Polidori pt2
- katiekrance05
- Nov 20, 2025
- 2 min read
It's called Polidori, but we're going talk about Lord Byron for a hot minute. They're not lovers...I don't think... That's just the only picture I could find of them together.
So, Lord Byron, or George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron, was a massively famous poet during the Romantic period. He published beautiful works, had a beautiful face accompanied by loose morals, and a penchant for waxing poetic about his 1/2 sister that he had an affair with. He had a house in Nottinghamshire given to his family by Henry VIII, absolutely wild. It's so pretty, too. He stayed in England all through his education, fell passionately in love with Augusta Leigh- who was actually his half-sister. Their affair produced a child and his eventual fleeing from England for fear of lynching.
He was so popular it was crazy. He would've been the absolute It item, with 600 million followers (or that day's equivalent), and just obsessed over by everyone. He was so popular and so handsome that his lifestyle basically consisted of writing poetry, travelling, and sleeping around. Dude was pretty content. But he wasn't. He was in love with his half-sister, and it left him tortured; his torment showed up in his work and his personality. This tortured image was the groundwork of the term Byronic Hero- one who is shrouded in pride, isolation, rebellion, and melancholy. They seem haunted, sad about some sin they’ve committed. Yet they are utterly defiant about it. This popularity followed him around and his publications were met with great expectation. He was "a celebrated figure in society. His personal life, however, was often a source of scandal and controversy," (Ondertexts).
When Polidori (told you we'd come back to him) published Vampyre in 1819 and accredited it to Byron for his inspiration- where it was improperly printed crediting Byron as the author- Polidori's attempts to get his due credit were met with disdain and mistrust from the public. Many people claimed plagiarism or jealousy as he scrambled to fix the mistake. He wrote multiple letters to the publishers to get reprint correct- and they did fix some of the reprints, but not always, some were still credited to Lord Byron- and in doing so was subjected to public embarrassment and criticism. He never fully recovered (financially, literarily, or socially) and many of his following works were printed under a false name or anonymously to achieve any sort of praise.
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