Dan Snow
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Poet, politician of sorts, lover, exile, self-starred rebel, romantic...
Hideous, hideous partner, and eventually freedom fighter.
He appalled and titillated Regency Britain's polite society.
He set hearts racing.
He managed to keep a bear as a pet.
And he just made lots of really, really terrible decisions.
And yet, strangely, made them look glamorous at the same time.
He was born into a Britain that was experiencing multiple revolutions.
The Industrial Revolution, huge leaps in technology, changes in the way that people lived.
People were becoming subordinated to machines.
People were leaving the countryside and entering these massive, dark, smoky cities.
There were questions about how we ought to organize ourselves in this new world.
Who should get the profit?
Who should get the surplus value from all this labor?
And whether these new workers deserved protections, deserved rights.
Across the channel, there was another revolution brewing, the French Revolution, a complete overhaul of France's society, aristocrats losing their head, talk of freedom and equality and liberty.
Byron managed to somehow come to embody all of these revolutions, whilst remaining quintessentially the aristocratic Brit as well.
He is an impossible tangle of contradictions.
He was brilliant, in fact.