It’s the birthday of romantic poet Lord Byron, born George Gordon Noel in Aberdeen, Scotland (1788). Byron was the product of his father’s second marriage. His father, nicknamed “Mad Jack,” struggled with debt, made his living by seducing rich women, and may have killed his first wife, though he was never charged with the crime.
In 1809 Lord Byron traveled to the Eastern Mediterranean and kept a diary of his adventures and exploits. While traveling in Albania, he let a friend read the diary, and his friend persuaded him to burn it. He rewrote the story of his travels as a partially fictionalized book-length poem called Child Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). The book made Byron one of the most popular poets of his time.
He was also an outspoken politician in the House of Lords. In 1812, workers in the weaving industry were rioting and destroying machinery in Nottinghamshire because of poor wages and working conditions. The Tories introduced a bill to punish the destruction of weaving machinery by death. Byron fiercely opposed the bill, speaking on behalf of workers’ rights, and published a poem on the topic that said, in part, “Some folks for certain have thought it was shocking,/When Famine appeals, and when Poverty groans,/That life should be valued at less than a stocking,/And breaking of frames lead to breaking of bones.”
Byron wrote many more books of poetry, including Don Juan (1819), and lived a life of controversy and excess. When he died at age 36, several interested parties burned his unpublished memoirs before he’d even been buried.