Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

A young English nobleman, tired of pleasure, sets out alone across Europe: Portugal, Spain at war, Albania, Greece under Ottoman rule, and in later cantos the field of Waterloo, the Rhine, the Alps and Italy. The poem mixes travel, history and the melancholy thoughts of a hero who looks very much like Byron himself.

When the first two cantos appeared in 1812, Byron said, 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous.' The poem created the Byronic hero, brooding, proud and restless, who appears in so much later literature. Then read Don Juan to see Byron laughing at the image he had created.

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.