“The Byrons fought, seduced and squandered their way through 18th-century Europe”
Joseph Crawford reads The Fall of the House of Byron by Emily Brand
The fact that this book’s title alludes to Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic tale of madness and dynastic decay, The Fall of the House of Usher, is fitting. The 19th-century poet Lord Byron delighted in playing the role of the doomed but glamorous Gothic aristocrat, and in dropping dark hints about his family’s heritage of wickedness, insanity and ruin.
Emily Brand’s book sets out to sort fact from fiction, drawing upon a wealth of contemporary sources to reconstruct the disastrous history of the house of Byron, and tracing the lives of its members as they blundered, fought, seduced and squandered their way through 18th-century Europe.
Aristocratic families of the era tended to be enormous, and the Byrons were no exception. Brand briefly mentions dozens of Byrons, but wisely focuses her attention on four of the family’s most colourful members. The scandalous love affairs of Isabella Byron, the murderous misanthropy of the infamous William Byron (‘the wicked lord’), the almost unbelievable toughness of Vice-Admiral John Byron (‘Foul-Weather Jack’), and the miserable and dissipated career of ‘Mad’ Jack Byron are all described here in novelistic detail, with a lightness of touch that belies the enormous amount of research that has clearly gone into every page.
In this retelling, the Byron family grow from the pantomime villains of legend into actual human beings, and whatever is lost in melodrama is more than made up for by the richness of the stories that Brand has brought to light. The cover promises “scandal and seduction”, and there is plenty of both, along with war, cruelty, murder, madness, shipwreck, incest, adultery and much more besides. But the spectacular anecdotes are never allowed to upstage the human realities behind them, and the result is a superb family biography that should appeal to anyone with an interest in the social and cultural history of Georgian Britain.
Joseph Crawford, senior lecturer in English at the University of Exeter