The Romantic Poets and Frankenstein

George Gordon, Lord Byron, became the most notorious literary celebrity of his age, his poetry inseparable from his scandalous personal reputation. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818) introduced a brooding, alienated wanderer whose disillusionment and defiance of convention gave rise to the archetype of the 'Byronic hero,' a figure of magnetic charisma, secret guilt, and rebellious individualism that echoes through later fiction from the Brontës to nineteenth-century Russian literature. His satirical epic Don Juan (1819-1824) displayed a very different, comic register. Byron died in 1824 at Missolonghi, in Greece, where he had gone to support the Greek war of independence, a death that reinforced his image as a Romantic hero in life as well as verse.