In 1814, at the height of his fame, the poet, libertine and freedom fighter Lord Byron had his head examined. Not by a proto-psychiatrist but by the German phrenologist and physician Johann Spurzheim, who, after making a detailed study of the no doubt amused Byron’s cranium, pronounced the brain to be ‘very antithetical’ and said that it was an organ in which ‘good and evil are at perpetual war’.

Two centuries after Byron’s death, this dichotomy is as pronounced as ever when it comes to analyses of the poet. His defenders point to his wit, his poetic genius, his heroic efforts in defence of Greek liberty and his personal flair; not for nothing has the word ‘Byronic’ entered the vocabulary as a largely admiring adjective. His detractors, meanwhile, suggest that he was an abuser of women, a pederast and a profoundly overrated poet, whose once lauded work now feels overblown and hollow, with the exception of Don Juan and a few of the lyrics. For good measure, the anti-Byron camp usually remark that he didn’t even succeed in redeeming himself through military glory, dying of a fever in Missolonghi at the age of 36 before he could see action.

Writing from Cambridge in 1807, Byron alludes to keeping a tame
bear in Trinity College

Nonetheless, he remains catnip for biographers (and, full disclosure, I am among their number). His contradictions and eccentricities make him a consistently fascinating subject, and even if attitudes towards his sexual escapades and poetry have shifted from indulgence towards more rigorous criticism, there is always a new angle to be taken towards the man nicknamed ‘The Manager’ by his wife Annabella and half-sister Augusta, with whom he conducted a scandalous ménage à trois that resulted in his banishment from Britain in 1816.

Andrew Stauffer has approached what would otherwise be a fairly standard life of Byron through an unusual (if increasingly modish) prism.

QOSHE - Books / Lord Byron had many faults, but writing dull letters wasn’t one of them - Alexander Larman
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Books / Lord Byron had many faults, but writing dull letters wasn’t one of them

4 23
15.02.2024

In 1814, at the height of his fame, the poet, libertine and freedom fighter Lord Byron had his head examined. Not by a proto-psychiatrist but by the German phrenologist and physician Johann Spurzheim, who, after making a detailed study of the no doubt amused Byron’s cranium, pronounced the brain to be ‘very antithetical’ and said that it was an organ in which ‘good and evil are at perpetual war’.

Two centuries after Byron’s death, this dichotomy is as pronounced as ever when........

© The Spectator


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