Dan Snow
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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.
He was politically engaged.
He was a best-selling poet.
His verses were deeply stirring to people.
He was also vulnerable, cruel.
Anxious, traumatised, jealous, ambitious, he was all the things.
And to help us make sense of that, because we're tackling the poster boy for sex and scandal in Regency society, there is only one person on this earth, breathing today, who can do justice to this story.
And that is the inimitable Kate Lister.
Dr. Kate Lister, historian, host of our sister podcast, Betwixt the Sheets.
So, lace up your true, pull up your stockings, buckle on your sword, because we are heading back to the 18th century to meet the poet who lived fast, loved hard, and died young, Lord Byron.