Dr. Kate Lister

It's often referred to as a club foot.

Scholars aren't quite sure if that is what it really, really was, but there was some kind of disability that meant that he limped his entire life, that when he was very, very young, his father in the letters that he was writing said that he didn't believe his son, George was Byron's name, would ever walk properly.

Some biographers that I've read have thought it was a kind of

dysphagia where the bones don't form quickly he had a really really weak leg and most scholars think that it's his right leg although there was disagreement even when Byron was alive so he has to wear these specially made shoes and boots that have got like really hardcore contraptions to constrict his legs so he was in pain a lot and he's very self-conscious about this

But this also means that he's now a lord, but he's gone from living above a shop to being a lord.

He's now throwing his weight around, but he's also very aware of this disability, which the other kids at Harrow mock him for quite mercilessly.

He's been teased for it his entire life.

Things like he can't play cricket.

Well, he does play cricket, but he has to have someone to do the runs for him.

for him.

So he's always aware of this physical disability that he has.

Did he start writing at Harrow?

He's writing all the time.

There's sort of like juvenile verses that we have, but I don't think when he's at Harrow, he has any inkling of, I'm going to be a great poet and a great scholar.

That's just what young gentlemen did is they wrote poems about things.

Yes.

He wants to go to Oxford, but they won't take him.

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.