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16 Byron the Aristocrat
Get accessJohn Beckett is Emeritus Professor of English Regional History at the University of Nottingham. His academic career was largely concerned with English landed estates, and this included his book Byron and Newstead: The Aristocrat and the Abbey (2001) and his article ‘Byron and Rochdale’ in The Byron Journal (2005). He has also written on Byron’s politics, including the essay, ‘Politician or Poet? The 6th Lord Byron in the House of Lords, 1809–13’ (Parliamentary History, 2015), and made several contributions to the Newstead Abbey Byron Society Review as well as the chapter on Byron’s politics in Clara Tuite’s Byron in Context (2020).
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Published:22 October 2024
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Abstract
Byron was an English peer with a landed estate centred on Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire. The title of Baron entitled him to be called Lord Byron, or (among his fellow peers) simply Byron. It also gave him an automatic right to a seat in the House of Lords from his twenty-first birthday for life. He was never one of the grandees. The Byrons were poor in aristocratic terms, but even so, the status, and the seat in Parliament, were undeniable. Had Byron never written a single stanza of passable poetry he would have been, and have remained, an aristocrat. The chapter explores how Byron became an aristocrat, how he executed the position, and how, following his self-imposed exile from Britain in 1816, he went on to live an aristocratic life in Italy and Greece. After his death his reputation spread across Europe. The chapter ends with an assessment of how his life and writing were shaped by his aristocratic values.
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