Lord Byron

Lord Byron was the first modern celebrity and died fighting for Greek independence. Born in London in 1788 with a deformed right foot, he inherited the barony at ten from a great-uncle known as the Wicked Lord, and grew up between poverty in Aberdeen and a decaying abbey in Nottinghamshire. He was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he kept a tame bear on the grounds that the rules forbade dogs. He travelled through Portugal, Spain, Albania and Greece from 1809, and the poem he wrote about it, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, appeared in 1812. He said afterwards that he awoke one morning and found himself famous. The Byronic hero — brooding, proud, sexually magnetic, carrying an unnamed guilt — was taken to be himself, and he encouraged the confusion. His marriage to Annabella Milbanke lasted a year. She left in 1816 amid allegations of incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and of sodomy, then a capital offence, and he left England permanently under a wave of scandal. He spent the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva with Percy and Mary Shelley, where the ghost story competition produced Frankenstein. He then lived in Venice, Ravenna and Pisa, wrote Don Juan — sixteen cantos of satirical comic epic that he considered his real work — and had a long attachment to Teresa Guiccioli. He joined the Greek war against the Ottomans in 1823, spent his own money refitting the fleet and paying troops, and died of fever at Missolonghi in April 1824 without seeing action. Greece treats him as a national hero.

• Lived: 1788 CE – 1824 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: poet