Lord Byron

Paris is missing from the record, and the absence is the point

It is worth setting out the itinerary, because the absence is so complete that it looks deliberate. In July 1809, aged twenty-one, Byron sailed from Falmouth in Cornwall on a Grand Tour — the long finishing-school journey through Europe that young English gentlemen made to see classical antiquities and acquire polish — that could not take the usual road: Britain had been at war with France almost continuously since 1793, and the route across France to Italy that young Englishmen had taken for a century was shut. So he went by sea — Lisbon, Cadiz, Gibraltar, Malta — and then into territory almost no English tourist had seen, Albania and mainland Greece, and on to Constantinople. He came home in July 1811 by the same maritime back door.

The second departure, in April 1816, was permanent. He crossed from Dover to Ostend in what is now Belgium, drove east through Flanders — the flat farming country of the southern Low Countries — to look at the field of Waterloo, where Napoleon had been beaten the previous June, went up the Rhine and settled for the summer beside Lake Geneva. From there: Venice from 1816, Ravenna from 1819, Pisa in 1821, Genoa in 1822, and Greece from 1823. Every one of those is documented to the street. Paris is not among them, and there is no Paris address, no Paris publisher, no Paris salon in the record at all. It is a strange thing for a European celebrity of the 1810s to have managed, and it is the honest starting point for anything this atlas can say about him.

Fame at twenty-four, exile at twenty-eight

Byron was born in London on 22 January 1788, into a family with a title and no money, and inherited the barony — the rank of baron, the lowest in the English peerage, with a seat in the House of Lords attached — at ten from a great-uncle, along with a half-ruined house, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. He was born with a deformed foot that made him limp all his life and that he was fiercely sensitive about. The first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, written out of the 1809 journey, appeared in March 1812 and made him famous immediately; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet who had written The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, met him and was struck above all by the beauty of his face.

What followed was five years of very public disorder. Lady Caroline Lamb, a married aristocrat with whom he had a brief and loud affair, produced the sentence he has never escaped — that he was mad, bad and dangerous to know — and went on sending him mementoes long after it ended. In January 1815 he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, an heiress and a serious mathematician; she left him a year later, taking their infant daughter Augusta Ada, and the separation became a public scandal in which it was widely whispered that Byron had been sleeping with his own half-sister, Augusta Leigh. He denied it in public and did not deny it in private. In April 1816 he left England, and he never set foot in it again alive.

The exile years produced the best of the work. On Lake Geneva in June 1816 he rented the Villa Diodati, a house above the lake outside the city of Geneva, and with his personal doctor John Polidori and the party staying nearby — the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; Mary Shelley, then still Mary Godwin, who would marry him; and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, with whom Byron had a daughter, Allegra, born the following January — he proposed a ghost-story competition to fill a summer of freakish cold and rain. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the novel about a student who assembles a living creature out of dead bodies and then abandons it, came out of that competition. In Venice he began Don Juan, the sixteen-canto comic epic he was still writing when he died: a poem in eight-line stanzas that turns the old Spanish seducer into a young man who is seduced by everyone else, and uses the joke to attack politicians, poets and the Church. Conservative critics called it filthy and impious; Percy Shelley thought nothing like it had ever been written in English.

The Byronic hero, explained

The Byronic hero is a character type Byron assembled across Childe Harold, the short Eastern verse tales — The Giaour, The Corsair, Lara — and the drama Manfred, and it is the single most durable thing he made. The figure is proud, magnetic, contemptuous of ordinary rules, unhappy in a way that reads as depth rather than weakness, and carrying a crime or a grief in his past that the poem never fully names. He is an outcast, usually self-exiled, usually beautiful, and the reader is invited to admire him without approving of him.

Because Byron's own life supplied a public scandal that matched the type exactly, readers across Europe collapsed the two together and treated author and hero as one person. The result is that the Byronic hero was not simply read; it was imitated, in poetry, in dress, in posture, and eventually in every brooding outsider in fiction — starting with Heathcliff, the vengeful foundling at the centre of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights of 1847. The type travelled fastest and furthest in France.

Missolonghi, and the memoirs in the fire

Greece had been in revolt since 1821 against the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish empire that had ruled it for nearly four centuries, and Byron — who had first seen the country at twenty-one, on the 1809 journey, and had spent months there — put his money and then himself behind the rising. He sailed from Genoa in July 1823, spent months on the island of Cephalonia weighing which faction to back, sailed at the end of December and landed in the first days of 1824 at Missolonghi, a marshy lagoon town in western Greece. He paid for troops and ships out of his own pocket and tried to hold quarrelling commanders together. He was not a soldier and never fought. In April 1824 he caught a fever, was bled repeatedly by his doctors in the standard treatment of the day, and died on 19 April, aged thirty-six. Greece mourned him as a national figure and still does.

In London, a month later, his friends destroyed his autobiography. Byron had given a manuscript memoir to the poet Thomas Moore, who had sold it to Byron's publisher John Murray; on 17 May 1824, in Murray's drawing room at 50 Albemarle Street, Moore, Murray and Byron's friend John Cam Hobhouse tore up the pages and burned them in the grate, on the reasoning that publication would ruin the reputations of the living and the dead. Nobody now knows what was in it. It is the most famous act of literary destruction in English, and it is the reason the archives that survive — the John Murray papers, now at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the Lovelace Byron papers, the family archive descending through his daughter Ada, deposited at the Bodleian Library in Oxford — matter so much. His body came home by sea; Westminster Abbey, the London church where England buries its kings and its great writers, refused to take it, and he was buried in the family vault at Hucknall in Nottinghamshire.

Delacroix reads Byron

The Paris that Byron never visited spent thirty years painting him. Eugene Delacroix (1798–1863) was ten years younger than Byron, and became the standard-bearer of French Romanticism in paint — the argument that a picture should work through colour, motion and feeling rather than through the cool, exact drawing that the classical school, which took ancient Greek and Roman sculpture as its model, demanded. He read English poetry hard, and Byron gave him subjects nobody else was supplying.

In 1826 Delacroix painted The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, straight out of Byron's 1813 poem The Giaour: two horsemen locked together at the moment a Venetian avenges the murder of the woman he loved. The Art Institute's own record names Byron as the source. The following year came the picture that made Delacroix notorious. The Death of Sardanapalus was shown at the Salon of 1827 — the state's official exhibition in Paris, where a painter's career was made or destroyed — and the Musee national Eugene-Delacroix records it as inspired by Byron's tragedy: an Assyrian king reclining on a bed while his women, his horses and his treasure are slaughtered around him at his own order, the whole canvas a red avalanche. The classical critics were appalled, which was the point.

Byron's other gift to French painting was Greece. The war he died in had already reached the Salon: Delacroix showed Scenes from the Massacres at Chios there in 1824, painted from newspaper accounts of Ottoman troops killing and enslaving the population of a Greek island. Byron's death at Missolonghi that same April turned a foreign war into a cause with a martyr attached, and Greek subjects stayed on Paris walls for the rest of the decade.

What France made of him

Beyond the paintings, Byron got into French writing and French music less as a name to quote than as a mood to work in. Hector Berlioz, the French composer, called his 1834 symphony for orchestra and solo viola Harold en Italie — Harold in Italy — after Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and let the viola wander through the piece as a detached observer in exactly the Byronic manner. Victor Hugo, the young leader of the French Romantic movement in literature, published an essay on Byron's death in 1824 and used it to argue about what the new poetry should be. The standard study of the phenomenon, the French scholar Edmond Esteve's Byron et le romantisme francais of 1907 — Byron and French Romanticism — traces the imported hero through four decades of French verse, drama and fiction.

That is the shape of Byron in this atlas, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. He is here not as a resident, a visitor or a guest at anybody's table, but as an import: a set of poems that crossed the Channel, got translated, and gave French Romanticism a hero it had not invented and a foreign death it could use. The Salon of 1827 is as close as he ever came to Paris.