George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Among Lord Byron's best-known works are the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The latter remained incomplete on his death. He was regarded as one of the greatest European poets and remains widely read.

Lord Byron's fame rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured extravagant living, numerous love affairs, debts, separation, and allegations of incest and sodomy. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

After this break-up of his domestic life, Byron again left England, as it turned out, forever. He passed through Belgium and up the Rhine; in the summer of 1816 Lord Byron and his personal physician, John William Polidori settled in Switzerland, at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. There he became friends with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin. He was also joined by Mary's step-sister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he had had an affair in London. Byron initially refused to have anything to do with Claire, and would only agree to remain in her presence with the Shelleys, who eventually persuaded Byron to accept and provide for Allegra, the child she bore him in January 1817.

At the Villa Diodati, kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer," over three days in June the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including "Fantasmagoriana" (in the French edition), and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's to produce The Vampyre, the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. By summer's end the group had split up, with Byron and Polidori on particularly bad terms, and the character of Lord Ruthven was no doubt created out of Polidori’s continued malice towards Byron.

On its publication "The Vampyre" was widely attributed to Byron, much to his irritation, and as a form of self-defence maybe, he lost no time in quickly publishing his own "Fragment," in which the vampire elements to be found in Polidori’s work are noticeably missing - perhaps eradicated to make the story as removed from "The Vampyre" as possible. But even after the matter of authorship was cleared up, Byron could not escape the unwelcome association with Polidori’s story, and it was still printed in the 3rd edition of Byron’s "Works" in 1820 by popular demand.

Posted by Vladimir Wed, 06/20/2007 - 13:40

 

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