Byron in Love Read Free Page B

penned to his Great-aunt Frances Byron Parker-Parkyns is arch and self-possessed:
    Dear Madam,–My Mamma being unable to write herself desires I will let you know that the potatoes are now ready and you are welcome to them whenever you please–She begs you will ask Mrs Parkyns if she would wish the poney to go round by Nottingham or go home the nearest way as it is now quite well but too small to carry me–I have sent a young Rabbit which I beg Miss Frances will accept off and which I promised to send before–My Mamma desires her best compliments to you all in which I join–I am,
    Dear Aunt, Yours Sincerely,
    BYRON
      I hope you will excuse all blunders as it is the first letter I ever wrote.
    By November the Abbey was freezing and damp, so that mother and son had to decamp, Byron with his nurse May Gray to the Parkyns cousins in nearby Southwell and Catherine travelling to London to plead with Mr Hanson to persuade Lord Carlisle, another distant cousin, to become Byron’s guardian, a duty he took on most reluctantly. For the period of Byron’s minority, Catherine having only £122 per annum of her own, pleaded with Lord Carlisle to use his influence to secure a pension from the Civil List, and so with his influence and the Duke of Portland’s, the King ordered the Prime Minister, Mr Pitt, to pay her £300 a year. But it was not enough to restore the Abbey or the outbuildings as she tried helplessly to set new rents for farm tenants and disentangle the legal knots by which the estate was encumbered. He would escape at night to go back and look at Newstead, his lost paradise and the rage at banishment was not dissimilar to that of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights , Byron thought to be the partial inspiration for Emily Brontë’s brooding and thwarted hero.
    Since the young Parkyns girls received private tuition from a Mr Dummer Rogers, Byron decided that he must be treated likewise and wrote peremptorily to his mother in London: ‘Mr Rogers could attend me every night at a separate hour from the Miss Parkynses…I recommend this to you because, if some plan of this kind is not adopted, I shall be called, or rather branded with the name of Dunce, which you know I could never bear.’ Byron and Mr Rogers read Virgil and Cicero together, the tutor only too aware that his pupil was in torment from the contraption on his foot, but stoically determined that it should not be mentioned. Mr Lavender, a truss-maker from the General Hospital, who styled himself ‘surgeon’, had been engaged by Catherine to ensure that Byron would no longer be a ‘cripple’. Mr Lavender’s course of treatments was primitive, the deformed foot was rubbed with hot oil, then twisted and forced into a wooden contraption, so that Byron was in worse torture. When he came to London a year later and Mr Hanson brought him to a more experienced physician, a Dr Baillie, he must have raged at hearing the two men say that it was in infancy that the malformation should have been treated and so the blame heaped upon his mother was all the more vindictive.
    Catherine came to be ostracised by her scornful son, Mr Hanson and his family, the dilettante Lord Carlisle. Dr Glennie, the headmaster at Dr Glennie’s academy in Dulwich, to which Byron was admitted at the age of eleven on Carlisle’s recommendation. He wrote of her thus–‘Mrs Byron is a total stranger to English society and English manners, with an exterior far from prepossessing, a mind wholly without cultivation and the peculiarities of Northern opinions, Northern habits and Northern accent…not a Madame de Lambert endowed with powers to retrieve the fortune and form the character and manners of a young nobleman, her son.’ In a world of male sovreignty, poor Catherine did not stand a chance.
    When a fellow pupil at Glennie’s school had said to him ‘Your mother is a fool’, Byron’s