News & Notes

26th August 1816, and two of Byron’s closest friends, John Cam Hobhouse and Scrope Berdmore Davis, arrive at the Villa Diodati in Geneva. They find their friend in a somewhat melancholy mood; hardly surprising given his turbulent year so far. His mental state may be...

It is the middle of June 1816. Thanks to a slight improvement in the weather, Byron and Shelley make plans to sail around Lake Geneva, stopping off at points of interest. It isn’t entirely a pleasure-cruise, since Shelley seizes the chance to break the news of Byron’s...

You may think that this summer so far is grim and wet, but it has nothing on the summer of 1816: grey skies, constant rain, temperatures so unseasonally low that crops failed to ripen. The weather throughout 1816 was so bad that it was nicknamed (with a distinct lack...

Getting out, Lord Byron met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her sister, and Percy Shelley. It is evening, May 27th 1816, and two young men have been rowing on Lake Geneva. As they reach the shore, they meet three other young people: the five are to spend much of the...

And Harold stands upon this place of skulls,The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo! May 4th 1816: having left London in style in his Napoleonic carriage Byron continues his melancholy theme of exile and loss with a visit to the battlefield of Waterloo. Byron's...

On 23rd April 1816, Byron left London for the last time. In a grand dramatic gesture he had ordered a huge travelling-coach modelled on one that had belonged to his hero Napoleon. You sent Napoleon to distant and lonely exile last year; now look at me, forced to do...

April 8th 1816. Byron has almost completed his preparations for leaving England. The terms of the legal separation from his wife have been agreed, signed and sealed. His beloved books have been sold at auction, raising £723 (add a couple of zeroes for a rough modern...

February 1816. Wife and child gone. Bailiffs in the house. His precious library of books seized, to be sold on behalf of his debtors. Byron was – as might be expected – in extremely low spirits at this time. And so his friends began to rally round and offer help. His...

In March 1816, with his marriage in tatters and his possessions disappearing by the day as they were auctioned to pay his debts, Lord Byron received a letter from a young lady. Nothing unusual in that: ever since that morning in 1812 when he had woken to find himself...

...tried to prove her loving lord was mad, But as he had some lucid intermissions, She next decided he was only bad... Annabella Byron was not by any stretch of the imagination a sympathetic woman. She was the adored and pampered only child of elderly parents, and had...