Don Juan

In Byron's comic epic, Don Juan is not the famous seducer but a handsome young man whom women keep falling for. Sent away from Seville after a scandal, he survives a shipwreck, falls in love with Haidée on a Greek island, is sold as a slave in Constantinople, fights at a Russian siege, becomes a favourite of Catherine the Great and finally reaches English high society.

Published in cantos between 1819 and 1824 and left unfinished when Byron died in Greece, the poem is full of digressions, jokes and attacks on the politicians and poets of his day. Its quick, conversational stanzas make it one of the most readable long poems in English. Compare the serious young Byron of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) was born with a club foot and inherited his title at ten. When the first cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage appeared in 1812 he became the most famous man in England, and after a series of scandals he left the country in 1816, never to return.

In Switzerland and Italy, often in the company of the Shelleys, he wrote his comic masterpiece Don Juan. He died of fever in 1824 at Missolonghi, where he had gone to support the Greek war of independence, and he is still honoured in Greece. His daughter Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage on the first computer program.