Secret appetite that drove Byron even more than his addiction to sex
He had so many conquests he owned his own brothel. But now a startling new book reveals the...
WHEn he was not quite 19 years old, the poet George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale and soon to be notorious as one of the most wanton sexual adventurers in the world, went on a diet.
Though he was only 5ft 8.5in tall, he weighed 14 st 6lb. On today’s body mass index, that registers as obese.
His doctor advised him to walk four miles or more each day (the equivalent of the current fashion for taking 10,000 steps), bathe three times a week and to eat and drink in moderation.
Instead, the young Byron hurled himself into ‘violent exercise & fasting’. He ran and played cricket while wearing seven waistcoats and an overcoat, sweating till he was exhausted. He took hot baths daily . As well as giving up alcohol and eating only one meal a day, he began swallowing laxatives. The effect was drastic. He lost four stone in five months and his clothes had to be taken in by 18 inches. When he returned to T rinity College, Cambridge, in the summer of 1807, friends failed to recognise him. One, a choirboy who was also his lover, seemed ‘thunderstruck at the alteration’.
Byron’s weight fluctuated wildly for the rest of his life. His bouts of starvation, bingeing and purging constituted an eating disorder — a fact only acknowledged by scholars since 1982 when food writer W ilma Paterson asked in the journal W orld Medicine, ‘Was Byron anorexic?’
Though anorexia nervosa is often portrayed as only afflicting adolescent girls, ten per cent of those who starve themselves are boys and men.
Byron also suffered from the related illness bulimia nervosa, bingeing followed by starvation, purging or vomiting. ‘I began very early and very violently,’ he told his confidante Lady Melbourne in 1813.
Anorexia is commonly seen in patients who have grown up in conflict with their parents, or who have a history of obesity or have a family history of psychosis or neurosis. In other words, Lord Byron was a textbook case.
Both sides of his family were pockmarked by incidents of infamy , depression and madness. His mother Catherine Gordon seems to have possi - bly lost both her father and her grandfather to suicide. His father’s uncle, the 5th Lord Byron, inherited the title at the age of 14 together with a large fortune.
The 5th Baron spent lavishly on Gothic buildings around the lake at his estate, newstead Abbey. Quickly running into debt, he was forced to sell a large number of paintings and other valuables at auction, and the stately home fell into neglect.
His nephew Jack — Byron ’s father — was educated at W estminster School and became an officer in the Guards, seeing action in the American War of Independence. On his return, he sold his commission and was soon known as a rake, ‘the most profligate libertine of the age, a spendthrift, a gambler and a debauchee’ dubbed Mad Jack.’
Before the age of 21, Jack had seduced a married noble - woman, Amelia the Marchioness of Carmarthen. She left her husband, abandoning her two sons and a daughter (all aged under five), and fled to P aris with Jack Byron.
When she died in childbirth, he forfeited her income of £4,000 a year (around £600,000 today) and resorted to Bath, England’s informal marriage market. There, he met the overweight Scottish orphan Miss Catherine Gordon, the 13th Laird of Gight and heiress to a considerable fortune.
Within 18 months of their marriage, Captain Byron ’s debts had absorbed nearly all his wife’s assets.
The couple’s only child, George, was born on T uesday, January 22, 1788, in rented rooms in Holles Street, London, one in a sequence of ever - changing addresses. The Byrons lived in nomadic dis - comfort because, as a debtor , the captain could be arrested at any day except on Sundays.
After decamping to Aber - deen, they separated and, when their son was just two years and seven months old, Jack fled to France. Apart from one short visit, to borrow money, he never saw the child again, and died a year later in squalid poverty, aged 35.
Mrs Byron bullied and spoiled her only son, ‘now kicking and now kissing’ him, in the words of one family friend.
When the boy was nine, his nursemaid, May Gray, abused him sexually, and also beat him frequently till his bones ached.
It is perhaps not surprising that when he was an adult, one of his mistresses remark: ‘Byron has a false notion of women. He fancies they are all disposed to be tyrants.’
Byron was born with a mis - shapen right foot. His mother despised this deformity and, when she lost her temper, would call him ‘a lame brat’.
When he was ten, Byron ’s great-uncle died. As the 6th
‘You are as bad as your father,’ his mother declared
The ‘fat bashful boy’ was now pale and thin He gorged on burgundy served in a human skull
Baron of Rochdale he inherited £60,000 (approximately £9 million today) and Newstead Abbey, which was in serious disrepair.
Though much of his inherited fortune was tied up in legal disputes, his mother decided to spend whatever was necessary to hide or mend his twisted foot.
A trussmaker at Nottingham’s general hospital claimed he could cure the disability, at a cost of about half Catherine’s annual income. Having rubbed the boy’s foot with oil for some time, the quack then twisted it forcibly and screwed it up in a wooden machine which George wore day and night.
All his life Byron limped. There was nothing he could do to mend the foot, but in other ways he could control his appearance.
At 15, he was a ‘fat bashful boy with his hair combed straight over his forehead’ but his starvation diet altered more than his waistline: his face seemed to lengthen, he appeared taller and his hair lightened from dark brown almost to blond. The fat boy made himself into an emaciated pale young man, with a ‘refined and spiritual look’.
His diet reveals a consistent pattern to his love life: when he found women to mother him, he reverted to infantile behaviour, stopped starving himself and started putting on weight — until panic born of claustrophobic dependence forced his eating disorder back to the surface.
As he began to become renowned for his romantic poetry, the same themes emerged in his verse.
For example, in The Corsair, an immensely popular poem published in 1814 when he was 26, the pirate hero Conrad flees from a nurturing mother-lover who plies him with food. It is only when back on his ship and adhering to a strict vegetarian and teetotal regime that he feels himself to be a man again.
A starvation diet not only appealed to the Puritan, ascetic streak in Byron’s nature but he was convinced that looking pallid and thin made him more attractive to women. They would want to mother him, and he longed to be mothered.
One friend found him admiring himself in front of a mirror: ‘How pale I look,’ the poet said approvingly. ‘I should like, I think, to die of a consumption. The women would all say: “See that poor Byron, how interesting he looks, in dying.”’
Despite his success in print, however, he despised the idea of being a poet. ‘No one should be a rhymer who could be anything better,’ he said. ‘Who would write who had anything better to do?’
He dreamed of being a great politician and statesman, like his hero Napoleon, but he could never be part of The Establishment: he was too much the son of his dissolute, rebellious father for that.
It was a side to his character that his mother emphasised. Whenever he misbehaved, she would say: ‘Ah, you little dog, you are a Byron all over. You are as bad as your father.’ Living up to the wicked ideal of Captain Jack Byron became one of the guiding principles of George’s life, though he outdid all his family when he embarked on an affair in his mid-20s with his half-sister Augusta — Mad Jack’s only daughter.
Augusta, or ‘Goose’, was married to her first cousin, Colonel George Leigh, and already had three children with him. When the fourth was born, she was named Elizabeth Medora (apparently a reference to a Byron poem) and Lord Byron was asked to be her godfather.
It seems likely that he was in fact the baby’s actual father, because he wrote to reassure Lady Melbourne that the child ‘is not an “Ape” and if it is — that must be my fault.’ The implication is that he and his friends had feared that incest would leave a physical mark.
Rumours were rife around London that Byron’s sexual excesses had corrupted his half- sister and that he was also guilty of a crime so scandalous that it could not be named in a newspaper: sodomy. Sex between men could still be punished with the death sentence.
By comparison, his more conventional immorality — joining the Drury Lane theatre’s management committee, for instance, enabled him to meet and seduce actresses — seemed fairly tame. His life was one of unremitting drama.
When he publicly humiliated one mistress, the novelist Lady Caroline Lamb, by refusing to dance with her at a party, she slashed herself with a pair of scissors and bled all over her dress. Famously, she had dismissed him at first sight as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.
Despite her initial reservations, Lady Caroline fell in love with him so violently that he began to be afraid. She was already married, to Lady Melbourne’s son William Lamb (the future Prime Minister Lord Melbourne), and was not afraid of making her adultery public knowledge.
She compared herself to ‘ an untamed tigress’ and enjoyed savage sex: Byron once complained that no man had suffered such sexual depravities at the hands of a woman since the Trojan War. He had met his match.
To deter her, he decided to marry and declared he was ready to wed any woman who wouldn’t spit in his face. Lady Caroline responded by spreading rumours not only of her affair but of Byron’s incest with his half-sister. Instead of trying to discredit the stories, he embraced them, dropping hints in poems such as The Bride of Abydos.
He wore all black, and seemed to delight in associations with satanism. At dinner at Newstead Abbey, he would hand around a human skull filled with burgundy, which he could drink down in one draught.
And then he married the young Annabella Milbanke, who did not know how to cope with her wild husband. His valet commented that she was the only woman in Britain who couldn’t call Lord Byron to heel with a flick of her fingers.
George and Annabella quickly had a baby, Ada, though the marriage was already a smoking ruin by the time she was born.
Annabella’s parents were horrified at the indignities being inflicted on their daughter by an egomaniac son-in-law who had begun to refer to himself as ‘even greater than Bonaparte’. But Annabella was afraid to leave him: she thought he would seize her baby and give it to his half-sister Augusta to raise.
As gossip reached fever pitch about Byron’s crimes, he decided to leave the country.
In Switzerland he met Percy Shelley and Mary Woolstonecraft Godwin and began systematically starving himself again. Mary noted his diet: ‘A thin slice of bread with tea at breakfast — a light, vegetable dinner, with a bottle or two of Seltzer water . . . The pangs of hunger he appeased by privately chewing tobacco and smoking cigars.’
He began an affair with Mary’s half- sister, Claire Clairmont, and they had a baby daughter named Allegra. Byron promised to raise the child himself in Italy, but soon placed her in a convent, where she died aged five.
He went instead to Venice and launched into a contented affair with his landlady, Senora Marianna Segati. She was ideal, he wrote to Augusta: she did not ‘plague’ him.
Inevitably, he started to pile weight on. One extravagant meal consisted of 18 dishes, including dark vegetable soup served with fried sweetbreads, a pork salami, beef with potatoes and fish stew for starters; roast woodcock, baked fish, veal and stew for the main course; almonds, pears, oranges and chestnuts for dessert.
He left Venice and went to Ravenna on the Adriatic coast where he took up with 19-year-old Teresa, Countess Guiccioli — first meeting her just three days after her wedding.
Over five years he grew so fat with her that friends found him unrecognisable. A friend of Annabella’s wrote gleefully: ‘He is enormously fat, his face bloated and complexion pasty.’
Food was not his only addiction. He was a glutton for sex, indulging in an estimated 200 liaisons with prostitutes during these five years, at a cost he estimated at £2,500 (£375,000 today).
Hiring a brothel for himself, he boasted to a friend that he had also seduced women from countesses to cobblers’ wives.
He maintained his affair with Teresa for five years. By the time she formally separated from her husband, however, he was tiring of her and he began to purge himself with laxatives again. One of his diet books recommended drinking soap dissolved in a glass of water.
In 1822, Byron was devastated by the death of his friend Shelley, who drowned when his sailing boat capsized. Byron attended the cremation on the beach and then threw himself into the sea, embarking on a nearly suicidal three-mile swim.
From this day on, Teresa wrote, he starved himself until he stopped eating completely. ‘Don’t you think I get thinner?’ he asked friends. ‘Did you ever see any person so thin as I am, who was not ill?’
Teresa would put a finger in the hollow of her cheek, to emphasise how skull-like his face had become. His appetite began to recover only when, aged 35, he left Teresa, to join the Greeks in their war of independence against the Ottoman Empire in 1823.
With male friends around him, he ate and drank heartily. But his health was broken and, after spending a huge sum on arming and training a regiment of mercenaries who ran away at the first opportunity, he fell ill.
He was obsessed with measuring his waist and wrist, to reassure himself that he was not putting on weight. He died in April 1824, having suffered a convulsive fit which his doctor diagnosed as epilepsy, though it may have been a stroke.
aDaPteD from the Private life of lord Byron by antony Peattie, published by unbound, £35. © antony Peattie 2019. to order a copy for £28 (20 per cent discount), go to mailbookshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155, p&p is free. offer valid until 28/09/2019