George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron, (1788-1824), born with a clubfoot, became a peer of the British realm. He harbored political ambitions, giving his maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812, a liberal dissent against the Frame-Breaking Act, which made it a capital crime to engage in Luddite sabotage. But he became a poetic celebrity that same year with the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a kind of travelogue based on his grand tour, which (due to the Napoleonic Wars) had to concentrate on Mediterranean lands.

Byron married in 1815. A daughter, Ada, was born, but the marriage fell apart the next year. Dogged by rumors of incest with his half-sister, he left England never to return. Within the Percy and Mary Shelley circle in Switzerland, he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold, which begins with an apostrophe to his daughter. In Venice, he effectively founded the field of Armenology. Byron was drawn into the struggle for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire, using his personal fortune to fund the effort. He died before he could lead an assault on the Turkish fortress at Lepanto. Byron’s sexuality was polymorphous, and involved the monstrosity of pederasty. Some of this can be attributed to sexual abuse he suffered as a child, but there is also the mystery of iniquity ensnaring each of us. Discussions about “cancel culture” might make us aware of how flawed each of us is, in ways we cannot begin to suspect. This would be a properly “liberally” minded approach, all the more necessary for those in earnest about the “liberal” project of emancipation.