Byron's Travels

Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was born on January 22, 1788. By the time he attended Harrow School, he had already experienced a significant shift in his circumstances. Born at the Castle of Gight in the Scottish Highlands, he became the teenage heir to the Byron barony, whose ancestral home was Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. From Harrow, he proceeded to the University of Cambridge. Despite the prevailing difficulties of undertaking a Grand Tour due to Napoleon’s dominance of Europe, Byron embarked on a voyage around the Iberian Peninsula and across the Mediterranean to Turkey, Greece, and Albania. His aim was to experience as much of the ancient world as possible and to prepare himself for the modern era.

Byron’s thirst for new experiences and places was insatiable. After spending four years in London, where he was celebrated as a distinguished poet, he set off again amidst scandal and distress. He journeyed to the Battlefield of Waterloo, traveled down the Rhine to Switzerland, and then ventured beyond the Alps into Italy, eventually reaching Greece, where he died at the age of 36.

From the moment his work Childe Harold was published in 1812, which saw Byron awaken to fame, to 1824 when news of his death reached London, readers were captivated, transported, enraged, dismayed, amused, and smitten by his life and work.

Fiona Stafford

Fiona Stafford is a professor of English literature at Oxford University. She is the author of numerous books, including a biography of Jane Austen. Stafford also wrote and presented the highly acclaimed BBC Radio 3 series “The Meaning of Trees” for “The Essay.” Her book The Long, Long Life of Trees, published in 2017, was recognized as a Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year. She is also the editor of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Classic anthology Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest.

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