{"id":3493,"date":"2021-01-22T07:00:06","date_gmt":"2021-01-22T07:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=3493"},"modified":"2021-01-22T07:00:06","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T07:00:06","slug":"the-thirty-third-year-of-an-ill-spent-life-byrons-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=3493","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Thirty-Third Year of an Ill-spent Life\u2019 \u2013 Byron\u2019s Birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I love birthdays, especially my own. Although last year\u2019s celebrations were non-existent due to Covid, generally I indulge in a week-long round of drinks and dinners and general frolics, using the birthday as an excuse to try and see everyone I care about. The older I get, the more excited I am to see the next birthday come around (I\u2019ve already started planning my 40th<\/sup>, and that\u2019s not for another 5 years!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, inexplicably, many people do not enjoy birthdays. Lord Byron is a classic example of this, and never more so than on the occasion of his 33rd<\/sup> birthday, 200 years ago today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly before midnight on the 21st<\/sup> of January 1821, Byron notes in his journal that \u2018in twelve minutes, I shall have completed thirty and three years of age!!!\u2019 Writing of his \u2018heaviness of heart\u2019, Byron does not seem to have been overly happy at the prospect, and decides to go to bed and sulk. A few minutes later, however, and he is back at his journal having heard the clock strike midnight. These chimes announce that he is \u2018now thirty-three!\u2019, a melancholy signal inspiring Byron to scrawl a quote from Horace, \u2018Eheu, fugaces, Posthume, Posthume, \/ Labuntur anni<\/em>\u2019 [Alas, O Postumus, Postumus, the years glide swiftly by] (Ode<\/em> 2.14).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He continues in this gloomy vein, dashing off a deeply dismal little squib which offers a clear indication of his unenthusiastic state of mind:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Through life\u2019s road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragged to three-and-thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing \u2013 except thirty-three.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The next entry is even more lugubrious, as the poet glumly envisions an epitaph (complete with a scribbled outline of a sort of gravestone):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1821.
Here lies
interred in the Eternity
of the Past,
from whence there is no
Resurrection
for the Days \u2015 whatever there may be
for the Dust \u2015
the Thirty-Third Year,
of an Ill-spent Life,
Which, after
A lingering disease of many months,
sunk into a lethargy,
and expired,
January 22nd, 1821, A.D.
Leaving a successor
Inconsolable
for the very loss which
occasioned its
Existence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In these lines, Byron offers an intriguing image of the debauched \u2018Thirty-Third Year\u2019 dying of its excesses (\u2018sunk into a lethargy, \/ and expired\u2019) and leaving the Thirty-Fourth year as its lonely \u2018successor\u2019. The past 365 \u2018Days\u2019 are dead and gone, never to be remembered without remorse; and while man\u2019s rotting carcass might be resurrected by a lenient deity, the time wasted in the course of an \u2018Ill-spent Life\u2019 cannot be redeemed or revived. Yet, the markedly mournful tone is characteristically undercut by a wry gleam of levity in the humorous image of the newly birthed Thirty-Fourth year slumped in despair at the grave of its dissipated predecessor, rendered foolishly \u2018Inconsolable\u2019 not only by the \u2018very loss which \/ occasioned its \/ Existence\u2019 but also by the thought of having to endure another such year of degenerate excess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Byron\u2019s dislike of birthdays, and despondency each year as yet another one loomed, is well known. (On his thirty-sixth birthday he writes with an almost gleeful morbidity of his \u2018funeral pile\u2019, a splenetic outlook that was unfortunately proved eerily prescient three months later). This gloomy stance was intensified by the poet\u2019s melancholic disposition and a susceptibility to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), rendering dark wet Januarys particularly difficult. However, in later years personal vanity, as much as depression, undoubtedly play a part in the moody poetry Byron produced each birthday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1818, he bemoans the fact that \u2018now at thirty years my hair is grey\u2019 and looks fearfully ahead to when he is \u2018forty\u2019 and must wear a wig (‘peruke’) to conceal his bald pate. This was not an isolated occurrence. Byron was increasingly obsessed with his appearance, especially after his scandalous separation from his wife and ignominious retreat from England\u2019s shores in early 1816.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly after arriving on the Continent, he writes to his sister Augusta Leigh about his white hairs, rotting teeth and extra poundage, concerned that he looks older than his years:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My hair is growing grey, & not thicker; & my teeth are sometimes looseish though still white & sound. Would not one think I was sixty instead of not quite nine & twenty?<\/p>(BLJ<\/em>, 5, 120)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This conviction intensified in the coming years. In 1822, Byron is agonising over Bartolini\u2019s bust to his publisher John Murray, worrying that it makes him look ancient and gloomily prognosticating his imminent demise:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bartolini\u2019s is dreadful \u2013 though my mind misgives me that it is hideously like. If it is \u2013 I can not be long for this world \u2013 for it overlooks seventy.<\/p>(BLJ<\/em>, 9, 213)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

A year later, and Lady Blessington records Byron\u2019s seemingly endless discussions about his encroaching decrepitude. \u2018To hear Byron talk of himself\u2019, she writes cattily, \u2018one would suppose that instead of thirty-six he was sixty years old\u2019 (Lady Blessington\u2019s Conversations of Lord Byron, <\/em>229).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite merrily claiming to be over one hundred years old in one hotel guestbook in Geneva, as he left his twenties behind Byron undoubtedly grew increasingly sensitive about his age and appearance \u2013 particularly when people assumed he was much older than he was. And many people did think he looked old for his years. In 1818, on visiting the poet in Venice, Newton Hanson (who had known Byron since his youth), cruelly observed that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lord Byron could not have been more than 30, but he looked 40. His face had become pale, bloated, and sallow. He had grown very fat, his shoulders broad and round, and the knuckles of his hands were lost in fat. <\/p>(BLJ<\/em>, 6.78)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This appears to have been a common refrain. On arriving in Pisa in 1821 and catching his first sight of the famous poet, Thomas Medwin was shocked to see a short man \u2018apparently forty years of age\u2019 (Medwin\u2019s Conversations of Lord Byron,<\/em> 7).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Medwin\u2019s account of this meeting draws attention to one of the main sources of Byron\u2019s self-consciousness in 1821 \u2013 the loss of the luscious locks immortalised by Thomas Phillips and Richard Westall, etched in prints, and distributed to tens of thousands of readers. Though, as Medwin notes, his hair still \u2018waved in natural and graceful curls over his head\u2019, it had become \u2018thin\u2019 and \u2018grey\u2019, and his head \u2018was assimilating itself fast to the \u201cbald first Caesar\u2019s\u201d\u2019 (7-8). This change is captured in Alfred D\u2019Orsay\u2019s 1823 sketch of Byron, in which the receding hairline is striking (though Byron was going through one of his periodic bouts of abstemiousness and is particularly slender).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"

Sketch of Lord Byron at Genoa, attributed to Count Alfred D\u2019Orsay, 1823. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Byron was obsessed with his thinning hair, so obsessed in fact, that he even resorted to a noxious old wives\u2019 remedy sent to him by his friend and factotum Douglas Kinnaird, involving eggs and other less-savoury items being plastered across the scalp each day:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s that you say about \u201cYolk of Egg for the hair\u201d<\/em>? The receipt\u2015the receipt immediately. <\/p>(BLJ<\/em> 9.101)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

By the way, your hair<\/em> receipt costs me an egg a day. \u2015\u2015Does it nourish as well as embellish the hair? <\/p>(BLJ<\/em> 9.143)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Any user of modern hair-loss treatments will appreciate the desperation driving Byron at this point!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Moore, meanwhile, noted during a visit in 1819 that Byron\u2019s features had lost their \u2018romantic character\u2019, coarsened by his dissipate lifestyle. This observation draws attention to the other aspect of the poet\u2019s vanity, the sneaking sense of personal culpability and conviction that his dissolute excesses \u2013 particularly the \u2018fuff-fuff <\/em>and passades\u2015<\/em>& fair fucking\u2019 with countless \u2018Seminal vessels\u2019 in his \u2018Whore-hold\u2019 in Venice (BLJ<\/em> 6.40) \u2013 were to blame for the rapid deterioration of his looks. Certainly, Byron ruefully echoes Moore\u2019s views, sheepishly admitting that his dissolute habits would soon see him fall, like a \u2018yellow leaf\u2019 to \u2018the ground, with all deliberate speed\u2019 (BLJ<\/em>, 6.106), the same guilt inflecting the 1821 birthday squib on the evils of his \u2018Ill-spent Life\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By January 22nd<\/sup> 1821, the beautiful youth who enraptured Ali Pasha with his delicate features and shell-like ears was long gone, as was the dashing young poet lionised by London and eagerly pursued by countless women. In their place was an aging Lothario who would \u2013 a mere three years later \u2013 be reduced to bribing his lovers with costly gifts, no longer able to rely on the allure of a handsome face and physique. As Byron morosely admitted later in 1821, \u2018it was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life that I was no longer a boy\u2019 (BLJ<\/em>, 9.37).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, while Byron might have worried about the loss of his looks and feared he would be \u2018interred in the Eternity \/ of the Past, \/ from whence there is no \/ Resurrection\u2019, 200 years on we\u2019re still celebrating his life and works (and his birthday) \u2013 so I\u2019d say he\u2019s aged pretty well, all thing\u2019s considered!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Dr Emily Paterson-Morgan is Head of Publishing for Knowledge E and the Director of The Byron Society. In addition, she sits on the editorial boards of The Byron Journal<\/strong> and the Gender and Culture in the Romantic Era <\/strong>series for Anthem Press, and is currently researching Byron\u2019s engagement with adultery discourses in English print culture. Contact her via Twitter: @epatersonmorgan<\/strong><\/a> or email: emily@p-m.uk.com<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more details about the Byron Society<\/strong>, its monthly events, membership programme, PhD Bursary and other grant schemes, please visit www.thebyronsociety.com<\/strong><\/a>. Contact the Byron Society via email: contact@thebyronsociety.com<\/strong><\/a> or twitter: @byron_society<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love birthdays, especially my own. Although last year\u2019s celebrations were non-existent due to Covid, generally I indulge in a week-long round of drinks and dinners and general frolics, using… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3493"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3501,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493\/revisions\/3501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}