A potential role as opposition speaker was diverted when at the beginning of March John Murray published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and, in Moore’s famous report, Byron ‘awoke one morning and found myself famous’.14 The poem joined the immediacy of a travelogue with a disillusioned speaker, who voiced the melancholy of a generation wearied by prolonged war. Despite Byron’s claim that Harold was a fiction designed merely to connect a picaresque narrative, the novelty of an author speaking passionately in his own person overwhelmed readers. Even as Byron satirically discredited the chivalric code on which, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke had rested the defence of the ancien régime (and which was still invoked to justify the war against Napoleon), the magnetism of his personality offered a new romance, offsetting the cynicism the poem displayed: the handsome, aristocratic poet, returned from exotic travels, himself became a figure of force.

Only someone circumstanced as Byron was could have effected this double operation, and the impact was tremendous. Byron followed the success of Childe Harold with a series of Eastern tales that added to his aura: The Giaour (1813); The Bride of Abydos (1813), written in four days; The Corsair (1814), written in ten, and selling 10,000 copies on the day of publication; Lara (1814), written in a month. Hebrew Melodies (1815) contains some of Byron’s most famous lyrics (‘She walks in beauty’ and ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’) and accorded with the vogue for nationalist themes. This sensationally successful phase of Byron’s career epitomizes the paradoxical convergence of Murray’s exploitation of the resources of advertising, publishing and distribution to foster best-sellerdom and star status, with a noble who gave away his copyrights because aristocrats did not write for money. Like all myths, ‘Byron’ did not resolve a contradiction but dramatically embodied it.

This literary celebrity was enhanced by Byron’s lionizing in Whig society. He was swept into a liaison with Lady Caroline Lamb, whose summary of him as ‘mad – bad – and dangerous to know’15 captured his notoriety. She was succeeded in his affections by the ‘autumnal’ Lady Oxford, but it was his relationship with his half-sister Augusta, now married to Colonel George Leigh, that gave rise to most scandal; her daughter Medora, born in 1814 and given the name of the heroine of The Corsair, was widely thought to be Byron’s. Seeking to escape these agitating affairs (obliquely reflected in the Eastern tales), and to repair his debts, Byron proposed (a second time) in September 1814 to the heiress Anne Isabella (‘Annabella’) Milbanke, who had laid particular stress on ‘the Irreligious nature of his principles’ in declining his first proposal in 1812.16 After a dilatory courting, the marriage took place in January 1815; their daughter, Augusta Ada, was born on 10 December 1815. In January 1816 Annabella unexpectedly left Byron to live with her parents, and, amid rumours charging Byron with insanity, incest and sodomy, the darker for never being explicitly articulated, she obtained a legal separation in April. Pirated editions of Byron’s poems on the separation, such as ‘Fare thee well!’ (1816), made marital discord into public scandal. Byron’s resourceful and desperate attempt to influence opinion in his favour brought forth counter-blows, pamphlets, and other defences of Lady Byron. The battle to write the public narrative intensified, though it also darkened, the poet’s celebrity.

In April 1816 Byron quit England, bearing ‘the pageant of his bleeding heart’, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase,17 across Europe. He settled at Geneva, near Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin, who had eloped, and William Godwin’s step-daughter by a second marriage, Claire Clairmont, with whom Byron had begun an affair in England. Shelley, he reported, ‘used to dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea’;18 the influence and resistance the phrase shows are evident in the third canto of Childe Harold (1816). The canto also memorably invokes Rousseau, Napoleon and Waterloo, the battlefield turned tourist shrine Byron visited on the way to Switzerland. He wrote The Prisoner of Chillon at this time, and began Manfred (1817), which he subtitled ‘A Dramatic Poem’, whose protagonist, haunted by remorse for his treatment of his beloved Astarte (the name taken from an incestuous Eastern goddess), turns the exhausted excess of Byro’s Titanism to faintly comic extravagance. At the end of the summer the Shelley party left for England, where on 12 January 1817 Claire gave birth to Byron’s daughter Allegra.

Byron went to Italy and described his Venetian life in brilliant letters, some of which were meant for circulation in the Murray circle. Margarita Cogni, a baker’s wife, succeeded Marianna Segati, his landlord’s wife, as his principal mistress, but his sexual life was hardly monogamous, and its prodigious activity was accompanied by substantial literary productivity. Byron studied Armenian, completed Manfred and in May joined Hobhouse in Rome, gathering materials for a fourth canto of Childe Harold. Published in 1818, this last canto was his longest and most sublime, and its invocation of Freedom’s torn banner streaming ‘against the wind’ (xcviii, 2) fixed his revolutionary reputation. Yet Byron began to feel trapped by the poetic modes that had won him popularity; determining to ‘repel the charge of monotony & mannerism’,19 he wrote Beppo, the tale of a Venetian ménage á trois, written in ottava rima, an eight-line stanza form derived from Italian comic poets, and published anonymously by Murray in 1818. Turning his self-exile into comic contrast between English and Italian mores, Beppo marks a crucial shift in tone, as would Mazeppa (1819), which encloses the violence of the Eastern tales in a comic, nearly self-parodic framework.

In the colloquial, digressive ease of Beppo Byron was testing the form of his greatest poem, Don Juan, at once fictional autobiography, picaresque narrative, literary burlesque and exposure of cant. The first canto, completed summer 1818, uses the name of the legendary libertine for a guileless boy through whose growth and sexual misadventures Byron slyly retells his childhood as ‘An only son left with an only mother’20 and satirizes Annabella in the guise of Juan’s hypocritical mother. The first two cantos were published in 1819, in an expensive edition designed to forestall charges of blasphemously corrupting the poor and uneducated, and which bore neither the author’s nor the publisher’s name. The provenance was easily deduced: Blackwoods criticized Byron for ‘a filthy and impious’ attack on his wife,21 and the second canto, which turns from the amusements of the first to shipwreck and cannibalism, redoubled charges of nihilism. Shocking the proprieties of one audience, Byron moved towards another; the poem sold well in increasingly cheap editions.

In April 1819 Byron met and fell in love with Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, nineteen years old and married to a man three times her age. Byron followed her to Ravenna, and she later accompanied him to Venice. Byron returned to Ravenna at Christmas 1819 as Teresa’s cavaliere servente (that is, a publicly acknowledged ‘escort’), a role that somewhat chafed.