“NEWSTEAD! fast falling, once resplendent dome!
Religion’s shrine! repentant HENRY’s pride!
Of warriors, monks, and dames the cloister’d tomb;
Whose pensive shades around thy ruins glide,
“Hail! to thy pile! more honour’d in thy fall,
Than modern mansions, in their pillar’d state;
Proudly majestic frowns thy vaulted hall,
Scowling defiance on the blasts of fate.”
— Lord Byron, “Elegy on Newstead Abbey,” from Hours of Idleness (1807)
Visiting Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home of Lord Byron (1788–1824), is quite the experience—but especially so for anyone even vaguely familiar with the spectacularly scandalous life of Lord Byron. I ventured to Nottinghamshire with The Anonymous Traveler herself in the summer of 2017 to visit Newstead Abbey, and while we found the sun-bathed building and surrounding grounds nothing short of idyllic, as a longtime Byron aficionado I could not help but find myself caught up in the profoundly gothic atmosphere of this enchanting place and its legendary Romantic resident.
Lord Byron was not only a quintessential Romantic figure but one with a real flare for the gothic. Reflecting on his stormy life in the Countess of Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron (1834), the poet expressed, “what I think of myself is, that I am so changeable, being every thing by turns and nothing long,” and indeed there were so many different incarnations of Byron—Byron the dandy, Byron the celebrity, Byron the (bisexual) lover, Byron the golden-hearted blue blood, Byron the Bonapartist, Byron the philhellene—that some dismiss Byron’s gothic vein as a juvenile affectation. Yet, in the aforementioned Conversations we find Byron himself even late in his short-lived life (these conversations took place in 1823, the year prior to Byron’s passing at the age of thirty-six) reveling in the idea that his “future biographers” (“I flatter myself I shall have more than one”) would “represent me as a sort of sublime misanthrope, with moments of kind feeling. This, par exemple, is my favourite rôle.” That Byron favored this devil-may-care persona—what would come to be called Byronic—was blatantly evident throughout his career as a celebrity poet, and even a cursory look at Byron’s biography would make it seem fate had fashioned this “favourite rôle” for Byron. Lord Byron was born George Gordon Byron, the only son of Catherine Gordon (1765–1811), Scottish heiress and the second jilted wife of Byron’s wastrel father, Captain John “Mad Jack” Byron (1756–1791), who had squandered Catherine’s fortune, deserted his wife and son, and died by the time Byron was three years of age. “My Mother,” Byron related later in life, “was as haughty as Lucifer,” and indeed Catherine—who had been left to raise her son in humble lodgings in Aberdeen, Scotland—relentlessly infused an aristocratic arrogance in Byron, whom she alternately idealized and, with misdirected resentment towards Mad Jack, berated (she once lashed out at her club-footed boy as “a lame brat”). Byron’s dogged sense of irremediable sin was mostly the product of the perverted form of Calvinism literally beat into him as a young boy by his Scotch nurse, May Gray, who also introduced the young Byron to the sins of the flesh. With ironic Calvinist certainty, Byron asserted that he was not destined for Heaven but doomed to Hell (“I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned”), viewing his physical disability—the deformed right foot which offset his almost angelic features—as his own personal mark of Cain, even the equivalent of Goethe’s demon Mephistopheles, who appears in human form with the exception of his telltale cloven hoof. For all this, “the lame devil,” as Byron referred to himself (le diable boiteux), defied his disability throughout life, the limping Byron taking to rigorous physical activities such as boxing, fencing, and swimming (in Greece, Byron would swim the Hellespont).
Byron’s tumultuous upbringing came to a head when at age ten he, through sheer happenstance, inherited his peerage from his great-uncle, William “the Wicked Lord” Byron (1722–1798). The Wicked Lord was so-called because in 1765 he had killed his neighbor, a distant cousin by the name of William Chaworth, in a duel resulting from a drunken petty argument over their estates. (Other malignant rumors, such as the Wicked Lord deliberately ruining the Byron estate by decimating Newstead’s trees and killing off thousands of its deer, abounded.) The Wicked Lord’s more immediate heirs in the form of his son and grandson had both met untimely deaths, and thus when he himself died in 1798 the young George Gordon Byron suddenly became the 6th Baron Byron. Catherine proceeded to put immense pressure—specifically financial pressure—on both her son and herself to ensure that Byron lived up to his noble inheritance, which of course included Newstead Abbey.
“THRO’ thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle;
Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay;
In thy once smiling garden, the hemlock and thistle
Have choak’d up the rose, which late bloom’d in the way.
…
“Shades of heroes, farewell! your descendant, departing
From the seat of his ancestors, bids you, adieu!
Abroad, or at home, your remembrance imparting
New courage, he’ll think upon glory, and you.
…
“That fame, and that memory, still will he cherish,
He vows, that he ne’er will disgrace your renown;
Like you will he live, or like you will he perish;
When decay’d may he mingle his dust with your own.”
— “On Leaving Newstead Abbey,” from Hours of Idleness (1807)
If I could find myself moved by approaching the imposing Gothic edifice that is Newstead Abbey at thirty years of age—and I most certainly had—I could only imagine what the experience was like for the ten-year-old Byron as he first beheld his ruinous ancestral home. Byron, in keeping with his family (both the Byrons and the Gordons), was always a rather eccentric figure, and Newstead naturally invited the young Byron to indulge his eccentricities to the fullest when he at long last moved in in the fall of 1808. Spotting the assorted animals which freely roam the grounds of Newstead, including a strutting peacock, reminded me of the menagerie Byron kept, including a tame bear. (Byron had initially kept his pet bear with him at Trinity College, Cambridge in response to their no-dogs policy.) Making my way inside and taking the short staircase up to the Great Hall, I was reminded of Byron practicing pistol-shooting in this very room, firing at coins and empty bottles. Newstead is filled with reminders of Byron’s eccentricities (a pair of his pistols and one of his target-practice coins are on display), but the prevailing air is Byron’s penchant for the gothic.
Thinking of the gothic Byron tends to call to mind the famous meeting with the Shelleys at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, when a bored Byron proposed that this group of English outcasts confined indoors on account of the inclement weather (this was “the Year Without a Summer”) entertain themselves by participating in a ghost story competition, which ultimately inspired Mary Godwin (Mary Shelley by year’s end) to dream up the spine-chilling story which would later become her novel Frankenstein (1818). This meeting—perhaps the most romanticized gathering of the entire Romantic movement—is certainly swathed in gothic gloomth (one of the several films focusing on this momentous meeting, Ken Russell’s Gothic [1986], stresses this aspect in its very title), but in terms of gothic revelry the Byron–Shelley party at the Villa Diodati cannot possibly compete with the antics Byron got up to at Newstead Abbey in years prior. There, the young Byron would host playfully profane revels where he and friends would overindulge in wine and women, Byron himself presiding over the debauched proceedings dressed as a monk and drinking from a skull cup. Byron was imitating the highborn rakes of the “Hellfire Clubs” which flourished in eighteenth-century England (most prominently Sir Francis Dashwood’s “Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe,” or, when they relocated to Medmenham Abbey, the “Monks of Medmenham”). As for Byron’s skull cup, that makes for a story in itself.
Byron related that Newstead’s gardener one day incidentally dug up “a skull that had probably belonged to some jolly friar or monk of the Abbey about the time it was dis-monasteried” (Newstead dates back to 1170, and was granted to Sir John Byron by Henry VIII in 1540), Byron explaining of the sizeable and well-preserved skull, “a strange fancy seized me of having it set and mounted as a drinking cup.” This skull cup would not only serve as Byron’s own personal drinking vessel during the drunken revels he’d host at Newstead—the “Order of the Skull,” he called it—but as inspiration for his “Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull” (1808). This wonderfully macabre little poem is written from the perspective of the skull in question, who fashions himself as a memento mori, a grim reminder that the grave awaits, but, as such, an inspiration to live life to the fullest in the here-and-now—to drink life to the dregs. The 24-line poem is certainly worth reading in full, but its opening stanza says it all:
Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.
The Byronic skull cup—a replica of which is on display at Newstead (the original was laid to rest by another owner)—may seem gloomily gothic, but as Byron’s “Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull” makes clear, it was a rather mischievous celebration of life. To find Byron in more “sublime misanthrope” mode at Newstead Abbey, I strolled over to Boatswain’s Monument, which Byron had erected for his late Landseer dog, who had died of rabies in 1808, prompting Byron’s “Epitaph to a Dog” inscribed on the monument. In it, Byron rages that Boatswain is “Deny’d in heaven the Soul he held on earth: / While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven, / And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.” The very thought of his beloved canine companion being excluded thus fires the poet’s misanthropy:
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debas’d by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit.
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.
The sentiments of a “sublime misanthrope” indeed.
This Byronic image Lord Byron cultivated—of the sublimity of his misanthropy—is evident in the great deal of Byronic iconography Newstead is decorated with, from mezzotint engravings to marble busts of the poet, which tend to stress Byron’s gothic air. Among these images: a close-up engraving of Byron from the iconic George Sanders 1807–08 painting of the windswept poet preparing to leave his home for his Grand Tour, with his young page Robert Rushton in tow (Rushton was the son of a tenant farmer on the Newstead estate); Thomas Phillips’ 1813 portrait of Byron in dark garb with trademark open-collar white shirt; Charles Turner’s mezzotint engraving of a brooding Byron, head resting on hand, after Richard Westall’s 1813 portrait; and Henry Meyer’s 1816 stipple engraving, after a drawing by George Henry Harlow, of a scowling Byron in full arrogant aristocrat mode. The placard accompanying the last of these relates Mrs. Leigh Hunt’s amusing quip that in this image of the poet Byron appears a “great schoolboy who had had a plain bun given him instead of a plum one”; it also includes the more ominous remark of Claire Clairmont (1798–1879) that it “has made you look so proud it almost frightens me.” (Mary Shelley’s stepsister was right to be frightened; more on this below.) Such images of Byron circulated throughout Britain and across the Continent, helping forge the connection between the poet and the cast of Byronic heroes—those poetic self-portraits of bold and brooding individuals enigmatically treading the line between virtue and vice, haunted by some mysterious crime committed in their dark past—which featured in the English peer’s celebrated poetry.
The splendidly paradoxical Byronic spirit also accounts for Byron’s refashioning of Napoleon as a Byronic figure—“Extreme in all things!” (Childe Harold III.36.320)—and idolizing and identifying with the Romantic age’s great man of action. Riding the waves of the French Revolution, Napoleon had come to power through a series of dazzling military victories in his march across the European stage. His dauntless ambition was such that he crowned himself Emperor of France in 1804, but a decade later Napoleon “abdicated the throne of the world,” as a disappointed Byron put it; rather than ending his life with his career in the high Roman manner, Napoleon accepted exile on the island of Elba, inciting Byron’s 1814 Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (also on display at Newstead), wherein the disgusted poet opens with a devastating outcry against the downcast Emperor:
’TIS done—but yesterday a King!
And arm’d with Kings to strive—
And now thou art a nameless thing
So abject—yet alive!
Is this the man of thousand thrones,
Who strew’d our Earth with hostile bones,
And can he thus survive?
Since he, miscall’d the Morning Star,
Nor man nor fiend hath fall’n so far. (I.1–9)
In early 1815, however, Napoleon would once more do the impossible by escaping from exile and marching up to Paris to reenter the corridors of power without a shot fired. “I can forgive the rogue for utterly falsifying every line of mine Ode,” a rejuvenated Byron wrote, but of course the Hundred Days concluded with the poet’s “poor little pagod” being defeated once and for all at Waterloo (“I detest the cause & the victors—& the victory,” Byron fumed), exiled for a second and final time, this time to the remote Mediterranean island of St. Helena. And yet, as Byron entered into an exile of his own in 1816 (more on which in a moment), the figure of Napoleon spoke to the poet more than ever before, and in due course Byron would link his own fate with that of the exiled Emperor, so much so that he would travel around Europe in a replica of Napoleon’s coach (albeit green rather than blue), and, following his inheritance of the name Noel from his mother-in-law upon her death in 1822, began fondly signing his letters Noel Byron, as he now shared the initials of his anti-hero. Byron explained that Napoleon had “been a Héros de Roman of mine” since he was a young schoolboy—claiming to have even kept a bust of Bonaparte at Harrow School, which he “defended…against the rascally time-servers”—but as an adult Byron would fashion himself as “The grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme” (Don Juan XI.55.440) not merely for his ambition but for his fall, when the Byronic pose was at its most evocative.
“I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bow’d
To its idolatries a patient knee,—
Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles,—nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts…”
— Childe Harold Pilgrimage, Canto III (1816), 113.1049–56
Before his Napoleonic fall from grace, Byron enjoyed years of fame as the darling of English high society. “I awoke one morning and found myself famous,” the poet remarked upon the debut of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which sold out within three days of its publication in 1812. Byron’s meteoric rise to stardom—“Byromania,” as his future wife Annabella Milbanke (1792–1860) called it at the time—was largely attributable to the poem’s eponymous Byronic hero, who, despite Byron’s insistence in the Preface that “Harold is the child of imagination,” was seen to be autobiographical. (Childe Harold—whose “gloomy wanderer” [I.16.137] was originally called “Childe Burun”—traces the exotic travels of the poet’s Grand Tour of 1809–11 through Spain, Portugal, Albania, and, most importantly, Greece.) Hurled haphazardly into the limelight, Byron carried on titillating an enthralled public (his 1814 poem The Corsair sold ten thousand copies on the day of its publication) with a series of “Eastern Tales” featuring an assortment of Byronic heroes—Romantic literary descendants of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, Anne Radcliffe’s gothic villains, and, most importantly, that great grandfather of all Romantic rebels, Milton’s Satan.
The Satanic component of the Byronic persona cannot be overstressed. Byron wrote of the titular “infidel” of The Giaour (1813), “If ever evil angel bore / The form of mortal, such he wore” (912–13), and of the title character of Lara (1814) that he “stood a stranger in this breathing world, / An erring spirit from another hurled; / A thing of dark imaginings…” (18.27–29). Byron of course fashioned himself as such a “thing of dark imaginings,” sometimes literally an “erring spirit from another hurled,” for Annabella Milbanke, who formally separated from Byron in 1816, related that her ex-husband’s “Imagination dwelt so much upon the idea that he was a fallen angel that I thought it amounted nearly to derangement, and the tradition that Angels, having fallen from Heaven, had become enamoured of mortal women, struck him particularly…” Byron’s wanton womanizing was presumably the result of having been among those amorous angels who descended to Earth to wed mortal women, ultimately leading to the Deity’s cataclysmic Deluge, as told of in the sixth chapter of the biblical Book of Genesis and the apocryphal Book of Enoch, and a subject Byron explored in his drama Heaven and Earth (1821; 1823). It was not for nothing that Byron was nominated as the head of a “Satanic school” polluting English literature and life by Robert Southey, first-generation Romantic radical turned reactionary Poet Laureate, for Byron, despite his dismissiveness over “all this ‘skimble scamble stuff about ‘Satanic’ ” (“I have no school nor Scholars”), really provoked his own public demonization. Byron undoubtedly roamed the halls of Newstead Abbey fancying himself a wicked lord, like the great-uncle he inherited this Gothic pile from, and appropriately enough in Mario Praz’s landmark 1933 study The Romantic Agony Byron would be rechristened “the Satanic Lord.”
“…in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within; and yet I live, and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing men.
But grief should be the instructor of the wise;
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”
— Manfred (1817), I.i.5–12
Byronic misanthropy notwithstanding, Newstead is today quite welcoming. My children helped themselves to an ice cream shop on the grounds before frolicking in the gardens, where a wedding party gathered in even merrier spirits. I could not help but think of the irony of a couple joining in holy matrimony here at Newstead Abbey, given Byron’s own ill-suited marriage—to a priggish mathematician, or “the Princess of Parallelograms,” as Byron called his wife Annabella—which collapsed quickly and very publicly. Among Newstead’s collection is “Fare Thee Well” (1816), the poem in which Byron reflects on the sadness of parting ways with his wife and daughter, Ada—the future Ada Lovelace (1815–52), groundbreaking computer programmer. At Newstead, “Fare Thee Well” is, as at the time of its publication, joined by copies of the satirical prints Byron’s poetic gesture inspired in April of 1816: I. R. Cruikshank’s The Separation, a Sketch from the private life of Lord IRON and George Cruikshank’s Fare Thee Well, which show the poet haughtily waving off his wife and infant child dismissively as he departs, on his other arm Charlotte Mardyn, an actress at Drury Lane, the theatre which Byron was on the management committee for, and one of his mistresses. (A fine detail, in the second print, is the skull cup in the rowboat the smirking Byron stands in; “Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull” was first published in the seventh edition of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1814.)
Byron’s womanizing was the stuff of legend, and his countless sexual conquests were to provide inspiration for the work which many have considered his magnum opus, Don Juan, which was a succès de scandale when its first two cantos were published in 1819. (The poet protested, “it may be bawdy—but is it not good English?”). Most infamous among Byron’s bedazzled high society beauties, prior to his ill-fated marriage, was Lady Caroline Lamb (1785–1828), who famously dubbed Byron “mad – bad – and dangerous to know,” which did nothing to prevent her falling headlong into a scandalous affair with the poet. “That beautiful pale face is my fate,” she wrote, and indeed her infatuation with Byron led Caro to destroy her reputation: when Byron tired of her, she went hysterical, making outlandish gestures such as sending Byron a letter enclosed with bloody clippings of her pubic hair (“I cut…too close”), disguising herself as a page to sneak in and see him, and cutting herself publicly. (“Every great affair ends in a straitjacket,” The Anonymous Traveler has told me.) The romantic lunacy never ended for Lady Caroline Lamb, who for instance had her servants don buttons whose inscription took Byron’s family motto, Crede Byron (“trust in Byron”), and inverted it (Ne Crede Byron—“don’t trust Byron”), and even composed a three-volume roman à clef called Glenarvon (1816) in which the titular gothic villain Lord Glenarvon is a stand-in for Lord Byron. Byron sought refuge from scandal and the debt which always plagued him in marriage to Annabella Milbanke—cousin of Caro’s husband, William Lamb (1779–1848), a future Prime Minister (1835–41)—but his marriage had of course failed spectacularly, and in the end the cancerous rumors (which Caro eagerly contributed to) of his scandalous sexual escapades—including sodomy (still a capital crime) and incestuous liaisons with his half-sister—left Byron feeling compelled to exile himself from England. (Sir Walter Scott wrote that “Lord Byron…has Childe Harolded himself, and outlawed himself, into too great a resemblance with the pictures of his imagination.”)
Born of Mad Jack Byron and his first wife, Byron’s half-sister Augusta Leigh (1783–1851) had been raised separately from him, but the two became acquainted later in life and grew close. How close is up to debate, but among Newstead’s collection is a section of a tree into which Byron carved his and Augusta’s names during their stay there in 1814—what was to be Byron’s final stay. (Byron’s debts forced him to put his ancestral home up for sale, and he would have to wait until 1818 to find a buyer in Thomas Wildman, one of Byron’s friends from Harrow.) The nature of their relationship is debatable, but it is probable that Byron did indeed sleep with his half-sister, and it is possible that Augusta’s daughter Medora—named after the love of the Byronic hero in The Corsair, who had “a laughing Devil in his sneer, / That raised emotions both of rage and fear” (9.31–32)—was Byron’s. As ever, readers were inclined to see autobiographical details in Byron’s verse. In Manfred (1817), the eponymous Byronic hero’s “half-maddening sin” (II.i.31) is a destructive and implicitly incestuous love, and in Cain, A Mystery (1821) brother-sister incest is arguably fully vindicated: one of the Byronic Cain’s most endearing qualities is his love for his sister-wife, Adah, who herself, when informed by the tempter Lucifer that their state of sibling love will become sinful in their descendants, is utterly aghast (I.i.362–82). Brother-sister incest is a motif in Romantic literature—the sister as an idealized version of the self—but certainly the theme becomes particularly pointed in Byron’s poetry given the scandalous rumors surrounding him.
“I have been cunning in mine overthrow / The careful pilot of my proper woe,” Byron wrote (“Epistle to Augusta,” 3.23–24), and yet if Byron did indeed have an affair with Augusta, it was still far from his most woeful, as far as his own behavior is concerned. Far worse was his fling with Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. She had enthusiastically become Byron’s lover in London in 1816, just before the poet entered self-imposed exile for the remainder of his life; finding herself pregnant with his child, Claire had orchestrated the Lake Geneva reunion, but only to find Byron uninterested in her. (Byron once reasoned, “I never loved her nor pretended to love her—but a man is a man—& if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night—there is but one way…”) As for the child born of their loveless union, Byron would hold on to his “little illegitimate,” ultimately placing the little Clara Allegra in a Catholic convent at Bagnacavallo, near Ravenna. The Shelleys’ pleas for Byron to return Allegra to her mother, Claire’s pleas to be able to visit Allegra, and Allegra’s own pleas for her father to visit her, all went ignored by Byron, and at the convent the child would die from fever at the age of five. Reflecting on her ill-fated affair with Byron, Claire Clairmont would express that he had “given her only a few minutes of pleasure but a lifetime of trouble.”
“…Too high for common selfishness, he could
At times resign his own for others’ good,
But not in pity, not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That swayed him onward with a secret pride
To do what few or none would do beside;
And this same impulse would in tempting time
Mislead his spirit equally to crime;
So much he soared beyond, or sunk beneath
The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe,
And longed by good or ill to separate
Himself from all who shared his mortal state…”
— Lara (1814), 18.49–60
“I am such a strange mélange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me,” Byron asserted to Lady Blessington in 1823. It is difficult indeed to square the Byron capable of such callous cruelty, as in the above account, with the Byron capable of such benevolent generosity, as he exhibited at home and abroad. Byron, for instance, famously addressed the House of Lords twice in 1812: with his maiden speech (February 27) he opposed the Frame Breaking Act, which proposed capital punishment for Nottinghamshire’s Luddite “frame breakers”; with his second speech (April 21) he campaigned for Catholic Emancipation. (“There are but two sentiments to which I am consistent,” Byron expressed to Lady Blessington, “a strong love of liberty, and a detestation of cant, and neither is calculated to gain me friends.”) A little over a decade’s whirlwinds of fame and infamy later, Byron was to be found involving himself at great personal expense in the nascent Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, a noble cause for which Byron would die (albeit from fever, never having seen battle) in April of 1824, and for which the philhellenic poet is still to this day lauded as a national hero in Greece, which is dotted with Byronic monuments. While it may seem difficult to reconcile Byron’s misanthropy with his philanthropy, he himself understood this “strange mélange of good and evil” that he was when he declared his “favourite rôle” to be “a sort of sublime misanthrope, with moments of kind feeling.” This was indeed how his “future biographers” were to characterize him, including the curators of Newstead’s Byroniana.
Leaving Newstead Abbey, I ventured to the nearby Church of St. Mary Magdalene, where Byron was laid to rest in the family vault. (His last request, “Let not my body be hacked, or be sent to England,” went ignored.) Byron may be buried here, but his spirit undoubtedly roams Newstead. Having absorbed the wild tales and passionate poetry of the immortal Byron for many years of my life, journeying to the Romantic poet’s ancestral home was nothing short of a pilgrimage for me. I am forever in The Anonymous Traveler’s debt for orchestrating it, and this entry is a small token of my appreciation.
— Christopher J. Cuccia
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