Byron (no one ever called him George) was born on 22 January 1788, in London. His parents, Catherine Gordon Byron (of the old and violent line of Scottish Gordons) and John Byron, had been hiding in France from their creditors, but Catherine wanted their child born in England, so he was1. John stayed in France, living in his sister's house, and died in 1791, possibly a suicide2. Catherine took her son to Scotland, where a deformity of his foot soon became evident. Special boots were made and treatments devised, but Byron limped all of hs life. He lived through his reading, being especially fond of Roman history, and dreamed of leading regiments of brave soldiers.
When the Wicked Lord died, Byron became, at the tender age of ten, the sixth Lord Byron. Newstead, the ancestral home in England, was an absolute wreck3, so Byron's mother moved them to nearby Nottingham. They were very poor. The Byron estate was mostly tied up in lawsuits, but Mrs. Byron finally got her son a decent income. He was sent to Dr. Glennie's Academy at Dulwich and then to Harrow, where he was, of course, mercilessly taunted by the other boys4. He went back to Newstead for his Christmas holidays (it had been rented to a Lord Ruthyn and was now at least habitable) and fell in love with a neighbor (and cousin5) named Mary Ann Chaworth. So infatuated was he that he refused to return to Harrow after the holidays ended, and it took a huge fight with Lord Ruthyn to finally get him to go back.
After his love Mary Ann married another in 1805, Byron became a very wild sort of person. He enrolled in Cambridge, but did no work, since that was the fashion of the time. He wrote lots of verses, and spent lots of money6. He inevitably spent beyond his income of L500 a year and had to get a relative's signature to obtain a loan, as he was still only seventeen. He turned to his half-sister, Augusta Byron Leigh, child of Mad Jack's first marriage. Augusta's husband was a big spender too, so she understood and signed7.
While staying at his mother's (something Byron did only when absolutely unavoidable), a neighbor of Mrs. Byron's encouraged Byron to publish his poems. In 1806, the book Fugitive Pieces appeared. Byron sent copies to two of his friends, one of whom wrote back to say that he thought the poem To Mary was far too shocking to be read by the general public. Byron took this opinion very seriously, and ordered every copy of the volume burnt8. The book was republished (minus the offending poem) in March 1806 as Hours of Idleness. It sold well, but reviews were mixed, and Byron answered his detractors with the very successful satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers9.
In June 1809, Byron and his friends John Cam Hobhouse and William Fletcher set off on a European tour which ended up as a tour of the Middle East. They eventually found themselves in Albania, where Byron was very well received by Ali, the Pacha of Yanina, a ruler renowned for his cruelty10. Byron admired him for having the power and courage to stand outside normal society. It was around this time that Byron began work on Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which he would work on off and on for the next eight years. In Greece, he amused himself by swimming the Hellespont, as in Hero and Leander, a distance of somewhere around three miles11.
