Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron) was born January 22, 1788. By the time he was at Harrow, he had already experienced a major shift in place and personal circumstances - from the child born at the Castle of Gight in the Scottish Highlands to the teenage heir of the Byron barony, whose family seat was Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. From Harrow, he went to the University of Cambridge and then, while most young gentlemen had become resigned to the impossibility of undertaking a Grand Tour during the years of Napoleon's domination of Europe, Byron embarked on a voyage around the Iberian peninsula and across the Mediterranean to Turkey, Greece and Albania to see as much as he could of the Ancient world and to set himself up for the Modern.

Byron's appetite for new places was never satisfied. After four years in London, being feted as a great poet, he set off again amid scandal and distress to see the Battlefield of Waterloo, to journey down the Rhine to Switzerland, before heading beyond the Alps to Italy and eventually to Greece, where he died at the age of 36.

From the moment Childe Harold appeared in 1812, when Byron woke to find himself famous, to 1824 when the news of his death broke over London, readers were variously entranced, transported, enraged, dismayed, amused, and smitten.