Lord Byron

Pseudonym: George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron Born: 22/01/1788 Died: 19/04/1824 Gender: Male Occupation: Poet

Dedicated to freedom of thought and action, and anarchic in his political views and personal morality, the poet and adventurer Lord Byron was the personification of the Romantic hero. Famous for his dashing good looks, his controversial opinions and his recklessness, he was a leading figure in the Romantic movement, of which Wordsworth and Coleridge were a part. Byron was catapulted to fame after the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, but his most famous and hugely successful work was the satiric epic Don Juan, which he began to publish in 1819, and had still not finished in 1824, when he died of fever at Missolonghi, where he had sailed to support the Greek fight for independence.

Image source: by Richard Westall, oil on canvas, 1813