The Guardian Reviews a New Lord Byron Biography
At The Guardian, Peter Conrad reviews The Private Life of Lord Byron (Unbound, 2019), a biography written by Antony Peattie. "Peattie probes the neuroses of the private man, but his book’s rich parade of illustrations also documents Byron’s self-presentation as a public figure," writes Conrad. More from this review:
...“I go forth,” says the hero of his poem Sardanapalus, “to be recognised.” When Byron met Ali Pasha, he exoticised himself in an Albanian costume, complete with sabre. Setting off for the Greek war of independence, he commissioned a plumed, crested helmet based on a Homeric prototype and posed with it wearing a tartan cloak that alluded to the battling heroes of Walter Scott’s novels. He died before joining the fight, but at least he had assembled the right accessories. Byron was always a fussy curator of his own image. A sketch made in Venice gives him unkempt whiskers, which he grew defensively when told that he had “the bloated face of a castrato”. A neoclassical bust made him look, he complained, like “a superannuated Jesuit”.
For his most ardent admirers, replicas were not enough: his fans undressed or unpeeled him. Peattie’s exhibits include a shirt Byron wore, now owned by a private collector of memorabilia; unfortunately, he can’t show us the scrap of Byron’s blistered skin that was kept as a memento by his current mistress after he suffered sunburn. Everyone wanted a piece of Byron and he was happy to give himself away. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage he asks: “What am I?” and promptly answers: “Nothing.”
Read it all at The Guardian.