You Have Heard of Lord Byron. But You Have No Idea.

Hi, I'm Cassidy. And I'm April. And together we are fashion historians, friends, and co-hosts of Dress the History of Fashion, a podcast about why the clothes we wear matter throughout history and around the world. From the cultural and societal to the personal and often political, with each episode we explore the multitude of meanings quite literally sewn into the clothes we wear. Please join us in unraveling the hidden histories residing in your closet. New episodes are available on Wednesdays and our Dressed Classic episodes re-air each Friday. On Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen to your favorite shows. This is the Bookright Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. I'm Rebecca Kaczynski. I have the hour managing editor Vanessa Diaz is back with us today to take us on another adventure in literary history. Vanessa, thanks for being here. I'm so excited to be back. It was a little bit of a break there, but it worked out really nicely because today's topic fits in with the month. So it was... Was it Marlowe last time? Remind me, do we do this with Marlowe last year? Yeah, last time you and I did was Marlowe. Yeah, it was just the beginning of the year. It was kind of wonky for several reasons. So now we're back. But yeah, I'm glad I get to do this again. I love these episodes because they're always fun. And also because Jeff and I have no idea what you're about to talk to us about. I do feel like I have to perform some basic literary history competency on these. I do feel on the spot a little bit. But that's fun. That's okay. Which is great because on the opposite end, I've expressed before, I'm always like the English professors in the house, like I'm going to pick a topic that he's going to laugh at me about. I've been in 20 years. What would you get to shed that I used to know this stuff? It lives in you. It's just anyway. But so... So wakes up in a tweed coat. Yeah, right. I like to think so. Like these are my tweed pajamas. They have a little half that goes with them. At one point, like tweed was cutting edge. It's hard to think about. Imagine. Look at these elbow badges. What a rebel. Jay Crew is going to bring that back. That's the whole Patrick Rad and Keev gambit. Oh, 100%. Make tweed sexy again. Middle names and tweed jackets. Middle names and tweed jackets. I actually don't want middle names to come back, but that's a whole different podcast. I don't want that. It is, especially as a Mexican child immigrants who was very jealous about not having a nickname. Anyway, several, several different tangents that exist here. So this podcast topic is one that Rebecca has seen only because when I was first proposing this as a segment, I dumped this document in her lap and was like, what if I did this literary history thing? And I think she even. Yeah, I think she even. I don't expect you to remember, but it even DM'd me like this is like what's what's this one about? And I was like, I'm going to save that one till you least expect it. So I'll see if you can maybe guess. It's very long, not a long game here. So because it's poetry month, I decided to. And I picked this topic literally in April of last year, just the time I didn't work out. And this guy has a bit of a history for being a notorious kind of F boy, just known almost more for his, his dalliances that I mean, he is obviously known. Byron as well. Absolutely. Yes. Look at you winning. You got your points already. I do. I'm off. I'm turning my camera off. Today's episode is brought to you by 11 Reader. If you listen to audio books a lot, the narrator problem can be so real. Seventy four percent of audio book listeners have stopped or considered stopping a book because of the narrator's voice. 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This episode is brought to you by Del Ray, publisher of Enamorada by Ava Reed. Stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition. Once there was an island where the dead walked the earth and seven noble houses ruled by necromancy until a conqueror's blade brought them low. But defiant against the new order stands the House of Teeth and its last living members, beautiful Morosia and her cousin, the uncanny Lady Agnes. Though she has not spoken in seven years, Agnes carries the house's legacy. She must recapture the secrets of death magic and avenge her family's fall in honor. And so a gruesome new duology begins. This is the first book in a new duology from Ava Reed, author of Lady Macbeth and a study in drowning. If you crave the macabre body horror and doomed characters, this book is for you. And it will leave your jaw on the floor. You'll be desperate to know what happens in book two. Again, stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition of Enamorada by Ava Reed. Thanks to our sponsors at Del Ray. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand. Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale ups online, in person and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your one dollar a month trial at Shopify.com. Slash setup. You get two tweets. Gordon Gordon. That's him, right? Yeah. So last year I was listening to a podcast that I love called Betwixt the Sheets, that is sort of a history of like sex and scandal, specifically throughout history. And she did this amazing little series. It was just sort of like history's biggest F boys, like doing kind of an analysis of like, as a reputation earned, is it not, you know, what have you? And so when she started talking about Byron, I was like, Byron. Byron may fit the bill better than like most people, I know, just because so much of what we know about him is because of Byron. Like, I mean, there's not too many of these, Vanessa. Literally that. So that was kind of what kicked off the series idea in the back of my brain. And then I just held on to it for a year. So here we are. I won't ask what you know about him per se, but like, yeah, I guess what is each of your like, are you poetry people? I mean, we all kind of know Byron because we know Byron, you know, existentially, but what yeah, where are you at? Rebecca's like shaking her head. I know nothing other than wasn't he there when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein? Yeah, he was. Good. That makes an appearance. Yeah. And he's a poet and I am sure I read some Byron in school and that is the full extent of my knowledge of Lord Byron. That's great. So my index card for Byron now is something like this. I've got a few things, Vanessa, and maybe I'll remember these correctly or not. Yes. One is that he's more famous for being Byron now than for really anything he wrote amongst common readers. I like Don Juan or Don Juan, because I remember that's actually how it scans in the poem is Don Juan, not Don Juan, which for me is immediately bad. I'm not sure how your people feel about that. Like the Mexican in the room would like to say something. Probably doesn't probably doesn't enjoy the John June, who was a true one or something like that. The first line, absolutely not. Yep. Child Harold's pilgrimage. He fought in the Greek Civil War. I believe he's a Greek like folk hero because he was so lauded for fighting in the Greek Civil War. He died young and had romantic entanglements, but also wrote about people having romantic entanglements, but a huge star, like a huge literary star in the day before there was popular culture. Like, yeah, I don't even. Is there an equit? I don't even know what the equivalent would be. Like there is no equivalent to this. That's a perfect set up. So yeah, like Byron again is one of those things that I feel like, especially if you just went to high school and you know, here, like you're going to know about in some way kind of tangentially. But so much of what I know, I have just said about Byron through the years has been more about, yeah, like the Byronic persona than about his actual work. Even though I had to sit here for a second and go, wait, name one of his works. And I eventually came up with one, but it took me a second, which is a thing. So there's no good way, I don't think in a 30 to 40 minute show to like actually do a bio of it, we just couldn't. Like there are so many side quests that I kept going on when putting this together that there's no way we're going to accomplish that. So instead I kind of made the side quests the meal and we're going to just talk about a few of the bigger, I guess you want to call them maybe scandals. Some of it is a biography, but just things that kind of make up this persona that he now embodies. So we will take it back to a brief viral only bio only because it does lay the work for like who he ends up becoming. So yeah, the man we know as Lord Byron was born as Jeff remembered. So clearly is George Gordon Byron. George Gordon. Yeah, George Gordon, which was right up there with sexy names like Sheldon. And when Harry met Sheldon, exactly. And when I first saw the, I was, but Byron is not amazing. Actually Byron gave Byron sex appeal before Lord Byron. He was just like, it was right up there with George. George Gordon, not George Gordon. Not doing it. I so love that you're teeing these bits of it up to me because there's parts of this name that, okay. So first, so he's born in 1788. He is apparently descended from this dude named Ralph DeBoren, which is D.U. and then B.U. are you. And so it wasn't even Byron at first. It was DeBoren. He arrived in England, apparently with William the Conqueror. So that was way back in like the 11th century. So he's descended from. Arrived with William the Conqueror for England is like coming over on the Nina, Pinto and Santa Maria for English people. It's like the exactly the same. That's, that's, I have a version of that written in my notes, kind of, which was like this, you say William the Conqueror and the Brits or you know, Peacup. His name is listed in what was called the doomsday book, which was this manuscript of a survey when William the Conqueror basically was like, how much land do you have and how much can I tax you for it? So that's the first record that we see of these DeBoren's and eventually becomes Byron. So the Byron name has like something to it. There is no ability. But then here we go on our first side quest and we could do so, so many of them. Byron comes from a long line of rakishness and a responsibility, shocking, maybe no one, but his lineage includes like his relatives, nicknames or stuff like the Wicked Lord, Mad Jack. The Wicked Lord Byron, right? Like his uncle or something was the Wicked Byron. Foul Weather Jack was his dad. Foul Weather Jack is unbelievable. That's an unfoul weather Jack. I love his dad. Was his dad a sailor? Was Lord Byron's dad a sailor? So the Foul Weather Jack comes because he had a career in like the Navy and apparently just kept on having to navigate these terrible storms. And so like, ah, Foul Weather Jack, you be in that suck, which is helpful because there's a lot of Byron Byron Byron when you're talking about this guy. We used to know how to do this. People don't have nicknames anymore. Anything Jack works. Just blank. Just that works anyway. I wish that's going to be a new like work side icebreaker one day. Like everybody come up with it. Would have been like your old seafarer name. Yeah, your Appalachian Jack. Yeah. Oreo Jack. That works. Oreo Jack works. Oreo Jack does. So this man who is Foul Weather Jack, Jack Byron, the Lord Byron's father, was first married to a woman named Amelia Osborne, who was in March of Us, and he was married. She was married to another man when they got together, which is a trend that you will continue to see with his son. He's in this pants is not a huge thing for the Byron's. No, not even a teeny, teeny bit. When they get to when they get married, she it's shortly after this March of Us has divorced her husband and she's eight months knocked up. So they're like not even kind of pretending it here. They're just like, oh, we're going to do this. And apparently the marriage was not a happy one, which is obviously a thing that you hear a lot of back then. Yeah, they have two children that don't survive infancy, a third one that does survive, who we will hear about later about her name is Augusta. And she is the only one that that lives out of that marriage. So Augusta, keep that name in the back of your brain. So then once he decides or actually, I should say the woman, the mother, Amelia, the March of Us, she passes away shortly after having that third child. And that's a problem for Byron because he relied on her for cash. The money that she had been given by the estate obviously stops being distributed when she dies. He's like, I need somebody that can pay for my lifestyle. And that's how he ends up with this woman named Katherine. What year we're talking about now? Did we already do to orient people in time? Maybe I was I did the beginnings of it, but you might have. But no, actually, the Byron was born in 1788. So yeah, so we're all a teeny bit before that a little before that. OK, OK, his mother, which is where I'll orient this again, is Katherine Gordon of Guy. That's who John Jack Marys in 1817, sorry, 1785. So now we're in that year. And the consensus again is that he absolutely married her for her money. She's there's so many terrible things written about the women that are in the Byronic like extended circles that just are so sad that there's a nodding him like record that describes this woman as Captain Byron met his second wife at Bath. He could not have been attracted to her beauty for she had none to boast of. Love. Whoa. Thanks so much. So it is everywhere you look is just like he married her for the money. He needed the money. She was a Scottish heiress from Aberdeenshire. But he specifically added the name Gordon to his name to essentially lend legitimacy so he could make sure he got the money that was coming to him. So that was the only reason why that Gordon name ever makes it into Lord Byron's name is because his dad was like, we need the Gordon money. We're going to add the Gordon name to our name. Otherwise, it would have just been Byron the whole time. These people are eight kinds of unserious people. So early childhood for poor little Byron, who at the time is still just George, sounds like a mass Jack is absentee. He's going off doing naval, you know, fall weather things coming back. So please imagine that foul weather. Jack is a bad dad. Bad dad. So more at 11. Lady Catherine takes a little Lord Byron to Scotland and she separates from Jack at the time. But Jack essentially saw that this is more or less when little Lord Byron is about three years old. But when he's 10, his father dies and he now inherits essentially what would have been, you know, Jack's estate from his uncle. So now at age 10, he is officially the Lord in Lord Byron. He's inherited all that. So his mother's like, OK, I guess we got to go to England to claim the inheritance, including the family estate, which is all kinds of disrepair. But like, fine, they're back in England. And this is when he starts to get educated. He goes to the Harrow School, which is that really prestigious English boarding school. This is where he's described as already beginning to pen these really kind of amorous notes to people at the ripe age of 10 is one does. He is described over and over again. He is being prone to violent bouts of activity that are in theory and over compensation for the fact that he's born with a clubfoot. So that was the theme that came into his early life. Yep. Yeah. But it wasn't just physicality, apparently, from this very young age. And he seems to have been given to these big dramatic expressions of love. He claims to fall in love with a young woman named Mary Chayworth or Chowworth while at Harrow and refused to go back to school because of the feelings. And he penned a famous poem that's called To a Lady on Being Asked. My Reason for Quitting England in the Spring, just to put it all out there in the title. Imagine getting that in the mail like I'm a tuple. Well, early, early signs of like the kind of dramatic that, you know, Byron was going to be, he gets over her eventually and there's evidence that he may have begun to engage in some same sex relationships in this period. But this is a theme that will kind of rear its head over and over again throughout this kind of study. Is it a lot of it is just conjecture because he couldn't actually say it in writing because it was still very much illegal at the time. So there's, it's pretty well accepted that he was bisexual, but you're not going to get the same overt displays in public the way you do with many, many, many, many, many women. He does go on to study at Trinity in Cambridge, meets this close friend named Jadal Edelson, who is one of the more famous ones that's considered to have been his lover. He apparently heard him sing it in the choir and fell in love with his voice. And then they wrote poems to each other, including one that's called Cornelian because they exchanged Cornelian rings, which is another name for Cornelian stone. So very lovely. But even when he writes about him, he describes over and over again as their love being a very pure love, which has been interpreted to mean one of two things, that they never fully consummated their relationship in any way. Or again, that he was protecting the guy's reputation basically by being like, no, no, no, but we never. Because again, illegal. Yeah, this is like how Emily Dickinson and Sue just had a passionate friendship. Correct. They were, they were roommates. So there's a lot of that theme. And then the other thing that he does during this time to live up to his many namesakes is he just spends all his money during or part of the inheritance is that this court has allotted him a sum of something like 500 pounds a year that he thinks is going to be plenty of money. He picks these really fancy digs to live at in Cambridge. Is it my life is going to be great? And he just like blows through it. And then he reaches out to his attorney and says, I want more money. And the guy's like, no, it sucks to suck. And he says, well, if you don't give me more money, I'm going to go to money lenders. He's like, OK. And so that's what he does. And he clears his debts for now. And then the theme of the rest of what we're going to talk about is just him over and over again, picking women that can help get him out of debt, which is just really, really sad. Our next side quest is sort of rejection that he first encounters and then his eventual fame, which happens really close together. His first collection apparently was a giant flop. It was called Fugitive Pieces. It came out in 1806. And apparently it was almost immediately not just recalled, but burned because his name was like, you got to you got to take this down. Some of these passages are like doing the most, which are apparently they were too erotic. And I will also mention that I'm fairly positive. I remember the mentor being a reverend. So I don't know how much of that was like that have scandalized me in my cloth or like probably a bad age and choice for Lord Byron to get the good reverend Chatsworth on your side. But a hot take. Publishing should do more of this. Oh, take all the books and burn them. Not burn them, but like this book is bad. Let's just not with it. Just not with it. So he's hearing the story of some author that tried to buy all the copies of their like their first novel, like whenever they would see one, they would just buy it so that was on the street. No more. That's effectively what they kind of do with the burning and he ends up, I think what I read in this, I don't know how much of this is accurate, but that only four copies of the original book exist in the world. And it's like that few they got rid of and burned so many. But they do end up republishing it. He gives him, he takes up boy, the offending pages and they republish it in 1807 as hours of idleness. But he gets a scathingly bad review in the Edinburgh review, which just reminds me of the episode that we did on Poe and how so much of like his career seems to be owed to him going, oh, yeah. And like writing back because that's what he does. He pens his first work of satire, which is called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and he publishes it anonymously, but it's a giant middle fingers up to this review. And apparently most people. Yeah, they all accept it like it was published anonymously, but because he continued to do stuff like this, it was kind of known like, hey, it's it's him. It's fire. Like everybody knows it's you. And it was almost considered like a badge of something if like you ended up making it into one of his critiques because he was just so, you know, sick with the pen kind of thing, which is fine. But then comes the child Harold's pilgrimage, which is famous. Yes. Now we're in like the bironic ascent. This comes out in 1812. It was his breakthrough. So remember what I said about debts? He left England to avoid them and travel around Europe. And it wasn't just the debts. This was apparently, I think I did know this, but I'd forgotten. It was a customary for young noblemen at the time. Yeah, the grand tour, right? Exactly the grand tour, yep, which was this coming of age, like educational trip where you go all over Europe and it's a pretty standard itinerary with some deviants. It's like you start off in Dover and then you go to like Belgium and France and Switzerland, Italy, the Mediterranean. It was a whole thing, which was a European drum spring up basically. There might have been a problem though, Vanessa, if I remember correctly, Europe wasn't great in 1812. There was this short guy rolling around. You couldn't get to all the spots. Napoleonic Napoleonic Wars. Yeah, they kind of, they were pesky and they got in the way of him getting to do it the way he like wanted to do it. So it did mess up and he ended up having to change and did more time in the Mediterranean, which kind of maybe sets up some of the themes that we'll see towards the end of his life. But yeah, it's consensus is he was avoiding his creditors. And during that time, it's apparently also met up with that girl that he fell in love with back when he was in boarding school called Mary Chayworth and had like a little affair. Just he said he's just so messy. Messy is the theme of this over and over again. But this this poem, the Childs, Child Harold's Pilgrimage, he published the first two cantos in 1812 and they were based loosely on his life and those European travels. It's a really long narrative poem about travel and romance. And those first two candles come out in 18. I always want to pronounce things with a Spanish accent. So we're going from canto to canto. To 1812. And I'm definitely saying them one. Were you canto? It hurts my soul. I've been thinking about Les Mis and here he comes like Don Juan since the intro of this podcast. Just like like I heard it on an episode of podcast. It was the one that I mentioned and there's a really a historian and a buyer one like on the show. And when he said it, I took a beat like he's a scholar of buyer and surely. Oh, it's because it's how they pronounce it. OK, tough, tough beat, tough hang. So again, the poem comes out and this is when his celebrity skyrockets. Have you ever read this, Vanessa? I have. And I find it when I read it, I was like, this isn't that impressive, but like that. No, it does. It does absolutely nothing for me. That's why I ask the question. It's not one. We're not doing it on zero to well read, Rebecca. I'll tell you that right now. Is that tough? That's good to know. I don't think I have any Byron on the long list over there. Yeah, it's just, you know, I'm sure there was a reason at the time and I could have spent more time trying to figure that out. But as we said, there's just a million places you could go with. But I was like, child's child's real quick, just to see if anything. You should keep going. Keep going, keep going, keep going. But apparently this is like he is quoted several times as saying I woke when morning and I was famous like it was it was big. It was overnight. Just wild that that could happen for a poet. Like, yeah, like this. You're not getting a viral Instagram post with, you know, old protagging you in the comments like this. Right. This is oldie timey and he apparently was an overnight celebrity and is listed in a lot basically as kind of our first major celebrity, which is a wild thing to think about. But yeah, this was unheard of at the time for him to just be this big and also not just for the poem, but then slowly for also his reputation. And yeah. This is when we go on our second side quest with side quest, which is all about Lady Carolyn Lam, who I find a fascinating character. I want to read more about her when I get the chance because she gets labeled as sort of the OG of this is a problematic term now, but crazy ex-girlfriend. So she she gets most of the heat when it's like, but Byron, dude. This is the problem when the dude gets to write the story. Yeah. Right. And she does eventually write a story. OK, I'm going to I'm going to get there. But all right. Sorry. No, no, no, that was me getting ahead of myself. But we could do hours worth of just Byron's relationships, because again, this this kind of habit he has of being like, I'm going to shack up with you, especially if you can maybe pay for my debts. But also there's this piece on the side and it's just him doing that in repetition. But Lady Carolyn Lam is a doozy as far as like the feelings that she develops for him. She's this angle of Irish aristocrat and a novelist in her own right. And they meet in 1812, his celebrity. Because again, the book, the poem had just come out, so he's a big deal already. They meet at a party. She is married. Another trend we see over and over again. But she's some she meets him and is immediately smitten. And in the like Taylor Swift of lyrics goes home in her diary that night and writes writes that pale, beautiful face is my fate. Like it just feels like I could hear that in a Swift jam somewhere. This affair is intense. She begins writing to him. He replies warmly is the thing I saw in like multiple sources. She was like, great, now we're going to end. They do. They shock up very, very quickly. And it's apparently very, very intense. They're meeting up all over London in like secret, but not secret. They're the subject of all the hot gossip. Everybody sort of just knows this. Lady Carolyn Lam's husband is described over and over and over again as being very understanding, like he seems to always kind of just be waiting in the wings for her to come back. But when I say it gets obsessive, she gets very, very obsessive. She's known for repeatedly doing the like show and up in a trench cart with nothing underneath and being like, ha ha, except she would do it dressed as a page. And she had this short little like flopper hairstyle. So people would think maybe that she was actually a man and then she would sneak into his rooms and be like, here I am. And this was a thing that she did all the time. But he apparently encouraged because Byron sent her a very sent him a very special gift with a note that reads, I cut the gift too close and blood more than you need. And he guesses as to what that gift was. I am terrified to answer this question. I have no comment whatsoever. Which is probably the right way to go. Jeff Earmuffs for the next five minutes. I'm just associating briefly. Thank you very much. Just hear the beepy in your head. Yeah, it was a hair from down there. And that was a thing that she just sent him with and like sent some back please. Like and this was and the husband apparently knew about all this. Yeah, like here's a self-addressed stamped envelope. The self-addressed stamped envelope may just be my 13th. Again, she's not doing herself favors here. But the sad thing is that she gets again, like so his nicknames for her include little volcano and little mania. So he seems very well aware that everyone has personality disorders. That's what I'm hearing. Where is the DSM that is I was going to say is it is clear she has a mental illness going on from here on out on several episodes being very looks like stoked by behaviors on his part of kind of ditching her and then kind of coming back and then choosing to write her letters at the most inopportune time followed by another letter right after that. That's like just kidding. None of that helps. And she does spin out into several like big mental health events that I think are really sad, especially because he called her little mania. You clearly knew that something wasn't okay, but you kept trying her along. So it's really sad, but she does eventually go on to write a novel called Glendarvin, I believe, where she fictionalizes her romance with Byron. But it's like it's it comes and it goes. She is very much remembered for being just sort of his ex with a really like obsessive nature. The other thing she's kind of famous for is that she coined the phrase that gets associated with his name a lot other than Myronic, which is the whole mad, bad and dangerous to know that that phrase was born from Carolyn Lamb and that you, you know, not recognizes the it's the popular texts like column to toe beans books and mirror on it. But yeah, that mad, bad, dangerous is about Byron and it's from Lady Carolyn Lamb, who just I feel so bad because of the way she gets labeled. Some of it is saucy to talk about, but I feel like this is a rule that still applies today, which is don't date the literary hotshot fellas. There's no one exist, though. Like who does they apply to anymore? I mean, no shade, but come on. It's like two people down the street. If you can think of a literary hotshot fella, stay away from me. Yeah, yeah. Or Susan email podcast, a book right? Who's on the list? I would love. I would love that. We will keep you anonymous. That's right. Side quest number three, Annabella and Augusta, which Augusta is one of the names I mentioned at the top of this show. So after the hair down there incident, it appears that Byron has soured on Carolyn and decides to move on. But Byron is the poster child for that, like, am I the drama meme? Like because he says he hates it and that that's why he leaves, but he seems to stoke it over and over again. And again, Factor now has debts, needs a lady friend with full coffers, and that's how he points his interest now at Annabella Millbank, who is not the only thing he points it at. No, there's a lot. There's a lot. And it gets worse. She is a baroness and the philanthropist. Again, this is when he's a really big deal. Now we're in 1814, 1815. So he's just published the Hebrew melodies, which is the collection of 30 poems that includes She Walks in Beauty, which is the one that I was like, think of a Byronic poem. Which I think that's the only thing that people would recognize that she walks in beauty like the night. I don't think anything else people would actually recognize as Byron. I don't think I could be wrong. I'm still kind of massively browsing. I was going to say I did like a quick little search and that is the only thing I found on like at the art prints and wedding poem quote. And I think that's because of dead poets. If we're not repeating saying that dead poets, I'm not sure anyone knows that. You know what? Yep. I think you might be right. So that's I'm now deeply amused by the idea of a bunch of people putting a Byron quote on a wedding thing. That is the part that I laughed at the heart. And so I was like, it just I want to go to a wedding where that happens so I can be like in the crowd just raise my little hand. Can I teach you a little song? Just a comment. Just a comment. Just just let me let me wax for a second here. He is the worst. So because he is so big and again, his reputation proceeds. And when he proposes to this woman that he now wants to be his latest kind of fundee and wife or funder and wife, she her name, pardon, I mean, Annabella Milbank, she actually turns him down the first time. She's like, yeah, I've heard about you. No, thanks. Unfortunately, she doesn't hold for very long because when he asks her a second time, she accepts and she is quoted as saying, like, I think I can fix him. Like, oh, oh, no. No. Oh, no. And unfortunately, she's not the only woman in his history who has set a version of that. And that just absolutely kills me. But this marriage, Jeff's face right now. Yeah. And it should because it's also the most unfixable person to fall in love with of all time might be Byron. Like that's like number one. Number one. Byron and John Mayer. Those are the two. Those are the two guys. Somebody. Sorry, John. Can we just insert that song? That'd be great. In the beginning, is there like a podcast 200 years in the future who's like pop music's original F-boy John Mayer? John Mayer. Oh, man. I would love that. He performs this close to a mic. Only Jeff and Rebecca can see me. But anyway, that's a random aside that really bothers me. But anyway. Vanessa, I was just on that real quick. I was trying to think of analogs for Byron. And the closest I could think of was like early Elvis Presley. Yeah. Of that like, oof, aim. Just like and also like part of the part of it was the hips, man. You know, that was part of the attraction, repulsion, fascination was, you know, overt sexuality just brought onto the literary page as much as anything. Yeah. Did any of these ladies like talk about was Byron really good in bed and like that's the draw or is he's writing me romantic poems? I am ashamed to say this is a thing I googled and I could not find. You are good at your job. I am incredibly good at my job. And I was like, I couldn't actually, it seemed like a lot of it was just like a combination of swagger, celebrity. And like, yeah, he said all these things, but I couldn't find anything. And I think it doesn't hurt or it does hurt that so many of these women at the end were like not in good mental spaces by the time they got to him. That I don't know how much of that was like, I don't care if you are. I'm not sure. I would love to know, but we don't. And as far as the face that Jeff is making that you can't see because this is not a visual medium, it only gets worse because even while he is married to this woman who's like, I can fix him, I can fix him. Shortly before their marriage, he met up for the first time in something like four or five years that half sister that I mentioned at the top, Augusta. Tough. Super tough. And the tough tough is that it is pretty widely accepted that they then engaged in a dalliance that his wife knew about. She had a child that child was born and everyone's like, yep, that's Byron's kids. People do things. Like, yeah. And and then the Andrew Stoffer, I think I said the historian that I was talking about from the top of the show describes their marriage as her sometimes coming home and being like, okay, well, I'm going up for bed now. And these two are just kind of canoodling on the couch being super weird. Like it was a it was a widely known secret that people definitely squicked at. Again, kind of like when I talked about Poe dating a 13 year old, it was that time when it's like, we're starting to believe this is creepy. We probably know it, but it's not all that people are still doing the first cousins and like that half sibling is maybe a stretch, but not as much as I wish it would have been. And okay, even more sadly, I mean, so she sticks around for a while. She being Annabella, they have a daughter as well. So Byron and Annabella and that daughter is Ada Lovelace, who is a petition writer, right? Our first I did not know this. Okay. Byron's story is a giant red string thing for me where like every name I give you, there's like seven stories that could tell you about that person. And like, I had to really, really rate it in and it gets pretty messy at the end here. But like, so anyway, that's who their daughter is. And shortly after she's born, he is. And shortly after she is born, she's like, yeah, no, I think I've finally had enough. And she leaves him. And at this point, he ends up leaving England because he is once again, divorced and absolutely destitute. So this time he leaves and he actually never ends up coming back to England again. We get another term. As again, it seems like every one of the women that he is involved with gets someone and she's the term, the person who coined the term Byron Mania because the fanfare around him was that fanatical that she started to refer it. You know, it feels like a very modern thing to add the mania to things. But yeah, by Romania was absolutely a thing. And apparently this I also didn't know in spite of being semi-well versed on the Brontes that Lady Byron and Lord Byron. So like this coupling is thought to be the inspiration behind the Tenant of Wellfield Hall by Anne Bronte. I don't think I knew that. I just wonder about the half, like the half siblings thing sounds pretty close to Wuthering Heights. Yeah. Just for people to remember about Celebrity 2, I was just thinking about something you said about the Byron Mania. There is no photography. Like people don't actually know what he looks like. It's just illustrations and newspapers and stuff. So it's I don't even under really understand. It's hard to understand what that even would have felt like. But you could project so much onto it. I think maybe that's interesting. That's a great point. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think that's that's really what was happening. Like that's the easiest way to. And now we come to what I think is probably our last major side quest. Again, we're not going to cover his whole life because there's just no way you could. But that time in Lake Geneva, which is the part that both of you are a little bit familiar with, having actually done an episode of our now defunct annotated podcast, poor one out. But it was a really, really great episode that I had to quote a few times because it was just. Oh, no. No, they're great. So Byron the Brogue, as I started calling him in my own head at this point is liquidating assets left and right. He's scamping around Europe. And in the summer of 1816, he ends up settling at this Villa diodati in Lake Geneva in Switzerland with his personal physician, who's John William Polidori. And this is the, which is all covered in the episode, the year without summer owed to owing to this big volcanic explosion that happened in the Pacific earlier that year that blew this giant cloud of dirt into the air that just completely altered weather patterns like all over the world. So they're having this really wet, disgusting summer. And it is during this not summer summer that five pals gather at the Villa and those pals are Byron, the physician, Polidori, Percy Bischelli, the author, Mary Godwin, who would eventually become Mary Shelley and then Mary's step sister. Now we know as Claire Claremont, but at the time I think was named Jane. And this is so messy. Do you remember why, Jeff? I mean, again, there's many whys, but it's okay. I think it wasn't Percy, Percy and Claire mixed up together. I can't remember. There was one, there's an orthogonal angle to this that I can't remember. So it is, and that's a path that I started to go really far down and then didn't because, again, we'd be here all day. But so there's a, the rumors that they may have had a thing. So that is Percy and then the, you know, the sister in law of the woman he does eventually end up with may have had a thing. But also, because Byron cannot keep it in his pants to save his life, right before leaving England, he and Claire, now Jane, had a thing. They had a thing. She gets pregnant. We don't know if she knows that at the time. What we do know is that she basically started, and this is the part where I started to quote Jeff because she wrote what we can only be described as a series of saucy fan letters to Lord Byron in the hopes of starting something up. And the translation was, dad's not watching and I don't have a boyfriend. If I come around, could you keep it on the down low? And there was no way I was going to do anything but read that verbatim because it was absolutely true. Used to write things. It's so good. I love it. It's a really, really great episode. And the transcript exists if you just want to go read it. It's also fun. But we don't, again, know whether she knew she was pregnant. But what we do know is that the mess of this is that Claire slash Jane is hot for Byron and is also apparently just hot. Byron knows that she's attractive but is less interested with her as he is with her proximity to Shelly because Shelly is his own kind of big deal and he just wants to be in his orbit. And then Shelly at this point, of course, is also setting his eyes on Mary Godwin. He idolizes both her mother and her father who were famous in the room. Again, the red string, Mary Wollstone, like it's, we can be here all day. Yeah, vindication. The rights of woman if you don't know. Yeah, exactly. So all of that kind of lumped in together is that Claire ends up kind of brokering this really terrible, like, well, you want to meet her and she wants to meet you. So like, why don't we all just go to this villa and like figure something out? And so they do. There's a lot of salacious, the worst reason to get an airbender. Like this is not what you want to do. We saw you across the villa. We like your vibe. We like your vibe. We thought maybe you would watch it. Which is even weirder considering the whole like lore there is behind Mary Godwin, who, you know, always like she, she, her mother died giving birth to her. So she spent a lot of time at her grave site. She's like 15 years old. Yep. She professed her love for Shelley at the grave site. There's that like unsubstantiated rumor that that is where she essentially like consummated their relationship for the first time. These people are just, again, the capital, our romantic movement has just a lot of mess kind of in it. So these five end up getting together in Geneva and they're like, yeah, sure. And again, there's a million rumors about what actually went down. That is not what we're going to talk about for this specific click list. But history is made literally that, that weekend. The five are gathered during this hot, wet Swiss summer and talk turns to this collection of German ghost stories that Byron apparently just had with him called Phantasmogoria, which is, you know, very about spirits and ghosts and possession and all that kind of stuff. And so they finish and Byron turns to the group and is like, we should all try our hand at a spooky story. Let's. So everyone sits down to like try to write this. And then the funny because this, the one of the first stories that comes out of it is Paul Dory. That personal physician goes on to pen a story that would go on to be called The Vampire with a Y. And that is the most famous and influential vampire story until, of course, Dracula comes along later. And you, you could find that impressive on it's own. It's unbelievable. You write the first vampire story and you come in second on the story writing competition in one night in Geneva. Because you get, yeah, like trumped by the fact that Mary Godwin, who would eventually become Mary Shelley, is at first apparently stumped. But earlier in the day, as happens when you gather with your friends, they've been talking about electricity and scientific experimentation, specifically about the experiments of this physicist named Luigi Galvini and his work with electricity. Again, the lighten up frogs and watching him twitch. That's basically it. Horns up nerds. Yep. And that is where Mary Godwin gets the idea. She apparently is kind of like, what are you guys writing? What are you guys writing? No one can really give her a good idea. And then she thinks to herself, like, well, what if a corpse could be reanimated based on that, like that conversation? And that is the story that eventually goes on, of course, to be Frankenstein or modern Prometheus and essentially kind of events, you know, science fiction in its own way. That just to wrap that awful like story up, like, so there's that all that cool stuff that happened. But then again, remember that Claire Claremont, aka Jane is pregnant. Oh, yeah. So she ends up, they all go their separate ways. Byron goes to Italy. The Godwins and the Shelleys go back to England. Claire keeps writing to Byron like, hey, so baby. And he essentially brushes her off over and over again. She goes as far as to show up at his doorstep in Venice, like, baby, you do something with this. And he refuses to see her, but does send a messenger to say, like, I will raise her, you know, in all the privilege and trappings, etc. That she can have with me, but you have to leave us alone forever, like kind of thing. And he does apparently allow her, I think, on two different occasions to see her daughter, but then kind of turns his back on her by doing a thing he said he wouldn't do, which is to send her off to a convent because they could agreed like, OK, if she goes with you, she can never be like a part from more than one parent at a time, like she should be supervised and whatever. And then tragically, unfortunately, after again only seeing her daughter two more times, the little girl dies when she's five years old. So she never gets to see her after that because Byron is just a hot freaking mess. And then the wrap up to all this, which I'll do in just a couple of quick minutes, just to kind of touch base on that Greek thing is that he, yeah, Byron stays in Italy after this. He has lots and lots and lots of affairs like we could be here for four hours. It really is unbelievable. No, it's intense. It's it's it's a lot. If I wrote down so many names. Yeah, there were two. I finally just gave up because like this is too many. I do need like a YouTube version of this with a bunch of reds. And again, I can tell you like I left out some of the like who these are descendants. It's just it's this interconnectedness is very mind boggling. And again, messy. But he meets this woman that he's considered the love of his life. It's thought that after he met this woman, Teresa, with Choli, that there's no like record of him possibly ever having gotten with anybody after that, which is intense to think about given who he was. But she was also married to a 50 year old man at the time when they began their affair. So again, it's very ironic in its own way. But the last of it is that he keeps traveling after Italy specifically to Greece because the like Ottoman Greece is a it calls to him like the Greek Revolution breaks out in 1821. Shelley had been a huge supporter of the Greek Revolution against the Ottomans. And apparently that was the thing he was tangentially interested in. And so when Shelley passed, I guess folks in Byron Circle were like, well, you should maybe take up this mantle. And he was like, maybe I should. And for reasons that in theory, people say were altruistic that he really did intend to let go for the cause. He takes off and goes there to us in split, you know, to help out. But what he didn't know is that he'd have less than 100 days left on this earth. He catches the fever that kills him. And in spite of requesting over and over and over again that he be left in Greece, because that's where he felt his heart was. They were like, yeah, no, we're shipping you back to England. And his body is to the ancestral home in a new Nottinghamshire. Wow. This is ripe for like, I mean, all these people are dead and everything's in the public domain now, right? So this is right. Yorgos Lanthimos. Yeah. Or like feminist revenge thriller where all of the Byron's women. Lord Byron must die. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Lord Byron must die. You heard of your first. Vanessa, in your research, did you come across how Percy Shelley died? Did you do go down this rabbit hole? I know it like in the back of my head, but I didn't like do a ton of research. So he was in his boat and he drowned like a capsaicin drowned in the name of the boat, the Don Jewin. Oh, that's the part I did not know. I knew what the drowning. Oh, no. He was identified by having a because his body washed up a few days later and he's like decomposing, but he had a copy of Keith's poetry in his pocket. So that's how they identified him. See, this is what I can tell you that like parts of Don Jewin were inspired by foul weather. Jack's like stories from his time in the, you know, Navy seas. But yeah, he was just a mess of a figure like said, I it's it's the definition of messy. Yeah, he absolutely think he scores pretty high on the, you know, historical F boy thing. It's more the terms surrounding him, the idea of the Byronic hero that survive him. But I'm always here for this kind of history and digging into the things that, you know, make people interesting. And again, just justice for the women in these stories because he got to write that narrative. And it is very, very unfair. Can we do eight lines of can we do eight lines of Byron? I was going through child Harold and I'm trying to find a piece that I sort of remember. Let's just get a, no, I'm not trying to defend Byron here. I think the indictment is clear and the jury does not need to deliberate very often. But just to get some of the words in, Rebecca, you're going to like this. This is Mary Oliver DNA stuff here. If you want to, this is from child Harold, child Harold's pilgrimage. There is pleasure in the pathless woods. There is rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where none intrudes by the deep sea and music in its roar. I love not mandaless, but nature more from these are interviews in which I steal from all I may be, or I've been before, to mingle with the universe and feel not what I can there express yet cannot all conceal. Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. No, that is a good one. And she walks in beauty like the night as probably up there for seven words in a row that is fucking cool as any word is. I know. Like if you're going to be poetry's original panty dropper, not bad. Yeah. I mean, you've got to have to got to bring the heat. Also, is that the title of this episode? I was going to say, I really love all the heat coming from these last like 35 seconds of our podcast time together. I just want Jeff to have to type panty dropper. I'm so happy to be making the show notes as the deep 11's in the forehead are like, no. It's not a phrase that I'm going to produce by keyboard or otherwise. Or otherwise. But F boy with a little asterisk. Little asterisk. Well, thank you for letting me talk to you about my random interests. I really would have guessed that like our national poetry month episode was probably, I thought maybe you were going to cater to me with like a Mary Oliver situation. Oh, I thought about it, but she's not messy enough. She's like, I was going to say, you've got you've got to remember that Vanessa, like a moth to the flame is drawn to a literary rubber necking episode. So I am like, if you look up, there is like the PDF gifts about Vanessa, one of them is absolutely the Marie Kondo. Like I love mess like that. We're going to get a Ted Hughes one out of you one of these days. I know we're going to get a good time. That's really a tough one. I was thinking in terms of the delta between even modern day name recognition and familiarity with their work. I mean, Byron's not the most famous writer, but like there's a lot of people that majored in English or like listen to the show probably like, oh, Byron, I've heard of that. And the next thing out of their mouth is. That's wild. It's really strange. Yeah, I had that same moment of like, OK, it's a name that like, of course, I know who that is. But then the more you get into it, you're like, wait, but what? And then yeah, like Samuel Coleridge. I'm like, it'd be like these romantic poems and poets of this age who were titans of the day. Yeah, just have not, you know, lived at all. Shall Percy Shelley is probably up there too. Yeah. Oh yeah. By far eclipsed by his wife. For sure. Vanessa, this is a great time as always. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you'll enjoy this audiobook excerpt of Innamorata by Ava Reid, provided by our sponsors at Delray. You, lady Agnes, last of all. He said, I would be happy to receive your judgment. Am I a true king? Her heart beat in that strangled rabbit way. With as much vigor as she could manage, she nodded. What was that, lady? Speak. This silence was the most callous ruler yet. More bitter even than the king. As cruel as the stones of the castle itself. I speak for all the house of teeth in this matter. Morosia said hurriedly before this horrible regime could grow more entrenched. You are a true king, Your Majesty. My cousin would not ever think to question your virtue, either. Enough from you. Niquefra said. He waved his knife vaguely in her direction, and Morosia closed her mouth at once. I am asking the lady Agnes. I would like to hear her speak it in her own voice. His gaze rested upon her. It was not a hateful gaze. It was not even angry, particularly. Where the blazing emotion had been, there was now only icy assurance. He was certain that he could make her speak. He did not even need to shout or snarl. He already felt half victorious. Agnes stared back at him, her tongue line limp in her mouth. Seconds passed as droplets from a tincture. The king blinked, and a bit of impatience leaked into his voice. Well, speak, Lady Agnes. Speak. She did not. What is wrong with you, girl? He spat at last. I am your king. His spittle sprayed onto her face. She did not even try to wipe it away. Father, Leopron said tersely, leave her be. She has proven her obeisance, as have we all. The king's gaze cut the air like a whip as he shifted to look at his son. She has proven nothing until I say so. Nothing will satisfy me but her voice, so speak, Lady Agnes. Or if you cannot, I will have to rest the words from you myself. And then he drove his knife down, right through the centre of her hand. There were screams enough to butcher the silence for good. Though none came from Agnes' mouth, she did not even whimper as she looked down. The blade had driven straight through the meat and muscle of her, pinning her hand to the table. There was no blood at all. And the shark had no breath. No blood at all. And the shark had, in fact, smothered most of the pain. She regarded the bloodless wound with a removed sort of curiosity. She felt almost buoyant. Though her hand was held fast to the wood, her mind floated freely, watching herself from above. The king regarded her with his mouth ajar, stupid like a gutted fish. He had meant to surprise her voice out of her, as if her silence was an animal that could be spooked. Yet the act was so brusque and quotidian that Agnes felt almost embarrassed on his behalf. He had no wiles, not even imagination. And true torture required a bit of both. And then at last came the anger, gathering on his brow like black storm clouds. He released the knife, leaving it to stand perfectly upright, held in place by her constricting flash. Over her head, he gestured to the leeches at the end of the table. Trust, he said, Maudant, come! They shuffled across the dais toward him. The remove Agnes felt made her sluggish. Her reflexes slow. By the time trust and Maudant reached her, she could not manage to rest her hand free. And then, at the king's gruff instruction, they each took her by one shoulder and thrust her down onto the table. Father! Leopron's voice rang out in horror. Stop this! Let her go! With her cheek pressed roughly against the wood, Agnes could not see what scene played out above. She heard scraping as Leopron pushed back his chair and stood. The king stood too. Rosia was letting out little, wordless squeals of panic, muffled as though she had one hand clapped over her mouth. Metal clattered against metal. She could glimpse only the legs and feet of the Dolores guard as they cracked the doors and poured into the room, storming the dais. They crowded the table like weevils upon a crop. Agnes struggled to turn her face up until at the blurry edge of her vision. She managed to see four of them holding Leopron back. Their steel-clad arms gripped him about the waist and the chest, and then two others came and grasped each of his wrists. She had not given Nikefaris enough credit, she realized hazelly. He had some wiles after all. This was no impulsive turn. It had been planned and calculated, arranged like an act of a grand mask. And this mask had a theme to impart upon its audience. Do not ever mistake sluggardry for idleness. The slumbering bear is not complacent in its den. It is merely working up its appetite again. Adele Blanche had made this error, and now Agnes would pay a martyr's price for it. The knife was removed, and blood spurted from the wound like a spray of seawater. Agnes barely had the chance to draw breath before the blade was driven down again, this time into the tender webbing of skin between her finger and her thumb.