Lord Byron Trivia
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50 free Lord Byron trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Lord Byron trivia for poetry lovers, Romantics, and anyone who suspects the man was even more interesting than the verse. The quiz begins with the boy who inherited a title and a ruined abbey at ten, the club foot, the tame bear he kept at Cambridge because dogs were banned, and the morning in 1812 when he 'awoke and found himself famous' after Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. From there it follows the scandals: Lady Caroline Lamb's 'mad, bad and dangerous to know', the rumours about his half-sister Augusta, the disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke that produced Ada Lovelace, and the flight from England in 1816. Then the exile: the wet summer at Villa Diodati that spawned Frankenstein and The Vampyre, the menagerie in Ravenna, the Armenian monks of Venice, Don Juan's sixteen cantos, Shelley's beachside cremation, and the final chapter in Greece, where he refitted the fleet with his own money and died of fever at Missolonghi aged 36. Later questions cover the memoirs his friends burned, the abbey that refused his body, and the dog whose tomb outshone his own. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Romantic poets, Mary Shelley and English literature quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Byron belonged to which literary movement?
Romanticism
Romanticism prized passion and the lone rebel, and Byron's own brooding protagonists gave the movement a stock figure still called the Byronic hero.
Q 02Byron was born in 1788 in which city?
London
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.
Q 03What did the press nickname Byron's grandfather, a vice admiral who sailed around the world?
Foul-Weather Jack
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.
Q 04Byron became a lord at the age of ten when which relative, the so-called 'Wicked Lord', died?
His great-uncle
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.
Q 05Newstead Abbey, Byron's ancestral home, is in which English county?
Nottinghamshire
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.
Q 06Byron was born with a deformity of which part of his body?
his right foot
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.
Q 07Which school did Byron attend from 1801 to 1805, playing for it in its first cricket match at Lord's?
Harrow
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.
Q 08At which Cambridge college did Byron study?
Trinity
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.
Q 09Because college rules forbade dogs, what animal did Byron famously keep as a student?
a bear
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.
Q 10Byron's beloved Newfoundland dog, for whom he built a tomb larger than his own, was named what?
Boatswain
Boatswain caught rabies in 1808, and Byron nursed him by hand with no thought for the danger of being bitten.
Q 11Byron's first major satire was his revenge on which magazine for savaging his first published book?
The Edinburgh Review
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.
Q 12Byron's House of Lords speech opposed the death penalty for which Midlands machine-breakers?
the Luddites
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.
Q 13On 3 May 1810 Byron swam across which strait, a feat he later commemorated in Don Juan?
Q 21Whom did Byron marry at Seaham Hall, County Durham, on 2 January 1815?
Anne Isabella Milbanke
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.
Q 22Byron's legitimate daughter became famous for collaborating with Charles Babbage on what?
the analytical engine
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.
Q 23Leaving England for good in 1816, Byron stopped to tour which recent battlefield?
Waterloo
the Hellespont
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.
Q 14Byron's Grand Tour of 1809–11 took him into Albania to meet which ruler of Ioannina?
Ali Pasha
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.
Q 15Which poem's first two cantos in 1812 made Byron say 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous'?
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
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.
Q 16Which Byron poem follows a young page who is tied naked to a wild horse and set loose?
Mazeppa
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.
Q 17In which 1814-15 collection with composer Isaac Nathan did Byron's 'She Walks in Beauty' appear?
Hebrew Melodies
Nathan set the lyrics to what he presented as ancient synagogue melodies.
Q 18Who described Byron as 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know'?
Lady Caroline Lamb
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.
Q 19A jealous former lover portrayed Byron as the seedy title character of which 1816 novel?
Glenarvon
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.
Q 20Byron's half-sister, with whom he was rumoured to have had an incestuous relationship, was named what?
Augusta Leigh
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.
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.
Q 24In the summer of 1816 Byron settled at the Villa Diodati on the shore of which body of water?
Lake Geneva
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.
Q 25Which novel was begun during the ghost-story contest at Byron's Villa Diodati?
Frankenstein
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.
Q 26Byron's physician John Polidori turned a Byron fragment into which pioneering vampire tale?
The Vampyre
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.
Q 27Byron's illegitimate daughter Allegra was the child of which stepsister of Mary Shelley?
Claire Clairmont
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.
Q 28In Venice, Byron studied which language with the monks of San Lazzaro, co-authoring a grammar of it?
Armenian
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.
Q 29The young married countess for whom Byron lived in Ravenna from 1819 to 1821 was named what?
Teresa Guiccioli
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.
Q 30A friend's letter of 1821 lists a crow, a falcon and which other bird in Byron's Ravenna household?
an eagle
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.