Episode Details

A Cambridge student parading a tame bear on a chain because the rules banned dogs but said nothing about bears: that is the key to understanding George Gordon Byron. This deep dive follows a boy born with a club foot into a bankrupt family who inherited an empty title and a crumbling abbey at age ten, and who transformed himself into the prototype of the modern celebrity, a political rebel, and a Greek national hero before dying at 36.

We explore his reckless father Mad Jack, his volatile mother, the savage reviews of his first poems and his book-length counterattack, the Grand Tour through Albania and Greece, his swim across the Hellespont, and the overnight fame of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage that the press dubbed Byromania. Then we trace the scandals with Lady Caroline Lamb, the rumors about his half-sister Augusta Leigh, his disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke, and his flight from England in 1816 to the legendary summer at Lake Geneva that produced Frankenstein and the first aristocratic vampire, before his final campaign in the Greek War of Independence.

• How Byron deliberately marketed himself as a man of action and built the brooding Byronic hero archetype
• Why Regency society consumed his transgressive poetry but cancelled him for living it
• John Polidori's The Vampyre and the revenge portrait of Byron as Lord Ruthven
• His House of Lords defense of the Luddites and opposition to Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon marbles
• The twist of his abandoned daughter Ada Lovelace, whose Byronic imagination helped envision modern computing