Byron in Love Read Free

responsible for his debts and funeral expenses, which Catherine managed to discharge by borrowing on a legacy of just over one thousand pounds, which she was due to receive on the death of her grandmother. When she learnt of her husband’s death, her screams were heard down the length of Broad Street, her grief ‘bordering on distraction’. In a fairly imperious letter to her sister-in-law, whom she addressed as ‘My dear Madam’, she emphasised her great grief, then requesting a lock of his hair, she reiterated the love between herself and her ‘dear Jonnie’.
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    At five and a half, Byron had become so unruly that Catherine sent him to school in the hope that he could be kept ‘in abeyance’. Schisms and tempers at home, Catherine referring to him as that ‘lame brat’, the castigation so etched in his memory that years later in a drama, The Deformed Transformed , Arnold the hunchback is addressed by his mother as an incubus and a nightmare, as he pleads with her not to kill him, while hating his vile form.
    Under the tutelage of a Mr Bowers he quickly developed a passion for history, especially Roman history, revelling in the stories of battle and shipwreck, which he would later enact for himself. When he was six he was translating Horace, reading the great but grave accounts of death, how death made itself felt in palace halls and in huts, his imagination fearfully quickened. Before he was eight years old he had read all the books of the Old Testament, finding the New Testament not nearly so rich in description. When he was enrolled in a grammar school, he reckoned, though we must allow for some boyish exaggeration, that he had read four thousand works of fiction, his favourites being Cervantes, Smollett and Scott. But history was his greatest passion and Knolles’s Turkish History would incite the hunger to visit the Levant as a young man and provide the exotic background for many of his oriental tales.
    It was at a dancing school, aged eight, that he was smitten by the charms of Mary Duff and though he did not know it by name, felt the attendant joys and uncertainty of first rapturous love. Mary was one of those evanescent beings, made of rainbow, with a Greek cast of features, to whom he would for ever be susceptible, her successor being a distant cousin, Margaret Parker, for whom he also conceived a violent love. That twin soul he sought again and again in blood relatives, passions by which he would be thrown into ‘convulsive confusion’. The antithesis to such tenderness was his countering cruelty. He had a fascination for a gothic novel, Zeluco , in which the anti-hero was fated to commit crimes he could not control, strangling those closest to him, taming a pet sparrow in order to be able to wring its neck, dark deeds that instead of consigning him to the dungeons, elevated him to the status of Magus, which Byron himself would aspire to.
    There was no fraternising with the Byron family, though Catherine tried to enlist Frances Leigh to get financial help from the Wicked Lord–‘You know Lord Byron. Do you think he will do anything for George or be at any expense to give him a proper education or if he wished to do it, is his present fortune such a one that he could spare anything out of it?’ Each letter was ignored. Then one morning in 1798 news reached them that the Wicked Lord had died, aged sixty-five, his son William Byron already having been killed in Corsica by a cannonball at the Battle of Calvi in 1794. The ten-year-old George became the sixth Lord Byron, an ennoblement by which mother and son were briefly borne on wings of Icarus.
    The whole cosmos of Byron’s childhood was altered. He would be given wine and cake by the headmaster at his grammar school and yield to a bout of tears when at the roll call, instead of Byron, he answered Dominus de Byron, and when the looking glass failed to reveal a different him, he determined to