Lord Byron

Lord Byron
	;
Real Name	George Gordon Byron
Born	January 22, 1788
Died	April 19, 1824

Origin[]

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was an English poet. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest British poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.

Byron was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, before he traveled extensively in Europe. He lived for seven years in Italy, in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa, after he was forced to flee England due to threats of lynching.

Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke. She was encouraged by her mother to pursue mathematics and logic. She is often regarded as the first computer programmer for creating an algorithm to calculate Bernoulli numbers on the machine and for envisioning its broader potential beyond calculations.

After this break-up of his domestic life, and by pressure on the part of his creditors, which led to the sale of his library, He journeyed through Belgium and continued up the Rhine river. In the summer of 1816 he settled at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with his personal physician, John William Polidori.

There Byron befriended the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and author Mary Godwin, Shelley's future wife. He was also joined by Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he had had an affair in London, which subsequently resulted in the birth of their illegitimate child Allegra, who died at the age of 5 under the care of Byron later in life. Several times Byron went to see Germaine de Staël and her Coppet group, which turned out to be a valid intellectual and emotional support to Byron at the time.

Kept indoors at the Villa Diodati by the "incessant rain" of "that wet, ungenial summer" over three days in June, the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including Fantasmagoriana, and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and Polidori produced The Vampyre, the progenitor of the Romantic vampire genre. The Vampyre was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron, "A Fragment".

Byron's story fragment was published as a postscript to Mazeppa; he also wrote the third canto of Childe Harold.

Later in life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence to fight the Ottoman Empire, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero. He died leading a campaign in 1824, at the age of 36, from a fever contracted after the first and second sieges of Missolonghi.

Public Domain Appearances[]

All published appearances and works of Lord Byron from before January 1, 1930 are public domain in the US.

Some notable appearances are listed below:

Public Domain Works[]

Major works[]

Hours of Idleness (1807)
Lachin y Gair (1807)
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I & II (1812)
The Giaour (1813)
The Bride of Abydos (1813)
The Corsair (1814)
Lara, A Tale (1814)
Hebrew Melodies (1815)
The Siege of Corinth (1816)
Parisina (1816)
The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)
The Dream (1816)
Prometheus (1816)
Darkness (1816)
Manfred (1817)
The Lament of Tasso (1817)
Beppo (1818)
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818)
Don Juan (1819–1824; incomplete on Byron's death in 1824)
Mazeppa (1819)
The Prophecy of Dante (1819)
Marino Faliero (1820)
Sardanapalus (1821)
The Two Foscari (1821)
Cain (1821)
The Vision of Judgment (1821)
Heaven and Earth (1821)
Werner (1822)
The Age of Bronze (1823)
The Island (1823)
The Deformed Transformed (1824)

Selected shorter lyric poems[]

Maid of Athens, ere we part (1810)
And thou art dead (1812)
She Walks in Beauty (1814)
My Soul is Dark (1815)
The Destruction of Sennacherib (1815)
Monody on the Death of the Right Hon. R. B. Sheridan (1816)
Fare Thee Well (1816)
So, we'll go no more a roving (1817)
When We Two Parted (1817)
Ode on Venice (1819)
Stanzas (1819)
Don Leon (not by Lord Byron, but attributed to him; 1830s)

Public Domain Literary Appearances[]

Glenarvon (1816): Byron appeared as a thinly disguised character in Glenarvon, written by his former lover Lady Caroline Lamb.
The Last Lamentation of Lord Byron (1824): The Spanish poet Gaspar Núñez de Arce wrote a long soliloquy on the miseries of the world, the existence of a superior, omnipotent being, politics, etc.
The Last Man (1826): Mary Shelley's apocalyptic novel The Last Man acts as a roman à clef for several members of her coterie including in its cast Adrian, Earl of Windsor as a tribute to Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend, Lord Raymond, who is a distinct portrait of Byron, noted as being "an adventurer in the Greek wars."

Public Domain Comic Appearances[]

Hit Comics #46
Kid Eternity #1
True Life Secrets #11
Tip Top Comics #142

Public Domain Film Appearances[]

Beau Brummel (1924)

Notes[]

The brief prologue to Bride of Frankenstein includes Gavin Gordon as Byron, begging Mary Shelley to tell the rest of her Frankenstein story.