis led to his denunciation as a "modern Pict". "Blush, Caledonia! Such thy son could be!" is fair censure, perhaps; but "England! I joy no child he was of thine" indicates a preference even if Byron continues by regretting that the sailors who transported Elgin's plunder were Englishmen. Anti-Scottish indignation is even louder in The Curse of Minerva where Scotland is evoked as a "land of sophistry and mist". But the opposite point touched by the pendulum of Byron's feeling represents a massive swing. It occurs famously in Canto X of Don Juan where Byron addresses Lord Francis Jeffrey:

... for I would rather take my wine

With you, than aught (save Scott) in your proud city.

He is reacting to the phrase Auld Lang Syne:

But somehow - it may seem a schoolboy's whine,

And yet I seek not to be grand or witty,

But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred

A whole one, and my heart flies to my hear.

While the passage re-states Byron's Scottishness:

I 'scotched, not kill'd, the Scotchman in my blood,

And love the land of 'mountain and flood'.

(with a phrase from Scott into the bargain), it does not quite reach for a reason for having neglected his Scottishness in the first place, and the implications of "scotched" are that it was deliberate, or convenient, or obligatory.

Every poet has a beginning, and Byron's earlier years were spent in Scotland, fatherless, and under the eyes of a Scottish mother and nurses. However, transformation from school in Aberdeen to an English hereditary peerage is extreme. Undoubtedly, too, it is a momentous part of what came to be responsible for a remarkable temperament - poetic, erotic, and political - that might best be considered "Byronic". Not only the geographical extent of his poetry, but his later years in Italy and Greece and affiliation with European causes suggest a degree of deracination, of profound exile, which his unique poetic intelligence may well have encouraged. His impact, too, was European. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove his Scottishness (or otherwise) of his inspiration; Byron can be claimed as a Scottish poet, but he is always likely to elude precise descriptions in such a context.

Byron died of fever at Missolonghi, Greece, on 19th April 1824 while engaged in the struggle for Greek independence.

John MacRitchie

Search Scotland's Culture for more by & about this author. Link will open in a new window.