Dr. Kate Lister

Where's the sex?

But at the time, it just lit the fuse paper of this emotional backdrop that was happening in London at the time.

Maybe it was all the revolutions that had been happening, the Enlightenment being ushered in.

And then suddenly there's this voice about this man that's very in touch with his emotional, erotic and sexual awakening.

And it was a huge hit, mostly with the aristocracy, because its first edition, which sold out in days, by the way, that cost, I think it was 50 shillings to buy that, the first edition of it.

So these are rich people who are buying this.

And to answer your other question, yeah, there were very strict moral rules at the time, but

Who those rules applied to and how they were applied is a whole other discussion.

If you are a very, very, very rich member of the aristocracy, you can cover yourself pretty well because you've got the money and the space to be able to get away from scandal, but that doesn't mean you're immune to it.

And Byron, when he goes on his grand tour, he deliberately goes to Greece and to Turkey and to Armenia because he knows that these are cultures where homosexual relationships are not only not taboo, but quite open.

He writes in his letters at the time, that's what he's going for.

And we can't flinch away from it, is that he wanted to have sex with young men.

He referred to them as hyacinths in his many, many letters to his friends that he was going to go and pick as many hyacinths as he could.

And he was going to cull these hyacinths.

Yes, that's pretty much what they're doing.

So you've got to imagine that Romanticism is born out of the Enlightenment movement, which leads up to the French Revolution, the American Revolution.

And there's a heavy emphasis on rationality, despite the fact that these revolutions were often very irrational revolutions.

but it was like, we want to do away with medieval superstition and belief in folklore and magic where people have science and where people have rational principles.

And it was really built on that.

So the romantics come along to counteract that.