[LOCUTOR]

Track thirty-eight, unit seventeen, beauty is in the eye of the beholder

[ELLIE CAWTHORNE]

[...] So how did he go from this layabout nobleman at Cambridge to transform himself into one of the era's most influential literary figures? What was his first hit as it were?

[CORIN THROSBY]

Well, he was I mean he wasn't doing nothing, he wasn't exactly laying about in Cambridge, he was starting to write poetry, he started writing poetry fairly young, hum and so he was writing and then… hum… his first volume of poetry had lukewarm reviews… hum.. particularly from the Scottish press and he wrote a response, you know, sort of having a go at all the people who had had a go at him. And that got quite a lot of attention, but the first poem that made him famous, actually came a little bit later, after he'd taken what we might describe as a gap year now, but was then known as "The Grand Tour" which was the trip that lots of young noblemen took… hum… to better their education, to see great art and antiquities… hum… usually went through they went through France and Italy or that was the focus, Byron went further east… hum… all the way to Albania, and during that time he wrote a poem called "Child Harold's pilgrimage". when he returned, he sort of wrote up these travels and, yeah, that was poem that he says "I awoke to find myself famous" it really felt like overnight success for him that the poem was a huge hit.

[ELLIE CAWTHORNE]

Well, can you tell us about "Child Harold's pilgrimage", why was it such a hit?

[CORIN THROSBY]

It's funnily enough, for a modern reader it's not the easiest read, there's a lot of description of Countryside, but if you imagine British readers at the time who most, by far, you know, the most of whom had not been to the continent had certainly not been to the east to Turkey, and to Albania. So he was feeding an appetite for travel literature as much as anything else and wanting to know about places abroad, hum… but more than that he created this figure of child Harold, which many took as a thinly failed description of himself as this brooding misunderstood dark nobleman and people really responded to this character, and he this was the character that he would then go on to recreate in his next poems. You know he was onto a good thing with this character and he sort of repurposed it in various ways through his next poems which are known as the Turkish Tales, where again we see this sort of dark misunderstood brooding nobleman, that you know, has a great true love and sort of loves deeply, but you know is scorned by society.