dramatic byrony
Or, the Dirtbag Madness Championship and the Champion Dirtbag Himself, Lord Byron.
Hello friends!
There are several orders of business in this newsletter, and all of them are pretty good in my opinion, so buckle up.
First, for today only (April 2), the ebook of Let the Dead Bury the Dead is an Amazon Daily Deal, which means it’s on sale for $2.99! If you’ve been casually interested in picking up my second novel but have sworn a solemn oath never to pay full price for ebooks (I get it), today is your day, and this is your link.
Next, we have reached the CHAMPIONSHIP ROUND OF DIRTBAG MADNESS! Paid subscribers have whittled us down from your selected eight victors to two contenders vying for the crown of Dirtbaggiest Historical Figure:
It’s a good thing I wasn’t betting real money on this, because good God. My money was on a Catalina de Erauso vs. Lord Darnley championship, and you can see how that turned out. But we have two powerhouse women in the finals, and they both richly deserve to be there! Ironically, they are both Murder Momagers with a penchant for poison, so clearly a particular brand of dirtbag is well-suited to this contest.
It’s Catherine de Medici vs. Agrippina the Younger. Who! Is! Our! Champion! Only you can decide.
The victor will be announced formally in the next newsletter, to great fanfare. Or, y’know, you can come back to this page in three days and see who won the poll for yourself. Your choice.
And finally, a transition: from Dirtbag Madness to Dirtbag Madness, Badness, and Dangerous to Know-ness.
It’s time for a Dirtbag I’ve put off for a while now because it seemed too obvious, but I’m several years into this project and I have to put my stake in the ground. My English major cred is on the line. So let’s do it:
George Gordon, Lord Byron, the Most “This Fucking Guy” Who Ever “This Fucking Guy”ed
Byron was born in London in 1788 to Catherine Gordon and a real piece of shit who went by the name of “Mad Jack” Byron. Here’s Mad Jack’s deal in a single run-on sentence: he seduced a married woman, got her pregnant, forced her to divorce her husband, married her three weeks before their child was born, harassed and abused this woman until she wasted away and died, married Catherine Gordon for her heaps of money, spent all those heaps of money on gambling and other assorted debts until they were broke, and then ran away to France to avoid their creditors, abandoning Catherine and her newborn son, although he continued to steal all their money and spend it on wild French parties, showing up every so often at Catherine’s house to make a nuisance of himself, until he died, probably from being a chronic asshole, in 1791.
PHEW. If you need to take a brief walk (or shower) to clear your head after this guy, I encourage it.
Bear Necessities
In 1798, when Byron was 10, a series of relatives died that resulted in him inheriting the family estate and the actual title of Lord Byron. For what it’s worth, I think we should bring back the historical practice of making 10-year-olds kings, popes, and peers of the realm. One rowdy fifth-grader in the House of Lords would really spice things up, is my opinion.
Byron’s mom sent him away to school at Harrow and then Cambridge. This was common at the time, but I also feel like Mama Byron took one look at the child in front of her and said “this boy’s father was nicknamed Mad Jack Byron and I feel like he’s going to be somehow even worse.”
At school, Byron was less interested in academics than in getting into fights, ostentatiously beating everyone in sports, and hanging out with the pet bear he kept in the dorms. Reportedly, the rules at Cambridge were that students couldn’t have dogs in their rooms, so Byron went and got a bear instead. History does not record who was responsible for cleaning up the catastrophic quantities of shit that come with keeping a bear in your bedroom, but I’ll bet you money it wasn’t Byron.
Some of this, historians argue, was Byron trying to compensate for how people saw him because of his disability: he was born with a clubfoot that made him walk with a limp through adulthood. I get that, though the “being an asshole about it” part is its own thing.
His other pastime during his school years? Falling in love with everyone within a six-mile radius. Several of these were fellow students at Harrow or Cambridge, which means I can categorize Byron alongside Lord Darnley, Caligula, and Lord Alfred Douglas as great examples of “people who were shitty and, separately, were also queer, though history often forgets the word ‘separately.’”
Sweet Childe o’ Mine
It was during this early Cambridge period that Byron started writing and publishing poetry. This will not surprise anyone who attended a liberal arts college, as the worst men you know always write poetry. The poems were not well received, so Byron responded the way all well-adjusted writers do to their reviews: by publishing pamphlets talking shit about individual critics until they challenged him to duels.
In 1812, the public’s perception changed: Byron published a poem called Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and, in his own words, “woke up one morning to find himself famous.”
Brief aside for my opinion on Byron’s poetry: it is all the same. Every Byron poem is about a dark-haired, devilishly handsome man who does not believe in God standing on a windy promontory overlooking the Hellespont or Waterloo, brooding manfully about mountains and ravines and his lover who has consumption and maybe is his sister.
Which, okay. Could you write one little poem about a flower without making it about insecure masculinity? I think that would be fun. Talk to Keats. He was also sad all the time but at least he had variety.
Also, I can’t read the words “Childe Harold” without mentally adding “and His Purple Crayon” at the end, but that may be a personal problem.
The Original Hot Topic Douchebag
I invite you, Reader, to take a guess how Byron responded to the fame and fortune that came with being a Hot Famous Poet.
If you guessed “irresponsibly,” congratulations! You win!
The biggest immediate change seems to be that he allowed himself to become the weirdest goth you’ve ever heard of. He set up a coffin at the end of his dining room and used the skulls of long-dead monks as drinking glasses. He would dress up as a spooky priest and set off guns inside the house. Sometimes he’d stage pretend naval battles on the family lake. People loved this, for some reason.
He also used the money from Childe Harold to embark on the Grand Tour: the Spoiled Rich Kid pastime of hitting thirty countries in a year and getting drunk and disorderly in all of them. As Napoleon was being a dickhead in Europe at the time, Byron had to go off the beaten path for his Grand Tour, so he chose the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Now. If you know anything about 19th century British history, it’s that English people cannot be fucking trusted in the Mediterranean or the Middle East. Turn your back on them for 45 minutes and they start eating mummies and stealing marbles.
To the best of my knowledge, Byron did not rob any ancient graves while traveling through Greece, Albania, and Turkey in the early 1810s. He did, however, swim the Hellespont, seduce a 12-year-old girl, and have so much gay sex that even he was exhausted. But Byron’s fascination with the Mediterranean would continue to problematically show up for the rest of his life, resulting in pictures like this:
Sister Act
Byron is, famously, history’s number-one fuckboy. And that reputation is well earned. Byron married Annabella Millbanke in 1815, but he had affairs with an uncountable number of women, including Lady Caroline Lamb, the actress Charlotte Mardyn, Mary Shelley’s half-sister Claire Clairmont, and possibly his own half-sister Augusta Leigh.
If I had a nickel for every time a famous 19th century poet fell in love with a blood relative somehow associated with the name “A. Lee” and wrote a poem about it, I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, Edgar Allan Poe.
Ordinarily I would feel terribly for Annabella Millbanke, for having to marry this philandering dickhead. However, Annabella was the best. She stayed with Byron just long enough to have one child—Ada Lovelace, the future inventor of computer programming. Then, in 1816, she divorced him, took enough of his money to get by, and devoted her life to fighting for abolition, advocating for prison reform, studying geometry, and raising her daughter to be a genius. If there is one hero in this story, it’s Annabella Millebanke.
The best part of Annabella’s divorce plot was that somehow this ruined Byron’s reputation in London. Public affairs? Fine. Ostentatious homosexuality? Absolutely. Possible incest? No worries. Divorce? Good heavens. Byron was broke and disgraced, and he left London in 1816 for the safety of the Continent, where any scandal could be covered up if you had enough panache.
Just Let Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont Have A Nice Vacation Without Any Men Around, It Is All I Ask
After questing through Europe standing on ledges and brooding, Byron settled at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland for the summer of 1816, where his friend Percy Shelley, his wife Mary, and the heroically weird Claire Clairmont all settled to wait out a season of bad weather. Byron was also living with his personal physician, John Polidori. Historians seem uninterested in whether Byron and Polidori were boyfriends. One of many ways in which I differ from historians.
This was the famous Switzerland writing retreat you’ve probably heard of, where Byron challenged everybody to write a spooky story and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Polidori wrote the spiritual forebear of Dracula, which may also have been an extended love letter to Byron. Byron and Shelley, the famous poets of the group, accomplished basically nothing but probably made the vibes real weird.
Around this time, Byron learned that Claire Clairmont was pregnant with his child from their affair in London. She would give birth to a daughter named Allegra, whose life Byron ruined because of who he was as a person.
Specifically, Byron refused to speak to Claire or ever see her again, but demanded sole custody of Allegra when she was 15 months old because he claimed that Claire was crazy. Except Byron was not going to raise a child, so he took Allegra away from her mother and sent her to a convent, where she got sick and died at age five of an illness she probably wouldn’t have caught at all if her asshole father hadn’t sent her to an Italian convent away from doctors to get back at her mother but he’s a genius so whatever.
You Can Pick Your Nose and You Can Pick Your Friends but You Can’t Turn Your Friends’ Skulls into Glassware
1818 to 1824 in the life of Lord Byron was a never-ending series of shenanigans in various countries across Europe. He couldn’t go back to England because his reputation as a divorcé who kept falling in love with his cousins was too scandalous, so instead he engaged in the following list of dumb activities:
Fucked multiple married women in Venice, then had to hide out in a gondola overnight to avoid their angry husbands
Got obsessed with the country of Armenia
Kept three pet monkeys at his house in Ravenna
Fell in love with an Italian countess, who he made leave her husband to be his mistress and then abandoned to go to Greece for Greece Reasons
Asked if he could keep Shelley’s skull after Shelley drowned in a boating accident
For that last one, they told him no because everyone knew he was going to use it as a drinking glass, which, gross. Also, if anyone was going to keep Shelley’s skull as a memento, it was going to be Goth Queen Mary Shelley, not Pretender to the Goth Throne Lord Byron.
Greek Squad
But back to the Greece thing! As I said, in 1824, Byron left Italy and sailed off to Greece in search of something self-absorbed to do. His choice: the Greek war for independence against the Ottomans. He spent shit-tons of money he did not have to outfit the Greek navy and then joined up with some revolutionaries who were preparing to fight the Ottomans and kept spending more money to help them.
“Wait!” you say. “That came the fuck out of nowhere. Why did Byron want to fight in the Greek revolution? What does that have to do with anything?”
Reader, that is a great question. I do not know. As best I can understand, this was Byron’s pathological need to be the manliest and most elaborately scandalous person in any room.
Probably he wanted to do something cool that he could write a poem about later. Maybe he was so lost in the sauce of his own bullshit he didn’t realize “Byronic hero” was an archetype he made up in his poems and not a real thing actual people should strive to be.
The point is, Byron had a quarter-life crisis and ran away to join the Greek revolution.
Did he find glory? Did he heroically rescue the oppressed people of Greece from their usurpers? Did he rush forward valiantly into battle with his sword glinting in the sunlight?
No. He tried to have sex with his teenage footman, paraded around in fancy costumes, and then caught a fever and died at age 36.
People still somehow contrive to make this a noble thing on Byron’s part. History baffles me.
Postscript: In Which Allison Tries to Be Impartial and Fair
Byron is clearly worthy of inclusion in the Dirtbag Hall of Fame. I mean, Christ. But do I hate Byron? Listen. It’s complicated. For the shitty things he did to women, yes, I hate him. For his poems, which I can’t stand, also yes. But for the sheer bisexual mess? I’m sort of here for it. He’s one of those people who I want to meet at a dinner party for exactly ninety minutes, after which point I will leave, take a deep breath of cleansing air on the front porch, and then call an Uber and go back to my quiet skull-free apartment.
Byron also has a couple cool things about him that I like. I will list them here for the sake of narrative balance.
He loved the ever-loving shit out of his dog Boatswain and built a giant marble tomb to commemorate the animal after its death.
He thought (correctly) that Lord Elgin was a dickhead who stole the Parthenon Sculptures.
He was publicly against antisemitism, AKA the exact opposite of every other 19th century writer I’ve come across.
One time he referred to William Wordsworth, my least favorite of the Romantics, as “Turdsworth,” which is hilarious.
That said, he fell in love with at least six of his cousins and also Napoleon, so. The jury stands by its original opinion.
That’s all for this time, my friends. Join me in two weeks for the crowned victor of Dirtbag Madness and another story about a ne’er-do-well of yore. Until then, be well, and if you drink out of a human skull be sure to hand-wash only as those are not dishwasher safe,
-Allison
I believe it was Keats who called Wordsworth “Wordswords,” which was almost as clever and more apt.
"As best I can understand, this was Byron’s pathological need to be the manliest and most elaborately scandalous person in any room."
I glossed over Byron when I read this and thought "Hemingway" instead.