Steamy Letters By Lord Byron Up For Auction

A series of letters penned by the great English Romantic poet Lord Byron to his friend the Reverend Francis Hodgson will go up for auction at Sotheby's in London (no date has yet been set). The letters have been in the family of a former Prime Minister, the Earl of Rosebery, for almost 125 years and have never been fully reviewed. Sotheby's expert Gabriel Heaton gave us a hint of their contents, telling the British newspaper The Guardian that "Byron clearly enjoyed writing slightly outrageous things to a clergyman...."

Byron was certainly no stranger to the outrageous. One of his many lovers, the Lady Caroline Lamb, famously described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know." Not that the opinion stopped her from wanting to know him. In fact, in large part because of his wild ways, everyone, and I mean everyone, wanted to know him.

Who was Byron? He was an aristocrat; he was witty and handsome and sometimes dark and brooding. He enjoyed dressing up like a monk and drinking wine out of a skull. He was--particularly for his time--remarkably promiscuous. He dressed the aforementioned Lady Caroline up like a pageboy and dressed himself up as a woman. He was also probably bisexual. In one of the letters up for auction, Byron describes the ruler of Albania as a "fine, portly person with two hundred women and as many boys, many of the last I saw and very pretty creatures they were" (and let's not forget--he was writing to a clergyman). Another letter details an affair he had with a serving girl. Heaton summed it up:

"Basically, he takes her as his mistress and he is never at any point saying he is going to be faithful to her but he expects her to be faithful to him and when he hears rumours that she isn't, she loses her job."

In my favorite excerpt from the letters, Byron refers to the poet William Wordsworth as "Turdsworth" (the two, as you could probably guess, were not friends). He went after Wordsworth more eloquently in a particularly vicious piece of light verse called "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers:"

Next comes the dull disciple of thy school,
That mild apostate from poetic rule,
The simple WORDSWORTH, framer of a lay
As soft as evening in his favourite May,
Who warns his friend "to shake off toil and trouble,
And quit his books, for fear of growing double;"
Who, both by precept and example, shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose;
Convincing all, by demonstration plain,
Poetic souls delight in prose insane;
And Christmas stories tortured into rhyme
Contain the essence of the true sublime.
Thus, when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of "an idiot Boy;"
A moon-struck, silly lad, who lost his way,
And, like his bard, confounded night with day
So close on each pathetic part he dwells,
And each adventure so sublimely tells,
That all who view the "idiot in his glory"
Conceive the Bard the hero of the story.

Wordsworth was not alone in drawing Byron's scorn. Byron only spared a lucky few of his fellow poets, including his friends Percy Bysshe Shelley and Sir Walter Scott.

Byron's huge celebrity only increased with news of his death--he fell ill while preparing to fight in the war for Greek Independence. Women across England wept and the young Lord Alfred Tennyson later recalled that, despondent, he carved into a rock "Byron is dead." Byron's celebrity, clearly, is not. His letters are estimated to fetch between £150,000 and £180,000 (around $250,000).

 

 

Comments

[SaveMeSuperman]

Lord Byron letters to Reverend = Michael Jackson and Rabbi Shmuli?

[antaeus]

GLENARVON is a roman à clef about Byron; FRANKENSTEIN, not so much. In fact, given the creature's longing for female companionship, it's difficult to see how he represents a cautionary tale about homosexuality. It also trivializes a novel of great subtlety and artistic achievement to reduce it to a young woman's bedroom melodrama. Rather it more clearly belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of a growing insecurity about and ambivalence toward Enlightenment rationality and scientific progress.

[Nishnabe]

Thanks, I pointedly added several times that it was not about reducing the other points of the novel and I did not say it was a "a cautionary tale about homosexual­ity." It was about a struggle for one soul. Simply my take on it from the native point of view. Also, I don't think there was a whole lot of subtlety and artistic achievement in the novel. My take was that it was poorly edited and wandering badly in places. My gosh, written like an 18 year old star struck follower of the literati. Often I sit in meetings where we are encouraged to "think outside the box" when it comes to issues of retention of students who now hemorrhage from secondary schools and college. When you do think outside the box, it is usually the History, English or Philosophy faculty (mostly Anglo) who bring us back to the reality that women and minorities are not ready to join the folks in the box. Funny, that box has sides big enough to keep others out, and those inside from seeing the world outside.
My Toocents

[spilkus]

Shucks, and I thought Frankenstein was a reworking of the Prwomethean myth and critique of the Age of Reason. But I'll bite. If it is an allegory or metaphor for the love triangle then match the tenor with the vehicle. In your reading, Who is the monster? Who is Victor? Who is the captain?

[Nishnabe]

See comment below. I was hoping these letters might shed some light on the affair with Shelley but so far I see nothing that could, except that he was bi-sexual which has been known since his time. Again, she was 18, how much did she imbed in the story? The sea captain was simply a narration device common at the time. Some of the transitions are terrible and the power of the novel is the story and not how she tells it. She also borrowed shamelessly from her father William Godwin and his novel Caleb Williams. But I believe she built into the story the struggle for the soul of Victor Frankenstein, the raison d' etre for the novel. Two men, one born of the other, struggling over one soul. Frankenstein is commanded to build a mate, a woman, under threat of the destruction of his family, and cannot, fearing that he will give birth to a race of monsters. But the core of the struggle is over the soul of one man. The lesson the innocent Mary was struggling with? That two men will never produce life, no matter how connected they are. Such a proposition is not out of the question. BTW, check, no one sees the monster and the doctor alive at the same time and lives to tell about it. Two men, one soul, incapable of reproduction. A literary stick in the eye to Byron.

[raechel]

Byron's greatest accomplishment? His daughter, Ada.

[Genep34]

From what I know of her she was something.

[Nishnabe]

Folks, Doing some research on the novel Frankenstein, I surmised the following. Much of the novel is about the struggle for the soul of Victor Frankenstein, written as a plea to Percy Shelley to reconsider his affair with Lord Byron. The affair between Percy and Lord Byron was conducted at least without secret during the time Mary Shelley was writing the novel and certainly during the summer at the chalet at Lake Geneva 1816. No one ever sees the monster and Victor Frankenstein together and lives to tell about it. Even the sea captain sees them both, but separately. At Frankenstein's death, the monster appears only after Frankenstein is dead. What is Mary Shelley saying? That love between men will never produce life, at least not life with a soul. No, I am not anti-gay, but in doing research on the novel I read Mary's diaries and journals and she longed for a "traditional" marriage with Percy Shelley. When I saw the post, I was hoping that letters between Percy and Lord Byron had surfaced. As a Native American, I was deeply interested in Byrons' stand on the repatriation of Greek artifacts from the British museums. "Dull is the eye that will not weep to see, thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed." Childe Harold Canto XV. In the course of doing that research and the study of Frankenstein, I ran across hints of the affair and Mary's reaction to it.

[PhilipB]

Well, Nishnabe!
I loved your comment! It was so thoughtful, reasoned and informed by your own story.
Fanned!
Best regards,

[spilkus]

So swell that you were able to take a universal allegory of human enlightenment and reduce it to a wife telling her husband to stop screwing his pal. Your method of literary analysis could well spell the end of literary analysis. I hope you're not on an English faculty somewhere. If you are a social scientist then by all means surmise away.

[Nishnabe]

Ah, spilkus, a literary maven. There are multiple levels to an 18 year old writing a ghost story? She had a miscarriage while writing the novel, Percy's pregnant and still wife threw herself into the Thames while she was writing, and she did not have a clue about developing the personality of the monster. Besides, I said "hints" and Mary's reaction to the affair. Look at the novel. There are only two times the monster cries. When "it" is "born," a scene she borrowed from her dream which sparked the novel, and a story from Rousseau when he fell from a bicycle. The second when peeping through a hole in the wall of the pigsty, he "hears of the treatment of the Red Indians of North America." Intrigued me. So, by this time, the "Brat pack" which was Byron, the Shelleys, Polidori (Vampyre, later used by Stoker) and some mentioned in this story above, were writing about the Native experience but especially the notion of soul travel (Polidori's Vampyre) was about that, as well as Bryons' Childe Harold. But yes, I am a social scientist and god forbid we knock on each other's walls of analysis. We might learn something. reductio ad absurdum.

[scarletxoxoxo]

My role model.

[emncaity]

Yes, definitely. Promiscuity and an affinity for "boys" (I can only assume that had he been talking about adults, he would've said "men"). There's somebody to emulate.

[SelenicMagick]

You obviously are NOT well-versed on British History...

Get a GRIP! IF there was an "age of consent" at the time it was EIGHT. THAT was between male and female. Homosexuality was ILLEGAL for a hundred years after that at least. Read "Ballad of Reading Gaol" lately? The "Age of consent in England went from EIGHT to THIRTEEN after Victoria ascended the throne, by which point Byron had been DEAD for 12 years.

First of all... Byron was sent to Harrow, as a student, at 13.

Secondly..­. He went from Harrow to Trinity (college), again as a student, where he met the 15 year old Choirboy John Edelson. Byron was 16 at the time.

Third... At the time when he convinced Lady Caroline to masquerade as a "boy" (and he masqueraded as a woman) it was for a bloody Masquerade Ball. In Regency England the social rules went out of the window at Masques . Especially if you have a reputation to uphold, which HE DID.

Fourth... of FAR more concern should be the Augusta Leigh affair. Augusta Leigh was his HALF sister. Her daughter, Elizabeth Leigh, was alleged to be his daughter.

Applying CURRENT social mores to situations that occurred more than 200 years ago is both ridiculous and ignorant.