Selected Poems

by Byron

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette executed; Marat murdered; the Terror begins. France declares war on Britain.

  1794

  Danton executed; Robespierre executed. The Terror ends.

  1794

  5 Byron attends Aberdeen Grammar School; becomes heir to the title, Baron Byron.

  1795

  Napoleon’s Italian campaign.

  1796

  Lewis’s The Monk ublished.

  1797

  Byron’s first sexual experience, with his nurse, May Gray.

  1798

  At the death of his great-uncle, the fifth Baron Byron, Byron becomes sixth Baron Byron and inherits the heavily mortgaged ancestral estate, Newstead Abbey, to which he moves with his mother and nurse May Gray. Battle of the Nile; Irish Rebellion; Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge) and Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions (Vol. 1) published.

  1799

  Byron endures painful but futile treatments of his club-foot. Napoleon returns to France and becomes First Consul.

  1800

  Second edition of Lyrical Ballads (with Preface) and Thomas Moore’s Odes of Anacreon published.

  1801

  Byron at Harrow until 1805. Pitt resigns on the refusal of George III to assent to Catholic emancipation. Publication of Southey’s Thalaba, Moore’s Poems by Thomas Little and Bowles’s Sorrows of Switzerland.

  1802

  Peace of Amiens between England and France; France reoccupies Switzerland. Volume 2 of Baillie’s Plays and Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border published. Edinburgh Review founded.

  1803

  Byron in love with Mary Chaworth, his cousin and neighbour at Newstead; she ridicules his lameness. Relationship with Lord Grey. England declares war on France.

  1804

  Pitt becomes Prime Minister; Napoleon crowned Emperor; end of the Holy Roman Empire. Baillie’s Miscellaneous Plays published.

  1805

  Mary Chaworth marries. Byron enters Trinity College, Cambridge, befriends John Cam Hobhouse, and falls in love with a chorister, John Edleston (‘Thyrza’). Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar.

  1806

  Fugitive Pieces printed privately and immediately suppressed when Revd John Becher objects to some of the poems. High life in London. Scott’s Ballads and Lyrical Pieces and Bowles’s editions of Pope published.

  1807

  Poems on Various Occasions (a cleaned-up Fugitive Pieces with twelve new pieces) printed privately in January, and in a public printing in June, with twelve further new pieces, as Hours of IdlenessByron leaves Cambridge without a degree, heavily in debt by end of the year. Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes, Moore’s Irish Melodies and Southey’s Letters from England by Don Espriella published. French invasion of Spain and Portugal. Peninsular

  Campain begins. Abolition of slave-trade in Enland.

  1808

  Poems Original and Translated, second edition, with five new pieces, published. Edinburgh Review ridicules Hours of Idleness. Byron awarded MA degree by Cambridge in July. Lives in London and eventually takes up residence at Newstead Abbey. Hunt becomes editor of the Examiner; Scott’s Marmion published.

  1809

  Spanish uprising (May); Convention of Cintra (August). Nine poems by Byron published in Imitations and Translations from the Ancient and Modern Classics, by John Cam Hobhouse. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers published in March. Byron takes his seat in House of Lords. Grand Tour with Hobhouse: sails to Lisbon, travels in Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Malta, Greece, Albania (visits the Ali Pasha), Missolonghi and Athens. Writes Canto I of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

  William Gifford becomes editor of the Quarterly Review (published by John Murray). Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming, Hobhouse’s Travels through Albania and Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra published. Coronation of Joseph Bonaparte in Madrid; Wellesley in command in Portugal Napoleon beaten by the Austrians

  1810

  Byron travels through Greece and Turkey, returns to Athens; swims the Hellespont; writes Canto II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Hobhouse returns to England.

  1811

  Byron sails to England, arriving by summer. Deaths of his mother and Edleston. Writes ‘Thyrza’ poems. Meets Thomas Moore. Prince of Wales becomes Regent after George III is deemed incompetent. Luddite Riots against the weaving frames.

  1812

  Association with Lord Holland and brief career in the House of Lords; Byron’s maiden speech opposes the Frame-Breaking Bill which prescribed the death penalty.

  Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I and II, published by John Murray in March; Byron woke to find himself famous. The Edinburgh Review (Jeffrey) buries the hatchet and gives a favourable review. Friendships with Samuel Rogers and Thomas Moore; affairs with Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford; through Lady Melbourne meets Annabella

  Milbanke, proposes marriage to her in October and is refused

  Anna Barbauld’s anti-imperialist Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and Volume 3 of Baillie’s Plays published.

  Napoleon invades Russia in June and retreats from Moscow in December, with catastrophic losses.

  1813

  Byron in the whirl of London Regency society; frequent visits to Princess Charlotte (the Regent’s daughter); affair with Augusta; last speech in Lords; visits Leigh Hunt in jail. Flirtatious friendship with Lady Frances Webster; meets Mme de Staël. Publishes The Waltz anonymously in a private printing, The Giaour in June (first edition) and The Bride of Abydos in November. The Edinburgh Review (Jeffrey) gives The Giaour a favourable review.

  Southey publishes Life of Nelson and becomes poet laureate; Leigh Hunt imprisoned for libel. Shelley’s Queen Mab and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice published.

  Austria joins the Alliance against France.

  1814

  Publication of The Corsair with ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’ (the Princess’s distress at her father’s betrayal of his Whig allies) in February (10,000 copies sell immediately), ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’ in April, Lara (with Rogers’s Jacqueline) in August. Byron attacked in Tory press for ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’. The Edinburgh Review (Jeffrey) gives The Corsair and The Bride of Abydos a favourable review, commenting on the character type of the hero.

  Medora Leigh (now thought to be Byron’s daughter by Augusta), born in April. Annabella Milbanke accepts his second proposal in September.

  The Allies invade France; Napoleon abdicates and is exiled; the Bourbons are restored. Shelley elopes to the Continent with Mary Godwin.

  Publication of Wordsworth’s Excursion, Scott’s Waverley, Austen’s Mansfield Park and Cary’s translation of The Divine Comedy.

  1815

  Murray publishes a four-volume edition of Byron’s poems; Hebrew Melodies published. Byron marries Annabella Milbanke in January; birth of daughter Ada in December. Life in London; through Murray meets Walter Scott;

  becomes member of the Drury Lane Theatre Management Committee. Financial difficulties and arrival of bailiffs; frequent visits from Augusta and beginning of alienation from Annabella.

  Napoleon escapes from Elba, is defeated at Waterloo and exiled to St Helena; restoration of Louis XVIII.

  Wordsworth’s collected Poems and Charles Lloyd’s translation of The Tragedies of Alfieri published.

  1816

  Publication of The Siege of Corinth and Parisina (February), Poems and fifth edition of English Bards. The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III published in November; at a booksellers’ dinner, Murray sells 7,000 copies of each volume. Byron works on Manfred, ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Darkness’.

  In January, Lady Byron leaves with Ada to live with her parents; Byron writes ‘Fare thee well!’ in March, and, amidst dark rumours about his character, a deed of separation is drawn up in March and signed in April; he meets and begins an affair with Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister. Cut by London society over the separation scandal, with financial difficulties worsening, Byron auctions off his library and
leaves England in April, for ever. Travels in Belgium, Waterloo, the Rhine and Switzerland. Rents Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva, meets the Shelleys, near neighbours, and begins Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III. Ghost stories at Villa Diodati (the origin of Frankenstein), friendship with the Shelleys; the affair with Claire Clairmont cools during her pregnancy with his child. Tours the Alps and Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley, visits Chateau de Chillon. After the Shelleys and Claire leave for England, he sets off for Italy with Hobhouse and moves to Venice later in the year; affair with Marianna Segati, his landlord’s wife; studies Armenian at a monastery.

  Hemans’s The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy, Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini (with a Dedication to Byron), Shelley’s Alastor, Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode, Austen’s Emma, Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon (with a hero meant to be read as Byron, and publishing one of his letters

  to her) and Coleridge’s Christabel and Kubla Khan ublished.

  Elgin Marbles displayed; prosecution of William Hone for blasphemous libel (tried in 1817); Spa Field Riots (December).

  1817

  Manfred published in June; writing Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV. Allegra, his and Claire Clairmont’s daughter, born in England (January). Venice Carnival and dissipations. Travels to Rome with Hobhouse, returns to settle in Venice. Visits with ‘Monk’ Lewis; affair with Margarita Cogni. Hears the story that is the basis for Beppo, reads Frere’s Whistlecraft (a poem in ottava rima). Sells Newstead Abbey for £94,500 in December.

  Publication of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves, Keats’s first volume of Poems, Moore’s Lalla Rookh, Hemans’s Modern Greece, Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays and The Round Table and Southey’s Wat Tyler (written in the 1790s), by his enemies to embarrass him. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine founded. ‘Z”s articles on the ‘Cockney School’ appear in Blackwood’s 1817-19, attacking Hunt, Keats and eventually Shelley. Habeas Corpus Act suspended in England (March). Death of Princess Charlotte from complications in the delivery of a stillborn child.

  1818

  Writes ‘My dear Mr Murray’. Beppo published in February, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV in April (including stanzas on the death of the Princess).

  Venice Carnival, dissipations, etc. Byron leases a palazzo on the Grand Canal and begins Don Juan in July; spends much time with the Shelleys, encounters Contessa Teresa Guiccioli Allera comes to Venice with her nurse

  Keats’s Endymion, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam, Scott’s Rob Roy and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein published; a scathing review of Endymion in the Quarterly. European Alliance; Habeas Corpus Act restored in England.

  1819

  Mazeppa and Ode to Venice published in June, Don Juan I-II in July, anonymously, and then pirated, to Murray’s distress. Works on Don Juan III. All four cantos of Childe

  Harold’s Pilgrimage published together. Venice Carnival, etc. Byron visits the Guicciolis in Ravenna and Bologna; begins affair with Teresa and at her request writes The Prophecy of Dante; gives his memoirs to Thomas Moore in October. Teresa’s husband and her father, Count Gamba, try to end her liaison with Byron; in November, she returns to Ravenna with her husband. On Christmas Eve Byron joins Teresa at Ravenna.

  Wordsworth’s Peter Bell and The Waggoner, Polidori’s The Vampyre, Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Hemans’s Tales and Historical Scenes published. Scathing review of The Revolt of Islam in the Quarterly, with a vicious attack on Shelley’s character.

  ‘Peterloo massacre’ in August; Six Acts passed in December; birth of Queen Victoria. Shelley writes The Mask of Anarch.

  1820

  Byron and Allegra live with Teresa and her husband; Byron’s and Teresa’s liaison continues. Byron becomes involved in the Italian Revolution against Austrian rule (the Carbonari movement) through Teresa’s brother. Teresa is officially separated from her husband in July and goes to live with her father; Byron visits frequently. Sends Allegra to live in the country. Working on Don Juan III–V, translates ‘Francesca of Rimini’ from Dante’s Inferno, Canto V.

  Death of George III; the Regent becomes George IV.

  Dissolution of Parliament, Cato Street Conspiracy in England. Queen Caroline tried for adultery; Byron involved in seeking Italian witnesses for her.

  Royalist reactions throughout Europe; revolution in Spain and Portugal.

  Murray publishes an eight-volume edition of Byron’s poems (1818–20). Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant published and suppressed; his Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems, The Cenci, Hemans’s The Sceptic, Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life, Wordsworth’s Memorials of a Tour on the Continent and The River Duddon, and Keats’s Lamia volume published. The London Magazine and John Bull founded.

  1821

  Byron begins his journal. Marino Faliero and The Prophecy of Dante published in April; when Don Juan III–V is published in August, Murray’s premises are mobbed by booksellers’ messengers; Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari and Cain are published together in December. After Southey publishes A Vision of Judgement with its attack on the Satanic school, Byron retaliates with The Vision of Judgment. Sends Murray The Blues in August. Marino Faliero flops on the London stage.

  The Gambas (Teresa’s family) are expelled from Romagna in July and banished to Pisa; Byron and the Gambas join the Shelleys and others of the ‘Pisan circle’ by November. Allegra is sent to a convent school.

  Deaths of Napoleon, Queen Caroline and Keats (in Rome, February); Shelley’s Adonais hooted at in Blackwood’s; Baillie’s Metrical Legends published. The ‘Bowles controversy’ in England: Byron writes two letters in defence of Pope and attacks the Lake poets and the Cockneys. Lockhart’s unsigned pamphlet, John Bull’s Letter to the Right Hon. Lord Byron published.

  Greek War of Liberation (from the Ottoman Empire) begins.

  1822

  Byron publishes A Letter to [John Murray] on the Rev. W. C. Bowles’s Strictures on… Pope; resumes Don Juan, attenuates his relationship with Murray and makes terms with the radical publisher, John Hunt. Southey attacks Byron in February in the conservative Courier. Leigh Hunt arrives with his large family in Pisa in July to join Byron and Shelley in publishing the Liberal. The first issue (15 October) includes Byron’s ‘Letter to the Editor of “My Grandmother’s Review” ’ and The Vision of Judgment, the latter resulting in hostile reviews and John Hunt’s prosecution. Murray publishes Werner in November.

  Allegra dies of typhus in April; Lady Noel, Annabella’s mother, dies; Byron takes the name ‘Noel Byron’ and shares the estate, nearly doubling his income. Shelley leaves for Lerici in April, drowns in a boating accident in July. Byron, Mary Shelley and the Hunts move to Genoa in September. Friction with the Hunts.

  Shelley’s Hellas published in February; also published, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, commits suicide in August.

  1823

  The Liberal publishes Heaven and Earth in January and The Blues in April. The Age of Bronze also published in April, The Island in June, Don Juan (now published by John Hunt) VI-VIII in July, IX-XI in August, and XII-XIV in December

  Byron is elected a member of the Greek Committee in London; quarrels with the Hunts and Mary Shelley; meets Countess Blessington; becomes involved in the Revolution and sails for Greece in July, arriving at Missolonghi at the end of the year; agrees to lend the Greek Government £4,000.

  Mary Shelley’s Valperga and Caroline Lamb’s Ada Reis: A Tale published.

  France and Spain at war.

  1824

  Byron in Greece at Missolonghi, financing the army. Writes verses on thirty-sixth birthday. The Deformed Transformed published in February, Don Juan XV-XVI in March.

  The Revolution is in disarray. Byron’s health deteriorates, and he dies at Missolonghi in April; his body is taken to England, where he is buried in July, with his ancestors near Newstead, having been refused interment at Westminster Abbey. His memoirs are destroyed
.

  Correspondence of Lord Byron with a Friend, edited by R.C. Dallas, is suppressed before it could be published; Dallas does publish Recollections of Lord Byron (1808–14), and Thomas Medwin publishes Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron at Pisa. Also published: L.E.L.’s (Laetitia Landon) The Improvisatrice; Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, including ‘Julian and Maddalo’, published in England by John Hunt and associates but quickly suppressed by Shelley’s father.

  1825

  Dallas’s Correspondence published in Paris. Murray produces an eight-volume edition of Byron’s poetry, and Hazlitt’s essay on ‘Lord Byron’ appears in The Spirit of the Age.

  1826

  Don Juan (Cantos I-XVI) published in two volumes.

  1828

  Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries published.

  1830

  Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life (two volumes) and John Galt’s The Life of Lord Byron published.

  1831

  Thomas Macaulay’s extensive review of Moore’s Byron published in the Edinburgh Review (June).

  1832–3

  3 Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington published in the New Monthly Magazine (July 1832-December 1833).

  1832–4

  John Murray publishes a seventeen-volume edition of The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life, by Thomas Moore, Esq.

  FURTHER READING

  THE ROMANTIC ERA

  Brown, Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 5: Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  Gaull, Marilyn, English Romanticism, The Human Context (Norton, 1988).

  Renwick, W. L., English Literature: 1789–1815, and Ian Jack, English Literature: 1815–1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Both in John Buxton and Norman Davis (eds.), Oxford History of English Literature.

  Wolfson, Susan, and Peter Manning (eds.), The Romantics and Their Contemporaries, Vol. 2a of David Damrosch (ed.), The Longman Anthology of British Literature, 2nd edn (New York: Longman Publishers, 2003, 3rd edition, 2006).