50 Fun Facts About Lord Byron

Byron belonged to which literary movement?

Romanticism prized passion and the lone rebel, and Byron's own brooding protagonists gave the movement a stock figure still called the Byronic hero.

Byron was born in 1788 in which city?

London: his mother came back from France, where the couple had gone to dodge his father's creditors, just in time to give birth in rented rooms on Holles Street.

What did the press nickname Byron's grandfather, a vice admiral who sailed around the world?

Foul-Weather Jack earned the name from the storms that dogged his voyages; as a teenage midshipman he had already survived a shipwreck on the coast of Chile.

Byron became a lord at the age of ten when which relative, the so-called 'Wicked Lord', died?

His great-uncle William, the fifth baron, died in 1798, leaving a title the boy had never expected and a half-ruined abbey; Byron was then living in rented lodgings in Scotland.

Newstead Abbey, Byron's ancestral home, is in which English county?

Nottinghamshire: Henry VIII granted the former priory to the Byrons, and the poet, sunk in debt, finally sold it while he was living in Italy.

Byron was born with a deformity of which part of his body?

His right foot was misshapen from birth, and he was so sensitive about the limp that he called himself 'le diable boiteux', the limping devil.

Which school did Byron attend from 1801 to 1805, playing for it in its first cricket match at Lord's?

Harrow lost that match against Eton in 1805, and Byron wrote that the two teams then dined together, got drunk and kicked up a row at the theatre.

At which Cambridge college did Byron study?

Trinity is where he piled up debts at an alarming rate and met John Cam Hobhouse, the lifelong friend who later set off with him on his travels to Greece.

Because college rules forbade dogs, what animal did Byron famously keep as a student?

A bear, he pointed out, appeared nowhere in the college statutes, so the authorities had no grounds to object; he even talked of putting it up for a fellowship.

Byron's beloved Newfoundland dog, for whom he built a tomb larger than his own, was named what?

Boatswain caught rabies in 1808, and Byron nursed him by hand with no thought for the danger of being bitten.

Byron's first major satire was his revenge on which magazine for savaging his first published book?

The Edinburgh Review's anonymous critic had sneered at Hours of Idleness; Byron's answer, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, took aim at the literary scene of the day and first won him recognition.

Byron's House of Lords speech opposed the death penalty for which Midlands machine-breakers?

The Luddites were weavers smashing the frames that were putting them out of work; Byron used his maiden speech, in February 1812, to mock the idea that hanging them would cure anything.

On 3 May 1810 Byron swam across which strait, a feat he later commemorated in Don Juan?

The Hellespont, today's Dardanelles, is the strait the mythical Leander swam each night to reach his lover Hero, and Byron crossed from Europe to Asia in imitation of him.

Byron's Grand Tour of 1809–11 took him into Albania to meet which ruler of Ioannina?

Ali Pasha ruled much of Albania and Greece from Ioannina almost as an independent prince, and Byron's account of the visit did much to put Albania on the map for English readers.

Which poem's first two cantos in 1812 made Byron say 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous'?

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage sold out its first printing within days; Byron had thought so little of the poem that he left a relative to see it into print.

Which Byron poem follows a young page who is tied naked to a wild horse and set loose?

Mazeppa retells a legend about the Ukrainian leader Ivan Mazepa, punished in his youth for an affair with a count's wife; most of the poem is the ride itself.

In which 1814-15 collection with composer Isaac Nathan did Byron's 'She Walks in Beauty' appear?

Nathan set the lyrics to what he presented as ancient synagogue melodies.

Who described Byron as 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know'?

Lady Caroline Lamb is said to have coined the phrase after their first meeting in 1812, when she snubbed him; she then pursued him so openly that the affair became a public scandal.

A jealous former lover portrayed Byron as the seedy title character of which 1816 novel?

Glenarvon's recognisable caricatures of society figures so angered one of them, a patroness of the fashionable club Almack's, that she barred its author from it.

Byron's half-sister, with whom he was rumoured to have had an incestuous relationship, was named what?

Augusta Leigh, the daughter of his father's first marriage, had seen little of him as a child; the two grew close only as adults, in 1813, when she was already married.

Whom did Byron marry at Seaham Hall, County Durham, on 2 January 1815?

Anne Isabella Milbanke, known as Annabella, left him a year later with their month-old daughter, and the legal separation that followed was the scandal that drove him abroad.

Byron's legitimate daughter became famous for collaborating with Charles Babbage on what?

The analytical engine was Babbage's design for a programmable calculating machine, and the notes Ada Lovelace wrote on it are why she is often called the first computer programmer.

Leaving England for good in 1816, Byron stopped to tour which recent battlefield?

Waterloo lay on his road through Belgium less than a year after the battle, and what he saw there went into the long poem he was then writing.

In the summer of 1816 Byron settled at the Villa Diodati on the shore of which body of water?

Lake Geneva was lashed by storms that summer, the 'year without a summer' that followed a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, and the rain kept the villa's guests indoors inventing ghost stories.

Which novel was begun during the ghost-story contest at Byron's Villa Diodati?

Frankenstein began as Mary Shelley's answer to Byron's proposal that each guest write a ghost story; she was eighteen, and the idea came to her in what she called a waking dream.

Byron's physician John Polidori turned a Byron fragment into which pioneering vampire tale?

The Vampyre first appeared in 1819 under Byron's own name, a false attribution, and its suave villain Lord Ruthven was a portrait of the poet.

Byron's illegitimate daughter Allegra was the child of which stepsister of Mary Shelley?

Claire Clairmont had begun the affair in England and followed him abroad; Byron later took their daughter from her and placed the child in a convent, where she died aged five.

In Venice, Byron studied which language with the monks of San Lazzaro, co-authoring a grammar of it?

Armenian lessons took him out to the island monastery through the winter of 1816–17, and he learned enough to translate passages of classical Armenian into English.

The young married countess for whom Byron lived in Ravenna from 1819 to 1821 was named what?

Teresa Guiccioli was married to a count nearly three times her age; Byron became her acknowledged escort and followed her family from Ravenna to Pisa and then Genoa.

A friend's letter of 1821 lists a crow, a falcon and which other bird in Byron's Ravenna household?

An eagle, by his visitor's count, shared the house with ten horses, eight dogs, three monkeys and five cats, and all but the horses wandered the rooms as if they owned them.

Byron's satirical epic Don Juan is written in which verse form?

Ottava rima, an eight-line Italian stanza, was a form he first tried out in the comic Venetian tale Beppo before stretching it across the epic he never finished.

Which Poet Laureate of the day did Byron ridicule in The Vision of Judgment?

Robert Southey is hauled up to heaven's gate in the poem and starts reading out his own verses, at which angels and devils alike flee in disgust.

The short-lived journal Byron launched in Italy in 1822 with the essayist Leigh Hunt was called what?

The Liberal carried Byron's The Vision of Judgment in its first number; his interest in the paper soon waned, though he went on giving it manuscripts to keep Hunt afloat.

Byron attended the beachside cremation of which fellow poet, drowned in a boating accident in July 1822?

Percy Bysshe Shelley's pyre was lit on the beach near Viareggio; a famous Victorian painting puts Byron at the centre of the scene, but in fact he left before it was over.

Byron's mother-in-law's will required him to adopt which surname, giving him Napoleon's initials?

Noel was the price of half his mother-in-law's estate; he began signing himself 'Noel Byron', and some suspected he enjoyed sharing the initials N.B. with his hero.

Byron sailed for Greece in 1823 aboard a chartered brig named after which mythological hero?

The Hercules was driven back to Genoa by a storm on its first night out and soon set sail again, landing him on the island of Cephalonia in early August 1823.

On joining the independence struggle in 1823, Byron spent £4,000 of his own money on what?

Refitting the Greek fleet came first, before he had even crossed to the mainland; he then took a brigade of Souliot fighters into his own pay and command.

Byron died of fever on 19 April 1824 in which Greek town?

Missolonghi is where the bleedings his doctors insisted on only weakened him; he died before the attack he was preparing to lead could set out.

Which future Victorian poet, then a boy of fourteen, carved 'Byron is dead' into a rock on hearing the news?

Alfred Tennyson, whose boyhood verse was steeped in Byron, later called it a day when the whole world seemed darkened for him.

Which institution refused to bury Byron for reasons of 'questionable morality'?

Westminster Abbey's refusal sent his coffin to the family vault near Newstead, and the abbey gave him a memorial stone only 145 years after his death.

Byron entrusted the memoirs that were burned a month after his death to which friend, later his biographer?

Thomas Moore protested when Byron's friends and family agents met at the publisher John Murray's house, but he let himself be overruled and the manuscript went into the fire.

In The Curse of Minerva, Byron attacked which British nobleman for stripping the Parthenon of its sculptures?

Lord Elgin had the marbles shipped to England while he was ambassador to the Ottoman court; Byron called it plunder, and the dispute over returning them to Athens was still running two centuries later.

Which Byron lyric opens with a comparison to 'the night of cloudless climes and starry skies'?

She Walks in Beauty was written, by a friend's account, the day after a party in June 1814 where Byron first saw his cousin's wife, Mrs Wilmot, in a spangled mourning dress.

Which composer wrote a symphony with a solo viola part inspired by one of Byron's wandering heroes?

Hector Berlioz wrote it after Paganini asked for a piece to show off his new viola; the virtuoso took one look at all the rests in the solo part and declined to play it.

In Don Juan, Byron's hero becomes a favourite at the court of which Russian empress?

Catherine the Great sends Juan on to England as her envoy, which gave Byron the excuse to bring his satire home to English high society.

Byron spent his childhood, until he inherited his title at ten, in which Scottish city?

Aberdeen is where his mother took him to live cheaply after her fortune had been squandered; he later called himself 'half a Scot by birth, and bred a whole one'.

Which Byron verse drama follows a guilt-ridden nobleman who summons spirits high in the Alps?

Manfred took its scenery from Byron's tour of the Bernese Alps months after he left England, and its hero's unnamed guilt has been read as the poet's own confession.

Which Byron poem begins 'The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold'?

The Destruction of Sennacherib was so well known to Victorians that Punch parodied its opening line when Australia's cricketers first beat the MCC at Lord's in 1878.

In Ravenna, Byron was initiated into which secret society working to free Italy from Austrian rule?

The Carbonari took him in through his lover's father and brother, and when the two were expelled after a failed rising, Byron followed the family to Pisa.

Which French painter turned Byron's play Sardanapalus into a huge canvas of a doomed king's last night?

Eugène Delacroix showed The Death of Sardanapalus at the Paris Salon of 1827, three years after the poet died, and its scene of carnage caused an uproar among the critics.