The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 01, 2026


PREVIEW： Chronicles #57 ｜ Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


Episode Stats


Length

24 minutes

Words per minute

155.52

Word count

3,817

Sentence count

84

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Chronicles, friends, where today we're going to be talking all about
00:00:18.080 Childe Harold's pilgrimage by Lord Byron, a man who was described by one of his many,
00:00:24.080 many lovers Caroline Lamb as mad bad and dangerous to know and as it so happens my guest today fits
00:00:31.760 just that description hello Rory hello thank you for the compliment I don't have the wealth or the
00:00:37.960 lands so well a little bit different but maybe one day your Byronic journey is yet to begin
00:00:44.460 I'll go to bath like his dad did and find a nice wife yeah oh I shouldn't say I've already got a
00:00:49.280 girlfriend but anyway anyway right so uh thanks for coming on to talk all about byron we've been
00:00:56.480 discussing doing this for quite some time and it's been really good actually because it's allowed me
00:01:01.700 to i've read several of the cantos you know many times over at this point i've been able to just
00:01:07.960 really really stew in them and you know think about what byron is trying to communicate with
00:01:12.820 this poem um and so it's great to have the opportunity to now sit down and discuss it
00:01:18.220 Yeah, definitely.
00:01:18.920 So I suppose one of the first things to talk about
00:01:21.080 before we talk about anything to do with the poem itself
00:01:24.180 is the fact that Byron was a singular figure, right?
00:01:29.120 He was a man who was really the first celebrity.
00:01:32.320 Yeah, yeah.
00:01:33.020 His own wife, Anne Milbank,
00:01:35.840 who in herself had been one of his little, you know,
00:01:39.140 female groupies, you know, and everything, 0.99
00:01:42.200 and ended up marrying him, poor woman. 1.00
00:01:44.320 She ended up coining the term Byromania.
00:01:47.220 long before there was ever Beatlemania
00:01:49.800 there was Byromania
00:01:51.180 long before Oscar Wilde
00:01:53.260 who for some reason a lot of people think to be
00:01:55.500 the first celebrity
00:01:56.440 Oscar Wilde was fundamentally
00:01:58.020 copying Byron
00:02:00.600 in a lot of ways
00:02:02.260 and that's something that
00:02:05.320 well actually so Childe Harold's
00:02:07.780 pilgrimage can really be
00:02:09.860 seen as the genesis
00:02:11.340 for where that celebrity status
00:02:13.900 began
00:02:14.440 yeah um it's something that so he went on a uh a lads holiday you know went on the grand tour as um
00:02:22.760 you know uh sons of aristocrats and people from noble families used to do back then after your
00:02:28.040 university years him and his pal hobhouse yeah from yeah right bridge yeah you'd go out uh to
00:02:34.200 spain or to france or to italy and you'd get to know the world you'd look at civilization you'd
00:02:41.640 take in experiences that were supposed to cultivate you well you don't see the ruins of antiquity yeah
00:02:47.400 yeah you yeah you go and visit what was civilization yes before the dark ages right uh however for
00:02:54.440 byron in his own particular time this was all rather complicated because there was that little
00:03:00.120 minor event known as the french revolution and the napoleonic wars going on so what would have
00:03:06.360 traditionally have been a trip going through france into italy on to greece in this case had
00:03:13.400 to be taken around spain yes um and so what really what child harold's pilgrimage is is the most
00:03:21.320 romantic poetic travel log you've ever read and that is really something that i want to stress
00:03:27.720 to people uh just in this one poem alone byron demonstrates himself to be an absolute master
00:03:36.360 of the english language this is i mean it is truly a tour de force um in writing and so i'm looking
00:03:44.040 forward to talking all about that a little later on but of course we can't really begin to discuss
00:03:51.080 the ideas as and the philosophies as byron lays them out in this poem without actually discussing
00:03:58.120 something about byron himself yeah and of course his family uh because he had after all let's face
00:04:03.720 it a very colorful uh family tree yeah he was he's very byron byron is known to be as you said
00:04:13.160 dangerous scandalous a bit of a degenerate by civil society standards by modern standards even 0.95
00:04:22.360 by modern standards he slept with allegedly over 200 women and from countesses to prostitutes 0.97
00:04:28.360 and several men or boys um i don't know if it's several but however many but he
00:04:36.520 he he was a rake from a long line of rakes really he basically all the men on his father's side of
00:04:45.480 the family were similar in terms of scandal and degeneracy yeah and immorality uh his his uncle
00:04:55.720 who hailed the title of Lord Byron.
00:05:01.340 The Wicked Lord.
00:05:02.800 The Wicked Lord Byron was in possession of an estate
00:05:06.200 called Newstead Abbey, which was a Christianian priory
00:05:10.220 which was dissolved, obviously, in the Reformation.
00:05:13.460 Given by Henry VIII.
00:05:15.020 Given by Henry VIII.
00:05:16.160 The actual line had come over with William the Conqueror.
00:05:19.860 Yeah, Ralph de Barun had come over.
00:05:23.080 Yeah, yeah.
00:05:24.040 anyway newston abbey the the uncle had uh who whose name was i think the wicked lord byron i
00:05:32.680 may be getting that confused it might have been an earlier lord yeah it's william byron william
00:05:37.000 byron yeah he he had taken the abbey he'd built several follies along the lake of the of the abbey
00:05:46.200 and he used those follies
00:05:49.780 essentially for orgies
00:05:51.840 as well as 0.95
00:05:53.100 for shooting
00:05:55.940 cannons at from a boat
00:05:57.720 he had them like
00:05:58.960 things like that
00:06:01.440 obviously his ancestors
00:06:03.680 Byron's grandfather
00:06:05.460 was similarly 0.95
00:06:06.800 crazy as well as his 0.77
00:06:09.920 father 0.51
00:06:10.520 John Fowlweather
00:06:12.360 Byron who was infamous
00:06:16.040 got his name because he'd always find his ship in just the worst winds and the worst storms that
00:06:22.760 the ocean could possibly bestow. And his dad was called Mad Jack, who again basically cavorted
00:06:27.940 around Europe and the world shagging and treating his wives badly, really. Burning through their
00:06:35.580 inheritance. So first of all, Byron is the son of his father's second marriage. His Mad Jack
00:06:45.460 Byron's first marriage was to Amelia Osborne, who was actually Marchioness of Carmartham.
00:06:57.220 And that yielded one daughter, Augusta Lee, and Byron would go on to meet her.
00:07:09.540 Scandalous, incestuous relations with her.
00:07:12.340 not the first time in the family line either no so before we get into the cancers you know
00:07:18.260 there's this running idea throughout child harold that he's buried something behind him there's a
00:07:23.380 there's a very early stanza and in the can say that it comes from a disreputable line of people
00:07:28.900 well not even that but there's a there's a love interest in the background who he doesn't or at
00:07:33.780 least he looked child harold says at least or at least the narrator alludes to it now obviously
00:07:38.740 a lot of people see byron as child harold although byron denied this yes and you know personally i
00:07:46.520 think that child harold is just a kind of immoral a narrative device a narrative device
00:07:51.880 used by byron to explore some themes within his own life but it's very much his own character
00:07:57.780 but anyway this love interest was presage in in or at least analogous to byron's own life with
00:08:05.900 a cousin who was from the Duff line, which is another Scottish family, who was essentially
00:08:14.560 Byron's first female love interest. And when she later married, he said he couldn't really
00:08:20.600 deal with it. And he couldn't understand how he could ever feel this way about a woman again.
00:08:25.700 So Byronic. So romantic.
00:08:28.380 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's a bit of a maelstrom, really, of romance and sodomy and all sorts of things for Byron.
00:08:37.460 And it's impossible to understand Byronism. It's impossible to understand his philosophy, his way of viewing the world,
00:08:46.120 his opinions on all of the things that he encounters throughout Childe Harold's pilgrimage
00:08:51.460 without understanding the genuinely volatile situation
00:08:58.460 that he grew up in as a child.
00:09:01.460 So obviously, as you pointed out, his father was a total rake,
00:09:05.460 even some might go as far as to say an absolute bounder.
00:09:09.460 In his second marriage, which was to Catherine Gordon,
00:09:14.460 the Clan Gordon.
00:09:16.460 Which is where Lord Byron George Gordon gets his name from.
00:09:20.460 um of aberdeenshire yeah and she in herself was a wealthy heiress um who who what what had happened
00:09:29.420 was mad jack byron byron's father has obviously married had a child his wife then died he needed
00:09:37.900 a new wife probably from exhaustion yeah yeah yeah he needed the new wife not only because
00:09:43.420 you know he wanted a wife but because he was absolutely bankrupt yeah so the place to go in 0.63
00:09:48.380 in those days if you were the land of gentry and you knew the new wife with a good fortune was to
00:09:53.680 bath so he went to bath he met this 20 year old um heiress in the in the form of catherine gordon
00:10:00.080 married her quite quickly and proceeded to basically ransack her estate yeah um in order
00:10:06.080 to support his lifestyle his and his debts um obviously lord byron george gordon who we're
00:10:13.340 disgusting, came out of that and quite quickly found himself as a child in quite, for an
00:10:21.940 aristocrat at least, in quite deplorable living standards because of his father's actions 0.78
00:10:26.880 and his mother's willingness to support them.
00:10:30.240 Yeah.
00:10:30.860 I mean, yeah, exactly.
00:10:32.320 And obviously his father passed away when he was very young and also as well, even when
00:10:36.060 the young Byron was alive, obviously it was in his mother's best interest to have the
00:10:41.520 father as far away from home as possible and so yeah he was often down south or he was in france
00:10:48.280 you know just continued anyway he went and remarried and yeah he would come back every
00:10:52.980 now and again on a sunday always on a sunday because that's when that was when debtors
00:10:58.020 couldn't demand their debts back he'd come on a sunday to london because byron and his mother
00:11:03.620 moved to london and lived in a back room above a shop i think not to say it was squalor you know
00:11:10.040 it was dignified, but it wasn't what you'd expect of an aristocratic family.
00:11:13.960 It certainly wasn't the sort of future that Byron's mother thought she had in store for herself.
00:11:18.360 Especially since she had 65,000 in her estate, around that amount, which was a lot of money,
00:11:24.360 like millions. I think very soon into their marriage, Mad Jack Byron had squandered at least
00:11:30.440 half of that and they had to sell vast amounts of the estate to do so. Mad Jack was turning back up
00:11:37.160 london and demanding more money blah blah blah blah um byron spent most of his younger years
00:11:45.160 in london at a school uh which i believe was basically in a cellar where he didn't receive
00:11:51.240 much of an education uh it was just very straight dogmatic christian teachings he also had a club
00:11:57.400 foot which compounded things yeah from birth yeah and they could have had it treated if they caught
00:12:04.200 it earlier but because they couldn't afford it father had spent it uh there was a couple of
00:12:10.680 nursemaids involved uh one of whom was a very strict calvinist uh so this is partly where he
00:12:18.680 developed his antipathy towards sort of original sin and um and uh organized forms of institutional
00:12:27.960 christianity and religion itself yeah uh they then went back up to edinburgh he and his mother
00:12:33.860 um where he sort of developed this sense that he was half born half scot but he was basically fully
00:12:40.220 scot there's an account where someone came in and said oh he's so pretty but it's a shame about his
00:12:45.080 club foot and he grabbed a horse whip and said didn't he mention it and whipped her um but that
00:12:50.980 was another nursemaid as well who was agnes agnes gray was the calvinist nursemaid and her sister
00:12:58.220 who i think was a presbyterian started abusing byron at the age of nine or around that time
00:13:04.460 sexually abused sexually abusing yeah which is where byron developed byron himself later on
00:13:09.520 alludes to this and says this is where his passions originated from at an extremely young age
00:13:13.920 his passions that would go on to see him sleep with 200 aristocratic wives and yeah numerous
00:13:21.820 other people so yeah yeah um so a very very unconventional upbringing and it's definitely
00:13:29.500 easy to see where the demons of his youth would go on to form the man of the future
00:13:34.200 but the other thing as well is that it wasn't all misfortune because of course um eventually when
00:13:40.760 byron was just uh 10 years old his uh great uncle yeah um passed away the one who was held the
00:13:48.840 estate and i'll allow the title yeah william by the wicked lord yeah passed away and his his own
00:13:54.600 son the one who should have inherited from him had died at war in corsica back in the 1770s so now by
00:14:01.080 after that byron became the heir apparent he was hit by cannibal i think yes yeah uh and so now we
00:14:07.080 find 10-year-old Byron coming into his inheritance now at Newstead Abbey, which had been left
00:14:14.380 in a state of total disrepair.
00:14:16.340 Yeah, had been ransacked by bailiffs and all the great oaks had been cut down by Byron's
00:14:23.340 father's father, or at least Byron.
00:14:26.420 Another distant relation who had, again, run out of money, so decided to kill 2,700 deer
00:14:34.460 killed on the property to sell to the local markets and cut down all the trees so wood so
00:14:38.800 yeah but but actually within that as well in that arrival at newstead abbey it would have been a
00:14:45.240 profound um experience for byron and one of his first um experiences with living a life filled
00:14:55.060 with gothic elements right seeing this this abbey left that had been violated by henry the eighth
00:15:02.660 and then his own ancestors as well to see this abbey in decay,
00:15:07.340 ransacked, to see things in ruin.
00:15:09.860 And the genuinely sublime beauty that that offered
00:15:14.700 was obviously left a very, very powerful impression on him.
00:15:19.400 And then as we go into Byron's years of proper education
00:15:24.300 at Harrow and then at Cambridge as well,
00:15:27.420 you see this young boy who had been born with a club foot
00:15:32.160 and by all descriptions seem to have been a little bit on the chubby side as a young boy,
00:15:38.320 actively willing himself, taking decisions about his own life and saying,
00:15:43.620 no, this is the sort of man I want to be.
00:15:46.640 This is going to be my brand.
00:15:48.620 This is a persona I'm going to put out into the world.
00:15:52.280 And so you see a man all of a sudden who went from a bit chubby
00:15:55.640 to actually getting a real hell of a physique on him.
00:15:59.200 yeah someone that basically by all accounts apparently had a an absolutely beguiling voice
00:16:04.320 as well he was incredibly handsome it almost reminds me in a way actually of how um henry
00:16:09.920 cavill right his his old school friends used to call him fatty cavill and now he's regarded as
00:16:15.360 like one of the most handsome in hollywood right that that kind of a transformation he became quite
00:16:19.600 a sportsman he even when he arrived at new study i think he found his uncle's pistols
00:16:25.120 so he was always interested in shooting he was a very very good swimmer he swam the dardanelles
00:16:32.000 one of his proudest moments of his life and the hellas punt i think yeah uh and several estuaries
00:16:37.920 and yeah sort of places you shouldn't swim so he was very very fit and you know that he didn't let
00:16:44.240 his foot do him down really no and also as well it became that there was so much about byron that
00:16:52.400 people became enamored or obsessed or just fascinated by that the foot became a triviality
00:16:59.520 yeah right and this is the point he just basically overread any of the things that would have
00:17:04.720 otherwise been oh you're seeing that guy with the cold foot to just create such a persona around
00:17:09.280 himself but he kind of used it to animate himself as well like obviously he he was extremely
00:17:14.800 self-conscious of it but he used he sort of transmuted that energy to make himself into
00:17:20.640 the man yeah that he began he became absolutely and so you see him already in his uh his freshers
00:17:27.200 week yeah uh turning up to cambridge and all of the things it's like uh oh i'm sorry lord byron
00:17:32.400 but uh you're not allowed a dog on the campus so he brought a bear you know these sorts of things
00:17:39.200 and even even at harrow he turned up as an outsider bear in mind he hadn't been despite
00:17:44.560 being an aristocrat he he wasn't wealthy until very very recently so this wealth allowed him to
00:17:49.200 to go to Harrow. It allowed him to move his mother into Newstead and it allowed him to
00:17:54.980 actually have a dignified life. She became re-involved in the aristocratic circles which
00:18:00.620 she couldn't be involved in anymore because of her loss of wealth and social status due to his
00:18:06.720 father. So when he arrived at Harrow, he was kind of on the outside and obviously Regency private
00:18:12.160 schools. Private schools don't have a good reputation these days, so imagine what they
00:18:16.080 like back then so he's quite quickly bullied but he was strong enough with it within himself to
00:18:24.080 resist that and strong enough as well to to stick up for other people uh who were bullied so he was
00:18:31.680 very much an outsider and very much his own man even even at a young age at harrow and later
00:18:37.120 cambridge yes and also as well uh certainly at his time at cambridge he managed to cultivate
00:18:42.720 around him, a circle of friends who were, how to put it, on the more radical end of the current
00:18:50.360 issues of the day. You know, these were men who were Republicans and atheists. And obviously,
00:18:56.620 you know, to be an atheist or a Republican or both at that time was to be associated with
00:19:01.460 Jacobinism. It was to be associated with the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And to basically
00:19:09.340 be someone who was a subversive, someone who was wanting to undermine the traditional institutions
00:19:16.840 of society and the morality that those social institutions preached. And this would have been
00:19:24.340 something that would have been even harder in Byron's day, because of course, during that time
00:19:32.840 with Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister
00:19:35.880 and many of the...
00:19:37.600 It's anachronistic, but the Tory-like,
00:19:40.480 what would become the figures of the Tory party
00:19:43.180 later on with Robert Peel.
00:19:46.040 The precursors to them,
00:19:48.440 who were in, obviously, total confrontation
00:19:51.680 against the French Revolution,
00:19:53.680 were very, very...
00:19:54.520 They weren't afraid of using censorship.
00:19:57.820 They weren't afraid of shutting down
00:19:59.740 the social clubs for the revolutionary types in English society at the time.
00:20:06.280 And Byron was really personally rankled by what he saw as this repression. 0.95
00:20:11.920 Yeah, he was completely on board with the Irish. 0.95
00:20:14.040 Yeah. 0.94
00:20:14.400 He was obviously repressed as part of this.
00:20:17.180 Yes.
00:20:17.440 He was very, very intense in his defence of the Irish,
00:20:21.240 Irish emancipation or his Catholic emancipation.
00:20:24.020 Yeah.
00:20:24.520 Yeah.
00:20:24.740 And so basically he formed a set of friends that would no doubt go on to form what we see here, certainly many of these themes coming through in particular the first canto, where he's looking at France and Spain and England all in conflict with one another in the Peninsial War and looking at the reasons for why this war is happening, who this war is being fought in the name of.
00:20:53.200 What are the elite interests that this war actually serves?
00:20:57.960 And to what extent is this war actually good for the common people?
00:21:02.640 And you see him scrutinizing a lot of those decisions later on.
00:21:08.160 He's very much against the idea of glory for the sake of glory.
00:21:13.600 He's very much on board with violence and sacrificing large numbers of people
00:21:21.780 in order if if the aim is liberation honorable liberty yeah but when it's for imperial games
00:21:31.620 gains or just gains of glory which are later to be lost due to diplomatic things uh diplomatic
00:21:39.660 decisions yes it's all for nothing and he's very much against that because this is kind of like
00:21:45.320 contradiction within him where he he's very very pro napoleon especially when he's younger
00:21:50.760 but as he grows older and Napoleon goes into exile and comes out of exile and whatnot and
00:21:55.980 acts in a way that Byron sees is not only tyrannical but dishonorable. He looks at this
00:22:05.300 Napoleonic ideal as something that hasn't been seen in Europe and he looks more to people like
00:22:11.840 George Washington as a representation of that ideal. It's all about liberty for him and he's
00:22:17.660 quite a humanist in a lot of ways. He's quite humanistic in his love of democracy and sort of
00:22:27.220 republicanism as well. Yeah, well, certainly unequivocally against absolute monarchy in all
00:22:33.420 its forms. I mean, you look at people as well that Byron commented on, such as Frederick the Great,
00:22:39.000 who for the time was seen as the enlightened despot, the enlightened absolute monarch
00:22:44.120 um of his day and though byron certainly thought that frederick the great stood apart
00:22:51.340 against other monarchs of his time his critique was not with the person yeah but with the actual
00:22:58.380 status yeah the institution the institution itself he doesn't he doesn't he doesn't see
00:23:03.040 aristocratic rank as legitimate it's what you do with it yeah it's the person right uh and the
00:23:09.480 other thing as well just to say that despite the fact that you know Byron was of course probably
00:23:14.840 the most famous Casanova of his day there is also the other end of that as well which is actually
00:23:20.820 the fact that far from being an absolute tearaway who slept with endless numbers of women and wasn't
00:23:28.700 afraid to you know stand up to people and get into fights with people and lived all of the things
00:23:34.840 that you think about when you think of the words mad, bad, and dangerous. There is also the other
00:23:39.880 side of that, which actually, it gave Byron a great amount of wisdom for why those things are
00:23:46.820 perhaps not the way. And actually, later in his life, he came to regret some of the earlier ways
00:23:54.340 in which he lived. In fact, in this very way, his involvement at the early stages of the Greek
00:24:01.700 War of Independence, which Byron would die in, for Byron was kind of, in a way, not entirely,
00:24:09.160 but something of an atonement. It was a way to do something with his life that actually would have
00:24:15.900 a lasting effect, as something, a force for good in the world, outside of his own quest for pleasure
00:24:24.420 and experience. Yeah. If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters,
00:24:30.040 head to our website where you can find more.