Byron

To one witness, Byron was an archangel; to another, Evil incarnate. John Nichol begins not with a poem, but with the fierce and tangled inheritance behind the name.

In this Victorian biography, Nichol follows the Byrons from medieval estates and the Royalist wars to Newstead Abbey, where family history grows stranger with every generation. At its center is the young George Gordon, who inherits the title at ten from an elder kinsman remembered for a fatal duel, lonely years, and uncanny tales. Byron’s pride in his ancestry, Nichol suggests, was more than antiquarian fancy: the family’s passions and misfortunes were part of the poet’s inheritance. What, in this remarkable lineage, would the child carry into his own life and verse?

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