He walks in beauty

From the moment he entered the world, during the frigid winter of 1788, George Gordon Byron was a person of contradictions. He was born with a caul over his face, a sign of good luck, and a club foot. His mother, Catherine, was a 22-year-old heiress who had had the misfortune to marry “Mad Jack’’ Byron. On both sides of the family there was excess and debauchery. Mad Jack was in France, fleeing debt, when his son was born, and he died when George was 3. Meanwhile, the beleaguered Catherine retreated to Aberdeen, where they lived above a shop, and she alternately raged at Byron and smothered him with kisses. Byron in turn amused himself at church by sticking a safety pin into his mother’s plump arms. When he was 5 she sent him to school, where he fell in love with reading - he claimed to have read 4,000 works of fiction by the time he went to grammar school - and history.

Then, when Byron was 10, his granduncle died. He became the sixth Lord Byron. Although the family was still in debt, his life was changed forever. He went to Harrow and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where “his table was strewn with invitations and study regarded as the last of his pursuits.’’ He fell in love with a 15-year-old choir boy, but, even in the midst of his passion Byron couldn’t quite forget that sodomy was punishable by hanging. Perhaps that fearful knowledge drove him to further excesses. During the next three years he frequented prostitutes, learned to box, gambled, and “clareted and champagned.’’ He also wrote poetry and plays, and a slim volume of translations and imitations, “Hours of Idleness,’’ was published in 1807. A review in Monthly Literary Recreations praised the 19-year-old author. The same issue also carried Byron’s negative review of Wordsworth’s latest poems.