Free Byron in Love by Edna O’Brien Page A

insisting it was not punishment those starving workers deserved, but compassion and bread for their children. ‘Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows?’ he asked. He challenged them by asking if a human life was valued at less than the price of a stocking frame, and Lord Eldon the Lord Chancellor was put very much out of humour by such audaciousness. He quoted passages from Cobbett, his sentences having the construction of Edmund Burke’s, a little theatrical as he later conceded, but afterwards he was very elated by compliments from his own party and the opposition. That evening, in a gathering at Lord Holland’s, his host praised him fulsomely, but in his memoirs Holland would say that Byron’s speech, full of fancy, wit and invective, ‘was not exempt from affectation, not well balanced, not well reasoned and not suited to the common notion of political eloquence’.
    It mattered not. Byron was launched. Dallas saw the speech as the best advertisement for Childe Harold and Murray delayed the publication for a few days in March, the better to whet the appetite of a curious elite. Sheets of the poem were dispatched to influential people and advertisements in the Courier and Morning Chronicle titillated them with what was to come. The first edition of five hundred copies was sold out in three days as Murray hastened to print a second smaller edition at half the price. Byron’s ‘reign’ would last through spring and summer, he, the only topic of conversation, men jealous of him and women ‘stark mad’ over him, besieging him with letters, both openly and clandestinely, enough, as he boasted, to fill a volume. A shop window carried a copy of Childe Harold , which had been specially bound for Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince Regent.
    Praise was unanimous. Tom Moore described Byron as as much ‘the child of the revolution, in poesy, as another great man of the age, Napoleon, was in statesmanship and warfare’. Critics who had formerly attacked his youthful and precocious verses were won over by the strength, vibrancy and startling genius of the new work. Dallas remarked on Byron’s temper being ‘soothed’, but for Byron, only twenty-four and fame unfurling so rapidly, there were other hidden consequences, a duality, a self-deluding grandeur, a necessity to fall in love with some heiress despite his homosexual proclivities, and above all, not to be toppled from his throne.
    Carriages bearing invitations from the nobility thronged the street of his lodgings in St James’s and the lame poet with the features of Adonis was thrust upon the world.
    And so he was welcomed into the drawing rooms of the Whig aristocracy, Holland House, Melbourne House, Devonshire House, the recherché society, which as Leslie Marchand wrote in his massive biography of Byron, were places ‘where irregularities of conduct were the prerogatives of an uninhibited upper class’. In a city of one million inhabitants, Byron met only with the privileged, apart from his servants and his firelighter, the withered Mrs Mule. The world of poverty, destitution, oppression, lawlessness and riots, that of thieves, pedlars, harlots and drunks, the lame and indigent, the ‘swinish multitude’ who thronged to Tyburn to see the executions did not have a place in Byron’s works. The East in all its mystery, was the mainspring for his creative energies.
    Though more at home in the company and bantering of intellectual men, Byron was swamped by women, all seeing him as the archetype of Childe Harold, despite his every camouflage not to be. There was something cold and fastidious in his bearing, yet the effect of his arrival in these places was dizzying. Hearts fluttered, senses went haywire, Lady Rosebery almost fainted and Lady Mildmay said that when he spoke to [her] in a doorway [her] heart beat so violently that [she] could hardly