Byron, Lord

Entry updated 16 February 2026. Tagged: Author, Poet.

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Working name and title of UK poet George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), the central figure – along with Percy ByssheShelley and John Keats (1795-1821) – in the second generation of English Romantic poets; father of AdaLovelace. At least as directly as did Shelley inPrometheus Unbound (1820), and perhaps more accessibly, he expressed throughout his career a volatile but persistent sense that the world – one may in his case go so far as to say the planet (see below) – was both fragile and governed by incessant change.

Byron appears, often with an ambivalent effect, in various contemporary works, most better thought of asFantastika than sf proper. AmandaPrantera'sConversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 Years After His Lordship's Death (1987), in which anAI is programmed with the poet's personality ofcirca 1807, has little to say about the Byron of sf interest; Tom Holland'sThe Vampyre: Being the True Pilgrimage of George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron (1995) is aVampire tale; hisMysterious-Stranger incursion into the life of the protagonist of DavidLiss'sThe Twelfth Enchantment (2011) augurs an ominously transformed nineteenth century Britain; the thinly disguised Ron Lord in JeanetteWinterson'sFrankissstein (2016) is a creature who would be inclined to sexually maltreat a vulnerableMonster. But JohnCrowley'sLord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (2005) more engagingly incorporates an imagined Gothic novel by Byron, dating its composition to the period before he began to work onDon Juan (written between 1818 and 1823;1819;1821;1823;1824 1vol each); Crowley's guess is enlivening, though it may be his speculative text more resembles the early work of the passionately Byronic BenjaminDisraeli than it does late Byron; there has been much speculation as to the kind of work he might have embarked upon had he not died in mid-career, but if the unrelenting deconstructive thrust ofDon Juan be taken on board, then it is far more likely that had Byron lived and written fiction (as he wished to do), that fiction might well have been speculative in nature: which is to say, sf. And Hugh Thomson'sViva Byron! (2025) describes an imaginary voyage to South America, at the end of which Byron is about to be crowned the king of Peru.

Byron had earlier touched on supernatural topics – a vampire appears, for instance, inThe Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813 chap) – and in the later "Ode on Venice" (written 1818; inMazeppo coll1819), he envisions a worldwide "loud lament along the sweeping sea!" that will one day have drowned the city. But his central influence on the literatures of the fantastic in general, and upon sf in particular, derives almost entirely from his response to the Year of No Summer, specifically June/July 1816, when he resided at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, for much of the time with an entourage that included JohnPolidori and his near neighbours MaryShelley and PercyShelley. Two events can be isolated, the first of which has been central in establishing Byron's importance as anIcon for the field. In June 1816, he participated in an evening gathering of the entourage at Villa Diodati, where his friends and lovers had been trapped by one of the almost incessant bouts of apocalyptic weather that cast such gloom over that summer. For entertainment the four intimates read aloud to each other from the French translation of a horror collection told within aClub Story frame:Das Gespensterbuch ["The Ghost Book"] (coll1811-1815 5vols; first two vols trans Jean Baptise Benoit Eyries into French with cuts asFantasmagoriana1812) by Johann August Apel (1771-1816) and Friedrich August Schulze (1770-1849) writing as Friedrich Laun. Though Eyries's redaction of Eyries and Apel had soon appeared, translated by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson with further cuts and one added story asTales of the Dead: Principally Translated from the French (1813), it is understood that Byron and the others used the French version. These tales were in the mode of theSchauerroman, dark and violent stories with doubles andDoppelgangers whose example shaped Shelley's early horror novel,Zastrozzi: A Romance (1810), and one of which, "Portraits de Famille" (trans as "The Family Portraits"), specifically instructs a group of trapped people to gather together and tell each other ghost stories. Much affected by the evening, Byron suggested that he and the other participants write similar stories of their own, which they would then read aloud to one another.

MaryShelley's tale of course eventually becameFrankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), a central example ofGothic SF. Byron's story, "A Fragment" (inMazeppa, a Poem, coll1819 chap), remained incomplete, and there is no real evidence that JohnPolidori did indeed accurately transform what would have been the whole story – if Bryon had finished it – in his own Villa Diodati contribution,The Vampyre: A Tale (April 1819New Monthly Magazine;1819 chap) as by the Right Honourable Lord Byron; Byron's name was affixed to the tale by its publisher, for commercial reasons; he always denied authorship. There is no doubt, however that Byron's romantic intensity as a person and as the already famous author of the first cantos ofChilde Harold's Pilgrimage (1812 and1816) – as well as the culture-defying, highly transgressive sexual relations for which he had become notorious by 1816 – were transfigured byPolidori into the figure of Lord Ruthven, the central model for the topos of the tormented ByronicVampire that dominated the nineteenth century, and on which CharlesNodier based his highly successfulLe Vampire (1820) (see also AlexandreDumas; BramStoker). [For full entries on Vampire Movies and on Vampires in the fantasy context, see alsoTheEncyclopedia of Fantasy underlinks below.] Films about or referring directly to the Villa Diodati events includeTheBride of Frankenstein (1935),Gothic (1986) directed by KenRussell,Haunted Summer (1988) directed by Ivan Passer (1933- ) andRemando al viento ["Rowing with the Wind"] (1988) directed by Gonzalo Suárez (1934- ).

The second creative event involving Byron at Villa Diodati may be of even greater importance, though its impact has not been as widely noticed. The bleakness of the early summer of 1816 did not abate – the Year without Summer, primarily caused by an enormous volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island (Dutch East Indies) in 1815, had had a planetary effect, darkening and chilling the entire globe – and in July Byron composed "Darkness" (written late July 1816; inThe Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems, coll1816 chap), a long narrative visionary poem (90 lines of blank verse) whose gloom is presciently planetary, for it is the planet itself being described, in language that is primarily non-metaphorical: in the lines "The bright sun was extinguish'd; ... / and the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air", heavenly bodies are typically replaced by the actualSun, earth,Moon. Safely after Byron's death the minor Scottish poet Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) claimed in an open letter (24 March 1825The Times) that in conversation he had given Byron the entire gist of "Darkness", and that Byron had plagiarized him; Campbell's own poem on vaguely similar lines, "The Last Man" (1823New Monthly Magazine 8), which sedulously supplicates God in jouncingly balladic verse, bears little resemblance to the underlying burden of the earlier poem. There has more recently been some rearguard critical focus on likenesses between the Biblical book ofRevelations and Byron's poem; but such an angle scumbles over the difference between Byron's language – which is in fact entirelyau courant with the rapidly advancing state in the early nineteenth century of sciences likeAstronomy and geology – and earlier iterations of the Sublime (see alsoPoetry). The Year Without Summer was itself already being perceived as a "weather" event affecting the entire planet: a vision premonitory (though not predictive) of current understandings ofClimate Change. When Byron states that

The palaces of crowned kings – the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes ...

he depicts (without using a single figure of speech) a vision ofRuins and Futurity in which theEnd of the World is stripped down to a real and local habitation: theDisaster visited on the planet around the corner of the day after tomorrow:

The world was void,
The populous and the powerful – was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless –
A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay.

In "Darkness" a literalLast Man figure can only be surmised, through the reasonable assumption that Byron's "dream, which was not at all a dream", registers the vison of an invisible (but somehow embedded) observer; but even without a tangible human focus, the poem is a genuineProto SF narrative. It is a near ancestor of theScientific Romance. [JC]

George Gordon Noel Byron, Baron Byron

born London: 22 January 1788

died Missolonghi, Greece: 19 April 1824

works (highly selected)

The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale (London: John Murray,1813) [poem: chap: binding unknown/]
The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems (London: John Murray,1816) [coll: chap: containing first appearance of "Darkness": binding unknown/]
Mazeppa, a Poem (London: John Murray,1819) [poetry: coll: chap: containing the long title verse-drama, plus "A Fragment": binding unknown/]

about the author

The critical literature on Byron is enormous, but as it only occasionally addresses the aspects of his career focused on here, we list almost nothing.