Lord Byron Fun Fact!

Though, in reality, it is not really much fun unless you find physical deformity hilarious.

Lord Byron famously had somethng wrong with his foot but, however, he did not have a club-foot as popular accounts will have you believe! Historians have analyzed his boots and discovered that he really had a withered leg from birth. Byron enjoyed clothing said leg, and the other, healthy one in white linen trousers. He ordered dozens at a time and threw them out after being worn only once.

So the moral of this story, Gentle Readers, is if you wish to be a Romantic Poet and have a physical deformity of some kind, remember to clothe it well. Historians will pay an extraordinary amount of attention to whatever you leave behind, however, so conspicuous consumption can oddly maintain your privacy.

Aargh.

I do not like Twilight for rather a stupid and specific reason, to be honest. The Amateur Historian wishes desperately to say that her initial, gut-reaction of dislike arose from feminist principles, an admiration for the subtleties and satires of Jane Austen over the sentimentality Brontes, a dislike of melodrama or something of sort, but it really started because the person who introduced Twilight to the Amateur Historian said Edward was a "Byronic hero."

Well, no, that’s not quite how it works. The Byronic hero stemmed from the Romantic and Gothic adulation of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in particular for his characterization of Satan  as a personnage of “flawed grandeur”—a magnificent and powerful person destroyed through their hamartia, or tragic flaw (hamartia stemming from Aristotle's Ars Poetica).The one to perfect this beloved staple of nineteenth century fiction was, of course, Lord Byron, who drew from his own self-myth and from the trajectory of Napoleon, whom Byron saw as a brilliant, dark and mysterious leader who just also happened to be the author of his own downfall. Byron wrote these young, oddly charming, prematurely-tainted-by-sin, trapped-by-the-constraints-of-memory-and-society protagonists in Childe Harold, The Corsair, Lara, and Manfred.  Though I suppose Edward does reflect, the erie, supernatural seducer of Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, how is Edward a) a fascinating psychological portrait, b) lead into his own destruction by free choice and a tragic flaw, or c) representative of Byron, who, well…

For the last point, have these macros, Gentle Readers:

It's enough to make one want to join George Takei's Star Alliance.

Heeeeeeeere's Johnny! Keats!

No one hates an author more than another author, particularly if they are authors in the same time period. (Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses come to mind), but few can be as sneering in prose as Lord Byron:

Lord Byron on John Keats (1820)

“Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”

Today, the Amateur Historian would like to kick off a week of poetry about poets from the 19th century, or, to be entirely truthful, Gentle Reader, the wonderful wit of Dorothy Parker in her A Pig's Eye View of Literature.

We begin with:

The Lives and Times of John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron

Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn't impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.

Reactions to Napoleon Bonaparate have always been mixed, particularly among the Romantics. Byron had a life-long fascination and self-identification with Napoleon, going so far in Childe Harolde as to call Napoleon "the greatest... of men" and to call himself "the grand Napoleon in realms of rhyme". Wordsworth, on the other hand, saw Waterloo as an act of "Almighty God" and became so vehement in his disapprobation of Napoleon he joined the Grasmere Volunteers to help defend England in case "Satan" should dare invade.

The German intelligentsia, despite having their country invaded by Napoleon, were more-or-less unanimous in their approval (Beethoven excluded). Goethe, with deep pleasure, received the Legion d'Honneur from Napoleon himself and declared that Napoleon, after the Revolution was "the expression of all that was reasonable, legitimate, and European in the Revolutionary movement". According to the British historian Alistair Horne, the philosopher Hegel went even further. "Hegel was said to have stood bareheaded in the street, even when the French soldiery stole his possessions; to him, Napoleon represented the 'Embodiment of the Absolute Ideal'. One hopes that said Embodiment was kind enough to return Herr Hegel's possessions.

How Un-Bearable

Though Lord Byron was a cad who, according to popular report "had natural relations with his sister and unnatural relations with his wife", was nevertheless a very good friend.

In school, even though he had a club foot and no money and was therefore bullied himself, he once tried to defend a friend of his against a bully. Said bully scoffed and told him to bugger off. Lord Byron switched tactics and asked him how many lashings said bully was going to give to his friend.

"Why?" asked the bully.

"So that I may have half the beatings," quoth Byron.

Once up at Cambridge, Byron bought a tame bear, at which point, bullies decided they would much rather pick on students who did not have tame bears living in their dorm rooms. The Amateur Historian does not quite know why the teachers allowed this, but presumably, they did not want to have to address their arguments to the bear in question.