Dr. Kate Lister

Well, one of the most interesting things about university at this particular time, at least in Cambridge, was that if you're a member of the aristocracy, which he is, you didn't have to sit any exams.

It didn't matter.

You'd have nothing to pass.

So you could just literally go there and drink and carouse your way through town and just have a jolly old time of it, which is exactly what he did.

This is most certainly a time of sexual awakening for Byron.

Although one of the things that we should definitely mention is that he would later record his first sexual experience was actually one of abuse.

A nanny that was hired to look after him called May Gray, who was this pious, religious, I think it's Lutheran, Scottish, like really went to town on all this religious stuff in his day-to-day life, but was sexually abusing him at night.

He would later write that she would come into his room at night and play tricks with his person.

He was about 10 when that was happening.

So that was likely his first sexual experience.

I would imagine that one of the things that he found most confusing was that this was a woman that would beat him for being a sinful boy all day long and then at night would come in and sexually abuse him.

It's difficult to say what impact this had on Byron, but reading back through all of the archive and the letters and everything that we've got surrounding him, I don't think he liked women very much, which sounds really counterintuitive because he has this reputation for having sex with absolutely anything that would move.

And that is well deserved.

But I think that he liked men a lot more than he liked women.

By the time he gets to

Harrow and then later Cambridge, he is realizing that he has sexual feelings for men, very strong sexual feelings for men as well.

It must have been very confusing for him, but it's when he's at Cambridge that we get the strongest evidence of his first gay relationships.

I think he'd get angry at women a lot.

He often found them grotesque.

And I wouldn't be surprised if that could be traced back to this early abuse that he experienced.