CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS AT ABERDEEN, DULWICH, AND HARROW
Captain and Mrs. Byron, finding themselves impoverished, left Holles
Street, and retired to Aberdeen, to live on an income of £150 a year.
Augusta having been taken off their hands by her grandmother, Lady
Holderness, they were alone together, with the baby and the nurse, in
cheap and gloomy lodgings; and they soon began to wrangle. It was the old
story, no doubt, of poverty coming in at the door and love flying out of
the window, leaving only incompatibility of temper behind.
The husband, though inclined to be amiable as long as things went well,
was, in modern phrase, a "waster." The wife, though shrewd and possessed
of some domestic virtues, was, in the language of all time, a scold. He
wanted to run into debt in order to keep up appearances; she to disregard
appearances in order to live within her income. Dinners of many courses
and wines of approved vintages seemed to her the superfluities but to him
the necessaries of life. He probably did not mince words in expressing his
view of the matter; she certainly minced none in expressing hers. There is
a strong presumption, too, that she complained of him to her neighbours;
for it is well attested in her son's letters to his sister that she was
that sort of woman. So the day came when Captain Byron walked out of the
house, vowing that he would live with his wife no longer.
For a time he lived in a separate lodging in the same street. Presently,
scraping some money together--borrowing it, that is to say, without any
intention of repaying it--he went to France to amuse himself; and in
January 1791, at the age of thirty-five, he died at Valenciennes. It has
been suggested that he committed suicide, but nothing is known for
certain. One of Byron's earliest recollections was of his mother's weeping
at the news of her husband's death, and of his own astonishment at her
tears. She had continually nagged at him, and heaped abuse on him, while
he lived; yet now her distracted shrieks filled the house and disturbed
the neighbourhood. That was the child's earliest lesson in the
unaccountable ways of women. He was only three at the time--yet old enough
to wonder, though not to understand.
His stay at Aberdeen was to last for seven more years. He was to go to
school there, and to be accounted a dunce, though not a fool. He was to
learn religion there from his nurse, who taught him the dark, alarming
Calvinistic doctrine; and he was to develop some of the traits and
characteristics which were afterwards to be pronounced. On the whole,
indeed, in spite of alleviations, he had a gloomy childhood, by a sense,
however imperfectly comprehended, of the contrast between life as it was
and life as it ought to have been.
He had been born proud, inheriting quite as much pride from his mother's
as from his father's family. He soon came to know that there were such
things as old families, and that the Byron family was one of the oldest of
them. It was borne in upon him by what he saw and heard that the proper
place for a baron was a baronial hall; and he could see that the apartment
in which he was growing up was neither a hall nor baronial. The first
apartment occupied by his mother was, in fact, as has already been said, a
lodging, and the second was an "upper part," the furniture of which, when
it ultimately came to be sold, fetched exactly £74 17s. 7d.
The boy must have felt--we may depend upon it that his mother told
him--that there was something wrong about that; that his school companions
were make-shift associates, not really worthy of him; that he was, as it
were, a child born in exile, and unjustly kept out of his rights. The
feeling must have grown stronger--we may be quite sure that his mother
stimulated it--when the unexpected death of his cousin made him the direct
heir to the title and estates; and, indeed, it was a feeling to some
extent justified by the facts. His great-uncle, the wicked Lord Byron,
ought then, as everybody said, to have shown signs of recognition, and to
have offered an allowance.
He made no sign, however, and he offered no allowance. Instead of doing
so, he went on felling timber, and effected the illegal sale of the
Rochdale property already referred too; and for four more years--from the
age of six, roughly speaking, to the age of ten--the heir apparent to the
barony was living poorly in an Aberdeen "upper part," while the actual
baron was living in luxury and state at Newstead. There were good grounds
for bitterness and resentment there; and Mrs. Byron, with her unruly
tongue, was the woman to make the most of them. Family pride grew apace
under her influence; and there was no other influence to check or
counteract it. The boy learnt to be as proud of his birth as a _parvenu_
would like to be--a characteristic of which we shall presently note some
examples.
If he was proud, however, he was also sensitive: and it may well have been
that his pride was, to some extent, a shield of protection which his
sensitiveness threw up. He was sensitive, not only because he was poor
when he ought to be rich and insignificant when he ought to be important,
but also because he was lame. An injury done at birth to his Achilles
tendons prevented him from planting his heels firmly on the ground. He had
to trot on the ball of his foot instead of walking; he could not even trot
for more than a mile or so at a time. A physical defect of that sort is
always a haunting grief to a child--especially so, perhaps, to a child
with a dawning consciousness of great mental gifts. It appears to such a
child as an irreparable wrong done--a wrong which can never be either
righted or avenged--an irremovable mark of inferiority, inviting taunts
and gibes.
Byron was sensitive on the subject, fearing that it made him ridiculous,
throughout his life, alike when he was the darling and when he was the
outcast of society; and various stories show how the deformity embittered
his childhood.
"What a pretty boy Byron is! What a pity he has such a leg!" he, one day,
heard a lady say to his nurse.
"Dinna speak of it," he screamed, stamping his foot, and slashing at her
with his toy whip.
And then there is the story of his mother who, in one of her fits of
passion, called him "a lame brat."
He drew himself up, and, with a restraint and a concentrated scorn beyond
his years, replied in the word which he afterwards put into "The
Hunchback":
"I was born so, mother."
That was one of the passionate scenes that passed between them--but only
one among many; and it was only in the case of this one affront which cut
him to the quick, that the child displayed such precocious self-control.
More often he answered rage with rage and violence with violence. In one
fit of fury he tore his new frock to shreds; in another he tried to stab
himself, at table, with a dinner knife. Exactly why he did it, or what he
resented, he probably did not know either at the time, or afterwards; but
he vaguely felt, no doubt, that something was wrong with the world, and
instinct impelled him to kick against the pricks and damn the whole nature
of things.
Then, in 1798, came the sudden change of fortune. The wicked Lord Byron
was dead at last; and the child of ten was a peer of the realm and the
heir to great, though heavily mortgaged estates. He could not take
possession of them yet--the embarrassed property needed to be delicately
nursed--but still, subject to the charges, they were his. He was taken to
look at them, and then, a tenant having been found for Newstead, Mrs.
Byron settled, first at Nottingham, and then in London, and her son was
sent to school--first to a preparatory school at Dulwich, and then to
Harrow.
Even so, however, there remained something strange, abnormal, and
uncomfortable about his position. On the one hand, Mrs. Byron, not
understanding, or trying to understand, him, nagged and scolded until he
lost almost all his natural affection for her. On the other hand, his
father's relatives, whether because they felt that "Mad Jack" had
disgraced the family, or because they objected to Mrs. Byron--who, in
truth, in spite of her good birth, was extremely provincial in her style,
and of loquacious, mischief-making propensities--were very far from
cordial. They had not even troubled to communicate with her when the death
of her son's cousin made him the direct heir, but had left her to learn
the news accidentally from strangers. Lord Carlisle, the son of his
grandfather's sister, Isabella Byron, consented to act as his guardian,
but abstained from making friendly overtures.
The fault in that case, however, was almost entirely Mrs. Byron's. There
was some dispute between her and Dr. Glennie, her son's Dulwich
headmaster--a dispute which culminated in a fit of hysterics in Dr.
Glennie's study. Lord Carlisle was appealed to, and the result of his
attempt at mediation was that Mrs. Byron practically ordered him out of
the house. Byron, of course, could not help that; but, equally of course,
he suffered from it. He was neglected, and he was sensible of the neglect.
He had come into a world in which he had every right to move, only to be
made to feel that he was not wanted there. Born in exile, and having
returned from exile, he was cold-shouldered by kinsmen who seemed to think
that he would have done better to remain in exile.
Very likely he was, at that age, somewhat of a lout, shy, ill at ease, and
unprepossessing. Genius does not necessarily reflect itself in polished
behaviour. Aberdeen is not as good a school of manners as Eton, and Mrs.
Byron was but an indifferent teacher of deportment. But his pride, it
seems clear, was not the less but the greater because of his inability to
express it in strict accordance with the rules of the best society. He was
a Byron--a peer of the realm--the senior representative of an ancient
house. He knew that respect, and even homage, were due to him; and he felt
that he must assert himself--if not in one way, then in another. So, when
the Earl of Portsmouth--a peer of comparatively recent creation--presumed
to give his ear a friendly pinch, he asserted himself by picking up a
sea-shell and throwing it at the Earl of Portsmouth's head. That would
teach the Earl, he said, not to take liberties with other members of the
aristocracy.
At this date, too, when writing to his mother, he addressed her as "the
Honorable Mrs. Byron," a designation to which, of course, she had no
shadow of a right; and he earned the nickname of "the old English Baron"
by his habit of boasting to his schoolfellows of the amazing antiquity of
his lineage. Lord Carlisle may well have thought that it was high time for
his ward to go to Harrow to be licked or kicked into shape. He went there
in 1803, at the age of thirteen and a half.
Dr. Drury, of Harrow, was the first man who saw in Byron the promise of
future distinction. "He has talents, my lord," he soon assured his
guardian, "which will add lustre to his rank." Whereat Lord Carlisle
merely shrugged his shoulders and said, "Indeed!"--whether because his
ward's talents were a matter of indifference to him, or because he
considered that rank could dispense with the lustre which talents bestow.
According to his own recollections, Byron was quick but indolent. He could
run level in the class-room with Sir Robert Peel, who afterwards took a
sensational double-first at Oxford, when he chose; but, as a rule, he did
not choose. He absorbed a good deal of scholarship, without ever becoming
a good scholar in the technical sense, and his declamations on the
speech-days were much applauded. There are records to the effect that he
was bullied. A specially offensive insult directed at him in later life
drew from him the retort that he had not passed through a public school
without learning that he was deformed; and Leigh Hunt has related that
sometimes "he would wake and find his leg in a tub of water." But he was
not an easy boy to bully, for he was ready to fight on small provocation;
and he won all his fights except one. He did credit to his religious
training by punching Lord Calthorpe's head for calling him an atheist,
though it is possible that his objections to the obnoxious epithet were as
much social as theological, for an atheist, among schoolboys is, by
implication, an "outsider."
"I was a most unpopular boy," he told Moore, "but _led_ latterly." The
latter statement has been generally accepted by his biographers; but not
all the stories told in support of it stand the test of inquiry. There is
the story, for instance, accepted even by Cordy Jeaffreson, that he led
the revolt against Butler's appointment to the headmastership, but
prevented his followers from burning down one of the class-rooms by
reminding them that the names of their ancestors were carved upon the
desks. "I can certify," wrote the late Dean Merivale of Ely, "that just
such a story was told in my early days of Sir John Richardson;" so that
Byron seems here to have got the credit for another hero's exploits.
There are the stories, too, of his connection with the first Eton and
Harrow cricket match. Cordy Jeaffreson goes so far as to express doubt
whether he took part in the match at all; but that is exaggerated
scepticism, which research would have confuted. The score is printed in
Lillywhite's "Cricket Scores and Biographies of celebrated Cricketers;"
and it appears therefrom that Byron scored seven runs in the first innings
and two in the second, and also bowled one wicket; but even on that
subject the Dean of Ely, who went to Harrow in 1818, has something to say.
"It is clear," the Dean writes, "that he was never a leader.... On the
contrary, awkward, sentimental, and addicted to dreaming and
tombstones, he seems to have been held in little estimation among our
spirited athletes. The remark was once made to me by Mr. John Arthur
Lloyd (of Salop), a well-known Harrovian, who had been captain of the
school in the year of the first match with Eton (1805): 'Yes,' he
said, 'Byron played in the match, and very badly too. He should never
have been in the eleven if my counsel had been taken.'"
And the Dean goes on, picturing Byron's awkwardness:
"Mrs. Drury was once heard to say of him: 'There goes Byron' (Birron
she called him) 'straggling up the hill, like a ship in a storm
without rudder or compass.'"
Byron's influence at Harrow, in short, was exercised over his juniors
rather than his contemporaries. It pleased him, when he was big enough, to
protect small boys from school tyrants. One catches his feudal spirit
again in his appeal to a bully not to lick Lord Delawarr "because he is a
fellow peer"; but he was also ready to intervene in other cases in which
that plea could not be urged; and he had the reward that might be
expected. He once offered to take a licking for one of the Peels; and he
became a hero with hero-worshippers--titled hero-worshippers for the most
part--sitting at his feet. Lord Delawarr, Lord Clare, the Duke of Dorset,
the Honorable John Wingfield, were the most conspicuous among them. It was
from their adulation that he got his first taste of the incense which was,
in later years, to be burnt to him so lavishly.
He described his school friendships, when he looked back on them, as
"passions"; and there is no denying that the language of the letters which
he wrote to his friends was inordinately passionate for a schoolboy
addressing schoolfellows. "Dearest" is a more frequent introduction to
them than "dear," and the word "sweet" also occurs. It is not the happiest
of signs to find a schoolboy writing such letters; and it is not
altogether impossible that unfounded apprehensions caused by them account
for the suggestion made by Drury--though the fact is not mentioned in the
biographies--that Byron should be quietly removed from the school on the
ground that his conduct was causing "much trouble and uneasiness."
That, however, is uncertain, and one must not insist. All that the
so-called "passions"--occasionally detrimental though they may have been
to school discipline--demonstrate is Byron's enjoyment of flattery, and
his proneness to sentiment and gush. He liked, as he grew older, to accept
flattery, while professing to be superior to it; to enjoy sentiment, and
then to laugh at it; to gush with the most gushing, and then suddenly to
turn round and "say 'damn' instead." But the cynicism which was afterwards
to alternate with the sentimentalism had not developed yet. He did not yet
say "damn"--at all events in that connection.
One must think of him as a boy with a great capacity for passionate
affection, and a precocious tendency to gush, deprived of the most natural
outlets for his emotions. He could not love his mother because she was a
virago; he hardly ever saw his sister; his guardian kept him coldly at a
distance. Consequently his feelings, dammed in one direction, broke out
with almost ludicrous intensity in another; and his friendships were
sentimental to a degree unusual, though not, of course, unknown or
unprecedented, among schoolboys. He wrote sentimental verses to his
friends.
But not to them alone. "Hours of Idleness," first published when he was a
Cambridge undergraduate, is the idealised record of his school
friendships; but it is also the idealised record of other, and very
different, excursions into sentiment. It introduces us to Mary Duff, to
Margaret Parker, to Mary Chaworth,--and also to some other Maries of less
importance; and we will turn back and glance, in quick succession at their
stories before following Byron to Cambridge.