 Hello and welcome to HistFest 2021 and a warm welcome back to those of you who have weekend and day passes. My name is Rebecca Adeel and I'm the director of HistFest and I am really really excited to share with you the day's events. We have a fantastic range of speakers and talks going on so please check them out via the website www.histfest.org. Now, before we get started there are just a couple of housekeeping points to note. Using the menu above you can provide feedback on the event and also if you wish donate to the British Library. The library is a charity and your support really does help to open up a world of knowledge and inspiration to everyone. Your feedback is also incredibly useful in helping to plan future cultural events. You can also find a tab with a link to the bookshop where you can browse a range of titles by the festival authors. Now at the end of the discussion there'll be an opportunity to have a short audience Q&A so please do submit your questions using the box below the video. Also below the video you'll find further information about today's speakers as well as social media links should you wish to continue the conversation after the event. Now I'm going to hand you over to our event sponsors to introduce you to the speakers for our next event. Hello, I'm Dan Snow from History Hit. History Hit is a new history channel, a place where you can go and listen to audio including interviews with all three of the wonderful guests in this session. And you can watch hundreds of hours of original history documentaries. Like the one in which Britain's leading forensic anthropologist opened a coffin of a celebrated infamous 18th century Highland chief to find out exactly who was in there and whether he had a head. Check out historyhit.tv. We're delighted to support the House of Byron scandal fall and the rise of celebrity. This session features historian, broadcaster and author of Dead Famous, Greg Jenner. Historian and author of The Fall of the House of Byron, Emily Brand. And it's chaired by broadcaster, historian and author of England's Mistress, the infamous life of Emma Hamilton, Professor Kate Williams. Enjoy. Hello and welcome everyone to our event, the House of Byron scandal fall and the rise to celebrity. Thank you so much all for coming to invite us into your homes. We are absolutely so honoured to be with you. We're so grateful to History Hit for our sponsorship and Rebecca for organising the wonderful History Hit and to the British Library for having us. It's so great to be with you. I'm just so excited to come to this event. It's, you know, completely up my street, Georgian celebrity. It's full of, we've got, we have 40 minutes of scandal, eye popping scandal. So hold on to your seats, you know, get ready, strap in because it's eye popping scandal, exciting stuff. And then at 20 to six, we'll have some questions and finish at 10 to six at five 50. So I'm really excited to introduce this brilliant event. We've got two books. We've got here is Emily Brand. It's wonderful to see Emily here, a historian and author, and there's the brilliant, the rise and fall of the House of Byron is her first book, five years of research. I followed on Instagram all the different archives she went to. Absolutely amazing. And, you know, it really is an 18th century delight full of so many stories, and she's busy working on her next book. It was Book of the Week on Radio four and superb family biographies, a BBC history and a ravishing family sagas at the Sunday time. So, so go out and buy it if you haven't already. And it's also marvelous to see Greg Jenner here, my fellow presenting friend on inside Versailles. We were in a freezing cold church talking about sex and scandal in the French court. And now we're here in our nice cosier houses talking about sex and scandal in Georgian Britain. Here is fantastic book dead famous and unexpected history of celebrity. It says fizzes with vignettes at the Guardian and juicy tip, but it's a joyous one for the books at the Guardian and the Irish Times and I think my perhaps favorite review of Greg said he was like an Oscar Wilde figure taking us through celebrity. Greg's next book is due out in November. It's October Ask a Historian. And of course he's always the also the host of our beloved history brilliant podcast. You're dead to me so subscribe to that. If you haven't already. So fantastic to be here. I've got so many questions to ask. I don't know whether I'm going to get through all of them and I know your questions as well. But Emily's book is such a revelation, because you know we all have an idea don't we have Byron mad bad and dangerous to know, but who was to know that his family, you know they were completely eye popping in their scandal as well, adultery murder. And it really shows what a wild family he was part of. And so, Emily, if I could start with you. What attracted you to write on this absolutely incredible family, never a dull moment. Well, thank you so much for all those nice words. Okay, that was lovely of you. And yes, it actually, I mean, much of my work has been about love and sex and seduction in this era in the long 18th century so obviously Byron looms very large in that anyway but what actually attracted me on this journey for writing this book was a female character in the book Isabella who has been pretty much and very well totally neglected since she died. And I saw a portrait of her as many historians may sympathize with me I was, it was midnight and I was googling historical things and this portrait popped up by Thomas Gainsborough of Isabella then Countess of Carlisle and I just totally fell in love with it. So I wanted to find out more about her. And there was very little online or seemingly an archives or anywhere about her so I was just totally entranced. And then by seeing that her maiden name was Byron. This sent me down this rabbit hole of information about her siblings about her nephew and her great nephew who was the poet. And I just got caught in this mission of writing this. It was clearly a family saga. And happily when I started visiting the archives and digging things up about Isabella she was just as interesting as the rest of them so it was a bit of a win really for me I, I, they wouldn't leave me alone, and I had to write it. So Isabella Byron, who was she could you write so brilliantly in the book about you know what traditional female education was, and Isabella really wasn't having any of that traditional female role was she. She was her own woman for sure. And yeah it's it's hard to say to show without a family tree sometimes but the book and my book is predominantly around the generation of the poets grandparents. The poet's grandfather was a military adventurer and explorer in the Navy. His elder brother William was the fifth Lord Byron and their elder sister was Isabella. I was just amazed on reading her letters, and her general adventures through Europe she basically ran through two husbands, she was known from her early 20s for her flirtations and her gallantries which obviously for men at this time totally fine for women at this time. Or, you know, don't go there. But she got bored of her second husband and she skipped off to Europe where she took up with various young officers and caused a sensation back at home, earning herself the title notorious woman. So obviously I just, I loved her. But then she came home and wrote an etiquette guide and this was set really. I must, I must read that I clearly have a lot to learn. I really must. Greg, so if I could turn to you. So the Byrons, are they the epitome of the 18th century market celebrity world. That's a really good question. I think I don't know how Emily feels about this, but I would say by and large the Byrons are not celebrities. They're probably in a slightly different category, but I think perhaps is a better and perhaps by the poet's grandfather, maybe sort of touches on it because of his sort of naval reputation, his heroics. But fame and celebrity sort of interlock in complicated ways and celebrities a bit different to fame and it's different to renown as well. It's it's quite a long winded argument that I don't want to bore you with, but I think they're sort of fame adjacent. They're certainly sort of being discussed. I think people know of them, but their families not quite. I mean, is it fair to say, Emily, the Byrons are not one of the great houses. Yeah, I mean, they're dangling at the bottom of the peerage aren't they really they're just barons and associated. I agree. I think whatever we will go on to say about the poet in terms of celebrity. I think his grandfather, I would say he had a degree of fame. And there were poems written about him, there were prints written about him. He was in the real life version of Lady Whistledown's scandal sheets for checking up with whoever he was checking up with. And for the rest of them, I'd say it's more notoriety, which I don't know how you would how that would fit in your system of fame. But yeah, they were they were getting renown amongst fashionable society, at least for all the wrong things. What is celebrity, Greg? What is fame and celebrity in the 18th, 19th century, the Regency period? Oh, here we go. Okay. And you could never bore us, you could never bore us. I will try and give you the sort of absolute speedy version. I define celebrity is having five checkpoints, you've got it, you've got to tickle five boxes. That means being known to strangers that needs to be achieved through the work of the media. You need to have personal charisma, so a unique identity that is distinctively you. The fourth thing is really important that people need to be fascinated by the private life, not simply the things you do professionally, but your love life, your involvement, who are you dating, who are you seeing. And the fifth and most important of all, I would argue is there needs to be a commercial economy attached to that person's fame. So arguably a parasitic economy, an economy where other people can make money from the celebrity's fame. So celebrities don't always make money for themselves. This is something we think of as being a celeb is glamorous and you make a lot of money. Actually, I would argue that celebrity is an economic system where it can be done to you. So other people can make money from debating you, discussing you, gossiping about you. And you might not make anything of it at all. So those are the five checkpoints. And if you don't touch those five, you don't get to be in my book. And it's a complicated thing because I'd argue that David Attenborough is not a celebrity. And people kind of go, what are you talking about? He's incredibly famous. And I go, yeah, not a celebrity. So there's rules, I think, that you have to apply. But that's me trying to create a rubric that I could apply as a historian. And so there are others who disagree with me. And I think that's absolutely fine. It's great to have disagreement. And that's fascinating, isn't it? Your point about the economy. Obviously, this is the world of commerce. The 18th century post-industrial revolution is when shopping, when commerce, when the empire, including enslavement, when Britain becomes an economic powerhouse. And as you say, celebrity has monetized Emma Hamilton, of course, my first book. She was such a celebrity, but it wasn't her who made the money out of the pictures of her and the versions of her, the discussions of her. Whereas obviously, nowadays, hopefully celebrities are much, they can make money out of the shots and pictures and make restaurants. So hopefully it's changed the degree. But it's certainly an economic system that some people get very rich out of. And some people, even those who are the famous ones, simply don't. Yeah. And even today, you know, a line I would make is I'd say that celebrity is a billion pound industry in which celebrities can make millions. So you have to think of them as cogs in a huge machine. And it's the same in the 18th century. There were very rich celebrities in the 18th century who made fantastic amounts of money and bought very fancy houses and wore beautiful clothes. But they were also impoverished ones. And there were those who were talked about rather than, you know, some of them are quite canny and, you know, did the talking to and placed gossip stories in the newspapers under the names of their friends. But celebrity is a, it's a much more capacious and broad and complicated subject than simply what we might think it is now. And Emily, talking of money, I mean, the Byron's really worked that good with money, were they? There's a lot of spending and excessive spending and loss of money going on, isn't there? Yes. I mean, the poet at one point says that the financial dissipation is an epidemic in their family. I don't know, like, I wonder how much he's just justifying his own bad behaviour, to be honest, but it does reflect throughout, I mean, the 18th century and going back into the 17th century as well. They're just, for the most part, quite dreadful. More concerned with following their pleasures, shall we say, than thinking about the future, not very forward-looking. No, no, no kind of thinking about mortgages or pension plans, really. No, there's no pension plans, is there? It's not what you're seeing. Yeah, people like, see, a story I really enjoyed in the book was Jack and Lady Kamarthen. I mean, that is a story of serious amounts of money spending, isn't it? Can you tell us a bit about that story? Well, Jack is the father of the poet and this is before the poet's existence and he's in his early 20s and he basically falls in with an older, slightly older married Martianess. She's got children. She's married to someone who's going to become the Duke of Leeds. Like, this is a huge deal. She's set for life, basically, but there's something. You married well. I know, but there's something about Jack Byron, I don't know, swaggering about in the military camps, apparently, that just caught her fancy. And the brilliant thing about this case is that her husband goes off doing military work in Yorkshire, I think, and she's just bringing Jack in through the front door. He'll just waltz in their house and he's found snoring in her bed by the chambermaids and swaggering around with no britches on in the library, I think. And it's just, we get such a great view from this scandal of adultery at this time because it goes to a divorce case and all this dirty laundry gets aired in public and is printed and everyone's snapping up copies of this trial. Eventually the divorce does go through and then Jack marries her and the product is Augusta Lee, as we tend to know her, who's the elder half-sister of the poet. So it doesn't really have a happy ending for anyone, I don't think, apart from Augusta, who exists because of it. Because it's fascinating what you write about the divorce, which is obviously so rare at the time, isn't it, divorce? So she sacrificed and she has to sacrifice for it. She has to sacrifice her reputation. When you think how hard it is for the Prince of Wales to divorce is why the Lady Carmarthen has to agree and has to agree for all her dirty laundry to be out there, all this proof of adultery, which involves servants talking about what they've seen. But that's the price she pays to be able to marry the man. Yes, and she gives up custody of her children to do that. And the really unusual thing, I think she must have been actually in love with, who becomes known as Mad Jack Byron, posthumously, because I've read the letters from her husband to her in the aftermath of finding about the affair. And he is so nice to her. And he's giving her, he's letting her have all the jewels of, like his trinkets of their happier days. And I just, I mean, I don't like her very much, but on reading those letters, it must have been on her part, at least at first, she must have been totally into Jack Byron. And then they had Augusta, obviously the famous half-sister of the poet, and then she died. Amelia, the Lady Carmarthen, yes. Yes, she died. And this is another, this is one of the examples of things that with the celebrity of the poet much decades later, we know, we know a lot of it from the sort of veil of myth that grows up around him because of his fame. And he sort of battered away accusations that she had died of a broken heart because of his father. And all these, all these myths about the family rose up because their descendants, their poetic descendant was so famous. And so, yeah, my research has been a lot of digging under what actually was true and what came because of the poet and then what became after the poet died. And the poet himself could really very rarely be trusted on things he was saying, so his own contributions were either. We got to talk about the poet. He's the elephant in the ring, he's the poet. I was thinking about the many, the elephants crushing his heart when he said he's heartbroken. Greg, you're the poet. So he is, he is pure celebrity, isn't he, the poet? Yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously we call him Lord Byron. His name is George Gordon Byron. Later George Gordon Noel Byron because he goes for all sorts of name rebrands, he's sort of like Madonna. He is a really complicated character. I think actually it's quite easy and it's quite fun in fact to just sort of squish him into a very single small idea of mad, bad, dangerous to know a man who sort of shacked his way around Europe in a very naughty way. He's very, very sort of sexualized and dangerous and pouty and kind of gothic in our imagination. He's actually a very complicated, contradictory, likable, hateable kind of guy. He's got an awful lot of hidden depths. And one of the most important things really is that he is born sort of into poverty really in some ways. His dad has thrown away all the family cash. His mum's not very nice. He's born with a disability. He has what's called a clubfoot. We might not say it's that now, but he has chronic pain. He limps quite severely. His calf muscles are much smaller on the weakened leg. His foot turns over. He walks upon the side of his foot. And he is sort of bounced around between Scotland and England. He doesn't really know who he is very much. He's got a strong Scottish accent initially. And then at sort of the age of 10 or so, he suddenly inherits this random family in sort of ennoblement, this title. But he inherits a sort of beautiful property that is not really in great nick. It's a bit ramshackle and dishevelled and old. And I'm sure Emily can tell us more about it. But Newstead is, you know, now we look at it as sort of the gothic seat of this great poet. But actually he's a 10-year-old boy turning up. He's never really been there before. And his mum's not the kindest. So it's kind of a weird start to life for him. And he only really finds himself, I think, probably at school. He goes to Harrow after the age of 10 or so. He becomes a noble. And that's sort of where he starts to find his feet. And yes, Emily. So who is the poet to you? Have you set him in context with his family? There was scandal in his family long before he was even born? Absolutely. I mean, he's obviously a fascinating character. As Greg said, he's very contradictory. He's often very, remains parts of his life, very controversial and difficult to unpack. And obviously hugely fascinating. But what I wanted to do with my research and with my book was to try and understand the impact that his ancestry might have had on him because that tends to be packed into a page and a half at the beginning of Byron biographies. And it has been since the 1820s. All very caricatured. And he had such a strong affinity with history in general, with his ancestors and with Newstead Abbey in particular. I mean, I think it was quite formative for him. Obviously, there were other things like his disability and not classic born and bred nobleman childhood, as Greg says, that will all have impacted on how he felt being launched into a fashionable society. But he's one of a long line for me, I would say. He's not the be all and end all. And, you know, what about his attitude to women? He's, you know, he's, I mean, I'm going to send this to both of you. So he is a man, he is a man who, well, is his attitude to women? Is it cool? What do you think, Emily? Well, how would you characterize him? It is one of the things that I think I struggle with the most. And that I'm asked by people who, like, why are you, why are you studying Lord Barrow, and then wasn't he the worst? And I just think, well, he was not great in his treatment of women if he'd gone off them. He has quite misogynist tendencies in his writing about them if they're not in the room, which I think is quite telling. Obviously, generally known for his affairs with married women, thinking of Caroline Lamb where it goes wrong, not very delicately handled on either side there. So I think it is part of his reputation of his, I'm trying to think of a different word than mystique, but it's part of what built into his renown, I think. And the reason why women wrote their fan mail to him in their droves is that classic sort of dodgy aristocratic bad boy that people want to reform. And this is something that comes up again and again in the letters that are sent to him about all, I understand you, no one else could. We could be together and, you know, I'll sort you out. And Annabella Milbank was a bit like that as well. I think she was nursing hopes of bringing him back to Godliness. Yes, that didn't work, did it? Yeah, Annabella was his wife and that's a marriage that fails almost immediately. I mean, he's a complicated character in a lot of ways. So the first thing to say about him, obviously, he's bisexual. He always has been from a young age, about 15 or so. He was in love with boys and girls. He was probably sexually assaulted at 10 by a woman, by his nursemaid, which we don't know what effect that can have, but obviously that's a traumatic thing to happen. In later life, he's a seducer. He loves to love and he loves to be loved. He gets bored very easily. He likes older women, he likes younger women, he likes younger boys, he likes skinny, glamorous people, he likes dark-haired people, he doesn't like blondes. He's very opinionated. He hates to watch women eat, but he also has an eating disorder himself. So there's a sort of sense that we look at him and, you know, he has a real problem with his weight. He feels overweight. He goes through these extreme kind of fitness regimes and detoxes and fastings in order to lose lots of weight. So he has a real problem watching ladies eat, which is a sort of thing that men did at the time as well. He's not the only one. So, yeah, he is kind of creepy. He's problematic and we know he seduces over 250 women in Italy alone, many of whom are married. So, like, he's not, you know, he would be cancelled if he was on Twitter today. Yeah, at the same time, he's a lot more emotionally open than you might expect. He's a lot more sort of in love with these people, even if it's a temporary thing. He's very honest with them. He keeps telling them his deep, his darkest secrets and some of them use that against him. You know, Caroline Lam and his wife, Annabella, they use his honesty against him to destroy his reputation as the reason he has to go into exile. So, yeah, problematic but complicated, I think. It's fun. Of course, one consequence of that fascinating consequence is how his daughter, Ada, is persuaded against poetry and against the arts, isn't it, and towards the science and becomes... But even though she's got this creative, amazing imagination, she becomes, you know, so infamous in history as developing the first computer, the brilliant Ada Loveless. Emily, one thing I really loved about your book was Newstead Abbey, how you brought it to life. It was almost like a character in your book and the servants in Newstead Abbey. We've introduced it a little bit talking about how Byron inherited it at the age of 10. Could you talk a bit more about Newstead Abbey and what it meant to the family? Yes. Well, it was definitely a huge inspiration for the young 10-year-old who arrives there in 1798 and he's just inherited this whack-in-great place near Nottingham. And both he and his mum just fall in love with the place completely. And the solista who's there is really surprised because there are the straw everywhere and there's cattle down in the basement area and everything's falling in and all of this. But he is totally enchanted by it and we see it infuse some of his very earliest poetry. Quite a lot of his early, you know, teen verses are about his ancestry and the ghosts that are haunting Newstead and watching him and he's the last of the line and all of this kind of gloomy stuff. But I mean, one thing that was really useful for me in writing my book is that it's just a really neat metaphor for what is happening to the whole family over the course of the 18th century. So when it is inherited by the poet's predecessor, the Fifth Lord, in 1736, it's obviously, it's got this character of being built from the ruins of an old priory but it's in pretty good nick and it's full of amazing artistic masterpieces and visitors are coming from all over the country and calling it one of the best collections they've seen, beautiful, characterful place. But when the Fifth Lord takes over, he really hasn't got very much care for the future. He's just been given this money and he wants to make a name for himself. He wants to have fun. He wants to consult with actresses and join the Freemasons and do a bit of pub stabbing. And that's what he does. And he runs through the Byron fortune. He marries a very wealthy young heiress. He runs through her fortune almost immediately as well and then they end up separating. So by the end of his life, he is a wreck of a man. Nobody likes him. And Newstead has fallen from this amazing mansion to everything's been auctioned off and people are paying him to keep their livestock inside the building. So that's what the poet inherits and that's why it, what captures his imagination, I suppose. It's fascinating the way you write about it and obviously in the summer, hopefully when we can all travel around but much more I'm dying to go and look at it again, thinking about what you wrote about it. You really brought it to life. And there's a great quote in your book that pleased the Byrons, didn't it? Is it not enough, the Byrons all excel as much as fighting and in loving well? Now how true was that? I'm sure they went all in for it. I'm sure they wanted it to be a perfect representation. So that I think is from around, it's from the 17th century, I think it's for the third Lord Byron, so slightly pre my family that I focus on but I love that that existed 150 years before the poet was romping around and certainly with the poet's grandfather he had the exact same reputation. He joined the Navy. He was a record-breaking explorer and in the 1770s he ditched his wife briefly and ran off with one of the chambermaids and this made it into the Town and Country magazine scandal sheet which is like the lady whistle down thing and that was basically a catalogue of his sexual adventures around the world as he's travelling around seducing Italian landlady's and people of all sorts of indigenous cultures and obviously young teenage servants as well. So the grandfather goes in for it and then obviously the poet I'm sure picks up on that one as well. So the grandfather was really notorious and obviously involved in this exploitation across the world. So he has so many notorious characters in Byron's history but it's fascinating isn't it? Because so often in the period it's only the men who get to do scandalous activities because you say there's this huge double standard. Men can do whatever they want but a woman who has an affair is very castigated completely what you talk about with Lady Kamarthen and also Isabella really breaking, I know that Isabella is one of your favourite characters in the book, how she really breaks out of the very strict, when you read very strict expectations of what a woman should be. Yes, I mean I was thinking about this and Isabella is basically Lydia Bennett in her 50s I think. That is cool. She retains it and her favourite adventure of mine is as I say she goes off to Europe because her husband, her second husband has just proved too boring and she shacks off basically with this soldier who she then, they go off travelling to Switzerland to Lake Geneva and then to Italy and then they decide that they'll just pass him off as an aristocrat and start introducing him as a German Baron but they are both booted out in the end because his behaviour apparently is too uncouth and people clock on that he's not a German aristocrat at all and she manages to drag this out for 15 years before she's brought back to England in disgrace so I quite admire that really. She took this guy around the Royal Courts of Europe didn't, some Royal Courts didn't she? Yeah, this is my aristocratic Baron, yeah, all made up. Yeah, made up, he was just a soldier and he was leaching off her awfully. I mean he was essentially a con man and her family could see this, everyone back in England could see this but she was, I mean he apparently wasn't even that handsome she said he was the politest man in the world and everyone else said he was a boar and a horse so the heart always can't see, can it? I know, I know. And Greg, when we think about celebrity and fame and those who often become particularly celebrated in culture are we attracted to those who have a self-destructive streak or like the Byron the Poet die young? Yeah, I mean as I said before celebrities in the economic system so it can be kind of anything and there's plenty of heroic celebrities certainly in the 19th century your Mary Seacoles and your Grey Stylings and your Florence Nightingales but if you remember the sort of my annoying checklist the fourth of those is that there has to be a fascination with the personal life, the private life and if you think about celebrity as a sort of human soap opera someone who is constantly producing new exciting dramatic things they've done that week which almost like switching onto your favourite show and seeing what they've done now it's fantastic, I can't believe he's dating her so there is a sense that a celebrity has they've got to have a kind of momentum and they've got to have a sort of ongoing buzz and if you do the same thing over and over it gets quite boring so part of the kind of dynamic that gives fame its exciting revelatory, got it mongering kind of energy is the scandalous novelty of constantly new even the word news tells us, you know news means new things and we love new things so Byron at the poet is one of the reasons he's so beloved and so hated simultaneously is that he's always on to the next thing he's always getting married and then suddenly he's not married anymore suddenly he's off, he's doing this, he's written this, he's written that he's insulting this person, he's turned up over here he's boxing with that person and Dying Young helps in a kind of posthumous sense you know there's two sort of separate things here really isn't there Kate we've got the kind of celebrity which is the lived celebrity the kind of people that you can go and see day in day out you can read them out in the newspapers and then you've got the posthumous reputation and this is where the complexity comes in this is where the confusion arrives because that's traditionally what people would call fame so posthumous reputation usually is called fame and it's derived from the Roman and the Greek use of the word pharma which derives from the Latin fame or pharma which means to be spoken of it derives a phari to be on the tongue and actually that's a misunderstanding of it the romantic poets, your Shelleys, your Keeps, your Byron's they understood fame to be something that happened to you after you died and they enjoyed that, they embraced that they welcomed it, they wanted to be famous after they were gone but when we go and look at Roman and Greek sources particularly Roman sources, particularly Virgil we see actually that Virgil understood completely that celebrity and fame could happen in your lifetime it could be horrific and terrifying and scary and fame was a monster so fame in the classical sense is like a sort of giant Godzilla covered with tongues and ears and mouths and she stalks you, she's a monster, she's a beast she doesn't sleep, she grows bigger her head's into the clouds and she finds you and she hunts you down so to be spoken of, phari to be on people's tongue is to be kind of both beloved and also hated and so the dying young thing is a really interesting challenge because that gets us into a different idea that gets us into a classical notion of fame that is misunderstood and it's slightly different to celebrity but it does matter, of course it does and Byron dying at 36, the poet dying at 36 does affix him as a young man even though by that point he was growing and he gained weight again, he was not very well anymore he's still in our head as a young man and Keats dies at 25 which of course is much, much younger and yes it's fascinating isn't it how those who die young are really affixed in our consciousness as always young and beautiful and it's interesting the comparison with Keats isn't it because in terms of reputation Byron we might argue was much more celebrated at the time but it's Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth who are the romantic poets I think that are more most likely to be known about and studied and talked about in modern culture now and why do we think that is that perhaps Byron's poetry has lost a bit over the years? That's such a great question and I think the truth is that byronic poetry is long he's a waffler, he likes to chat he writes in what's called Spenserian stanzas which is named after the 16th century poet Edmund Spencer who wrote Fairy Queen and so this is a very specific style but he wrote these great epic poems child tarot pilgrimage is his first great hit and then you've got the corsair and you've got the joua these sort of hits that are kind of big and grand and glamorous and long and narrative essentially, they're storytelling whereas of course Keats and Shelley and Salvi and Wordsworth are writing short memorable poems we can recite we can learn when we're 10 years old at school there's lines that you can recall but it's important to know that at the time Byron's poetry was recalled by people people were obsessed with his poetry he was the most famous poet in Europe bar none and when he died when the news reached Britain there's all these stories of servants and lords gathering around the table and just reciting their favourite bit so he was beloved as a writer at the time although he was despised as an individual but history then wasn't tremendously kind to him as a creative and there was a real back and forward on his legacy as to whether he was a great writer or not and to a certain extent he's dated he's a bit dated and he's just quite hard to read now even though I think actually it's quite fun to read it stuff if you know a bit about his life it comes alive, you can really see him in it and you can see the kind of the personal in his writing but if you don't know anything about him it's very arcane and quite tricky to get into Fascinating, Emily, you were saying Newstead Abbey which as I said I just love the way you talked about the fan that the ghosts Byron in his Juvenile his early writing which I know you've read so much of which I don't think any, lots of us I don't know anything of and I'm sure lots of people watching haven't read either he talks a lot about the ghosts in he's the ghost of his ancestors and what you know you give the incredible story of his family here and what do you what kind of impact do you think having ancestors of these kind of stories would have had on him? Yes I do think that they were they were formative in that we can see them he carries them throughout his life if they'd only just come up in his sort of Juvenile poems I would think oh this is a young boy looking at a big castle and thinking oh this is mine hooray but he throughout his life he returns to the stories from his ancestry he sticks a Newstead in so many of his epic poems and you know when he goes off eventually and joins the Greek struggle for independence he has got his family motto blazoned on his big plumed helmet in a ironic style so I think he feels that he does carry them throughout his life but yes I would agree with Greg that a lot of his poetry now can seem a bit impenetrable to the modern reader but I would say that a great thing to do is to get an audio book if anyone's interested in listening to the poetry I feel like that's certainly I was able to connect to it a lot more easily by listening to it rather than just reading it off the page so yeah I think that's what I would say to anyone who's wanting to maybe learn a bit of the poetry And we've just got a few seconds left before I turn to my wonderful audience question so anyone in the audience who wants to send in a question now is your last chance type quickly so just before we move on to these fantastic audience questions Emily as I was saying I feel like I've lived some of the book with you I don't know if it's an odd thing to say because I saw all your archives and all the letters you were talking about and I was so excited when it came out and I know you've been to so many archives read so many original letters that people have never read before and you have a favourite letter and all the ones you've read This is tricky I mean I love the John Murray archive which is up in Edinburgh because it is full of so much material culture as well as just the letters so there's bits of Byron's bed curtains supposedly and the fan mail and his passport and thankfully not Caroline Lam's pubic hair as far as I saw I didn't order that one up it's probably somewhere sorry but I loved to find the love letters from Isabella to her second husband and thankfully her boring second husband was a historian and kept all of the letters in chronological order and then put his little notes about them in the margins and so their whole relationship was laid out over the course of 10 years from their secret engagement to his little obituary for her and that was just amazing because that's not been published anywhere before so that was my most exciting moment that Gloucester archives shout out to Gloucester archives That is exciting, so exciting isn't it we're so grateful as historians aren't we to all the archivists who do all this work and we're really so grateful to them and I mean just my mind is blown by all this fascinating stuff and I feel like I've got the ghost of Byron in my house with me I hope not Kate, they're diesel he's a very tricky one I'm just going to turn to some of our audience questions here so many questions I don't think I can get through all of them but we've got some really fascinating questions here and one of them here is how did Byron act around his contemporaries like Shelly and Wordsworth and do we think the fame boosted his ego or changed his character or were they kind of interchangeable oh he's a monster he is one of the complexities of Byron is that he has extremely close loyal friends from Cambridge and they are his sort of gang, his buddies they're going to stay with him his whole life pretty much and then he's got his professional associates who he is constantly at war with and rivalling with, he hates Salve who's a poet laureate he thinks Wordsworth is a prig and a boring old windbag he thinks Shelly he likes mostly but he thinks he's better than Shelly Keats he calls a cockney oink who writes I don't know if I can say the word but he's fairly rude about his style of poetry he thinks he's the greatest and he thinks other people aren't quite as good as him and his second ever book when he's 21 years old is a devastating critique of the critique of the critics and the writers of England and Scotland who have savaged his first book so at 21 he already burns his bridges and goes after his enemies so that sort of he could be kind, he could be generous, he could be supportive but he is, he's an egotist yeah he's not the one to go for a blurb for your latest poetry book is up no oh god can you imagine here Byron the back of the book like this is awful why would you read this it's me and Emily just a question we were talking a bit about his cruelty towards women how typical of Byron's behaviour and some of obviously his relations behaviour how typical of that is of contemporary masculinities or is it part of this wider behaviour of a celebrity did Byron get away with it because he was Byron or because he was a man that's a tricky question I think that we have so much evidence left of what Byron thought and what he was doing because of his fame that it's easy to attach it to just him I think that he maybe there is evidence of him being pretty cruel about women and dropping them very easily as we've talked about I'm sure that there's part of him getting away with his gallantries because he's a man also because he's a very handsome young man with a title I think that has got to play into it as well his father showed a lot of the same impulses from what we can tell from the contemporary evidence he was his Jack's letters are awful in their cruelty I'd say they surpassed the poet in terms of boasting about kicking female servants down the stairs and sleeping with whoever he can sleep with and all of this so that really comes through in his father's letters which I think is quite interesting there's an endless string of awful men I think of this time and being a man of that rank as well of course you're bound to get away with much more than you would as women for sure fascinating Greg I've had a lot of questions about your rules of being a celebrity I've had quite a few questions it really stimulated a really exciting debate here what I'm going to just start with is just an interesting question here were there any people in history you were going to put into your book into Dead Famous of course but did not because they didn't reach your criteria there are 125 people in the book and I could have put easily another 500 in no problem but there were several hundred dead famous too the vengeance but to be blunt about it being a historian sometimes you have to be confident in being able to stand up and defend your argument and I just had visions of myself getting up at book festivals or doing talks like this and sort of going this person was a celebrity and thinking I don't think that's true so the people in the book are people I am 100% categorically confident were celebrities they ticked all five boxes there are some people who you could make the argument for you could sneak them in and you might just have a case and potentially the poet's grandfather was one of them and it's a fun discussion to have and there are certainly like Roman charioteers that I explored the idea of gladiators and charioteers they were so famous they were so well known people knew their names but was there a commercial economy no there wasn't we don't have the evidence for it so they can't quite go in so yeah it's a frustrating game but it's a fun game actually and it's a game you can play actually I said already David Atterborough is not a celebrity but he is one of the most renowned people in our land he's the most respected of all of our public figures but he's not a celebrity and there are lots of people like that actually that if you start the game it's quite good fun so tonight if you're bored and you don't want to watch the news then why not play the game of celeb or not which amuses the family for hours the country's children to drop roblox and now play that instead that's much more fun fascinating and just got time I think just for one more Emily you know the poet had very sympathetic politics we might say to those who were dispossessed in society but combines this with a very callous attitude towards those he encounters that's quite a contradiction isn't it yeah I think that sums up how difficult it is to figure him out and deal with him at all to be honest he when he was young I think he was very enthusiastic about the idea of getting involved in politics and reform and he only gave three speeches as an appear in the House of Lords but they were all you know they were leaning towards the sympathetic for the common man and pointing out that they are the backbone of the country but then there's this huge contradiction that people were very keen to point out is that he is speaking of equality and then swanning about with a Napoleonic style carriage and a menagerie of animals living very extravagantly so it's something that was levelled at him when he was alive and it's quite difficult to reconcile them now I think as well for sure. Fantastic well thank you to our wonderful audience for your questions sorry we couldn't get through them all I've had so many fantastic ones and we're just about to finish but just before we do I just have two kind of fun questions just to finish off and my first one is to Greg and that was what would Byron be like on Twitter Greg Oh my goodness he'd be an absolute handful I mean it would be amazing Lost and his publisher John Murray his friends were always telling him don't say that cut that out they were always editing his poems always saying you can't say that that's libelous you can't say that so first and foremost he'd be constantly causing problems he'd be fun though because he would be occasionally you'd find yourself on the same side of the argument and sometimes you'd find yourself in the opposite because he's the defender of the common man and the radicalism and at the same time he was a tough he would be very unpredictable but yeah he'd always be in trouble. Definitely be posting at 2am something really objectionable for sure. Emily just two quick questions to you number one I'm going away my cats need house sitting who of the Byrons is the most responsible house and plant and cat sitter we've got any of them? They're Augusta it's got to be the half sister I mean she apart from her pretty reputed affair with Byron apart from that she was quite solid. She's my cat sitter I can say and I just love the book so much just going to wave it again I absolutely love it recommend it to anyone who hasn't already got it and it really is like a movie it reads like a movie I just say to the new Netflix biopic and in the Netflix biopic who will play Isabella who's your dream actress to play Isabella? I've been pondering this for years now and I am taking suggestions so if anyone has any please tweet them at me I've got stuck on Kate Winslet I love her and I just want to I would like Isabella to be portrayed as a more mature romping woman having adventures not a 19 year old with an older man that was not her at all she'd be the 50 year old with a 22 year old soldier on her arm so someone who can do that well I'm gripped and I hope that we will Emily you'll get us all me and Greg roles as extras we can kind of wave a ball or something and look very natural just a small ask it's been so wonderful thank you so much to our wonderful audience for coming we really appreciate your company and it's been so great to have you here with Histvest and I'm just so grateful to the amazing Emily and the amazing Greg the authors of these two brilliant books for giving so much time and so much generosity all this time and you know thank you so much to our wonderful interpreter I know I speak very fast I'm very grateful and then to our fantastic captioner as well we've done so much in the British Library for hosting us so thank you for coming all do follow Greg and Emily on Twitter their Twitter feeds are an absolute delight and Instagram subscribe to your dead to me and do go and buy the books at the History Fest book shops because they are truly wonderful and I won't regret it and you want to get them read before for the Netflix biopic comes out and thank you again so much Greg and Emily all your all your generosity with your time and your thoughts and thank you all for coming we so appreciate it Thank you to you our audience for joining us today and a special thanks to today's panelists as well please do remember to send feedback if you can and also check out the British Library's what's on pages to see what other events are coming up please also check out Hisstfest's website as well www.hisstfest.org Thank you