Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 2: your weekly podcast that sometimes is people who it's really
Speaker 2: easy to say are cool, and sometimes are people who
Speaker 2: it's really easy to say aren't boring. And someone who
Speaker 2: is neither uncool nor boring is my guest, bridget Todd,
Speaker 2: host of There Are No Girls on the Internet.
Speaker 3: How are you a bridget I'm great, thank you for
Speaker 3: having me.
Speaker 4: I'm honored that you think I'm sometimes cool and maybe
Speaker 4: not boring.
Speaker 3: I strive for both of those things.
Speaker 2: You do well at both, unlike some of the people
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about this week, who managed some
Speaker 2: of them and not the others.
Speaker 5: Is a complicated one. I am thank you. I know
Speaker 5: who I like. I like a little moral ambiguity. I
Speaker 5: like a complicated historical or cultural figure.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, well first I implicated historical figure is Sophie Lichterman,
Speaker 2: who's been podcasting since the fourteen hundreds and apparently really
Speaker 2: really old skincare fucking on point.
Speaker 1: Your sun's green even if you're not going outside.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're like one of those vampires who doesn't age.
Speaker 2: We're gonna talk about vampires this week.
Speaker 3: Really, I didn't even know that she must have known that.
Speaker 2: No, this is just happy and our audio engineer is Danil.
Speaker 2: Everyone knows is a Hi to Daniel, Hi Danel.
Speaker 3: I yea Hi Danel.
Speaker 2: Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. So
Speaker 2: not the last time we had you on, but the
Speaker 2: first time we had you on, we were talking about
Speaker 2: how computer used to be a job, right, And this
Speaker 2: week I was like, let's talk about the origin of computers.
Speaker 2: And by that I mean I want to tell a
Speaker 2: story that involves vampires, poetry, revolution, and an almost unprecedented
Speaker 2: amount of heatness to get access I'm using. Today, we're
Speaker 2: going to tell the story of the first computer programmer,
Speaker 2: a woman named Ada Lovelace who never met her father,
Speaker 2: but her and her husband were obsessed with her father,
Speaker 2: the infamous hedonist, the sex crazed class trader, the most
Speaker 2: famous poet of his generation, and the first vampire lord Byron.
Speaker 2: You familiar with much of this story.
Speaker 3: I am familiar with some of this story.
Speaker 4: I just I'm like quivering with excitement because when you
Speaker 4: said a complicated person, I had a feeling. Then when
Speaker 4: you said vampires, I was like, Oh, I think I
Speaker 4: really know.
Speaker 3: I'm so excited to get into this cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, I was like, I'm going to do Ada Lovelace
Speaker 2: because I've just been doing a bunch of stuff that
Speaker 2: revolves not revolves around but like Lord Byron is a
Speaker 2: periphery figure skulking in the dark and drinking people's blood
Speaker 2: or whatever. And I was like, all right, well, I
Speaker 2: don't really want to specifically get into him, and so
Speaker 2: I started doing Ada Lovelace, and then I more and
Speaker 2: more realized that I actually think that understanding her father
Speaker 2: is like a big part of it. And also not boring,
Speaker 2: not a cool guy, maybe a cool guy. Really the
Speaker 2: jury is out historically about this man.
Speaker 4: I think not boring is the perfect way to describe him.
Speaker 4: I know that Ada Lovelace is somebody who had a
Speaker 4: very complicated relationship with her family on top of being
Speaker 4: a complicated person herself. And I like how you're coming
Speaker 4: at this, like we do sort of have to talk
Speaker 4: about her father or to really understand who she was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I was also like, before I did too
Speaker 2: much of this research, there's this thing where people kind
Speaker 2: of talk about Ada Lovelace as if like she's like,
Speaker 2: oh well, we kind of need to throw a woman
Speaker 2: in there. When we're talking about early computers. No, like
Speaker 2: she she's as important as Charles Babbage. There's no part
Speaker 2: of me after reading all of this that doubts that,
Speaker 2: if anything, she was more important.
Speaker 3: Totally agree.
Speaker 4: And I hate this perspective where people you can tell
Speaker 4: the inclusion of traditionally marginalized people is like a footnote,
Speaker 4: like they're like, oh, yeah, some women were there, some
Speaker 4: queer folks were there, some transpoloks were there, black folks, whatever, whatever, whatever.
Speaker 4: But that's so wrong because these people they were at
Speaker 4: every I mean this literally, at every step of computers
Speaker 4: becoming the ubiquitous forces they are in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4: Women were there, Queer folks were there, trans folks were there,
Speaker 4: black folks were there. And so this idea that adding
Speaker 4: them is like a little nod to diversity or something
Speaker 4: that is so wrong because they wouldn't exist without us.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, And it was really nice to like know
Speaker 2: that by reading more about this story, you know, I
Speaker 2: actually had this moment where I was like, am I
Speaker 2: really going to do some fucking nobles? I like kind
Speaker 2: of hate English nobility specifically, like a lot of what
Speaker 2: we're going to be talking about happened around the same
Speaker 2: time that England was Oh, I don't know, genocide in
Speaker 2: Ireland and things like that. You know, I usually don't
Speaker 2: like nobility. I usually am like whatever. But these folks,
Speaker 2: their story is compelling enough that I decided it's worth it.
Speaker 2: Although I've refuse to learn why marrying an earl makes
Speaker 2: you a countess. I don't understand it, and I refuse
Speaker 2: to learn. And if you know, listener, don't tell me.
Speaker 2: I don't care.
Speaker 4: Margarete Killso a hearty supporter of monarchies.
Speaker 2: And nobility, not traditionally a fan.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: So one thing that Ada Lovelacener father Lord Byron hav
Speaker 2: in common is a shocking amount of secrecy. There's an
Speaker 2: awful lot we don't know about them that we will
Speaker 2: never know about them in their personal lives. And then
Speaker 2: a lot of conjecture, and some of it based with
Speaker 2: a lot of evidence. Right, we also don't know the
Speaker 2: juiciest bits. So whatever we think we know, there's probably
Speaker 2: something wilder. Lord Byron when he died, his friends burned
Speaker 2: his wars, less history judge him as a monster.
Speaker 4: That's when you know you're really like when you're It's
Speaker 4: like the old school equivalent of.
Speaker 3: Clearing your browser history. You can't burn their.
Speaker 2: Papers, Yeah, totally, and they could have gotten a lot
Speaker 2: of money for those papers. This man was famous, and
Speaker 2: Lovelace didn't fare entirely better. There's a deathbed confession that
Speaker 2: shocked her husband that we don't know.
Speaker 3: What do you think it was?
Speaker 2: I think it was a round cheating, but I don't
Speaker 2: know because I also we'll get to it. I think
Speaker 2: they were swingers. I think they knew each other as cheating.
Speaker 2: So it's got to be something wilder than that, is
Speaker 2: my personal guess. Unless he was just such a like
Speaker 2: goody two shoes wife guy. Well, okay, we'll talk about
Speaker 2: him later. We're gonna start chronologically with the father, Lord Byron.
Speaker 2: Lord Byron was, for like one hundred years at least,
Speaker 2: the archtypical bad boy, the anti hero. I'm not a
Speaker 2: classic literature girl. I'm much more of a fantasy speculative fiction.
Speaker 2: So I never heard anyone use the phrase byronic hero.
Speaker 2: Had either of you heard this phrase before.
Speaker 3: I had heard it?
Speaker 4: I am a PhD in literature dropout. Unfortunately I have
Speaker 4: heard that phrase. Don't ask me what it means. That's
Speaker 4: why I'm a That's why I'm a dropout and not
Speaker 4: a degree holder, but I have heard that phrase before.
Speaker 2: Okay, really cool, Yeah, no, let's dropout. I really excited
Speaker 2: when I accidentally, like I knew that you know a
Speaker 2: lot about computer things and the way that women are
Speaker 2: talked about in the history of computing. I love when
Speaker 2: I find out that I have the perfect guests for something.
Speaker 4: Uh, the perfect guest might have been a PhD holder.
Speaker 4: I'll take it nonetheless now because then.
Speaker 2: If you're a PhD holder, he'd be like, Margaret, that's
Speaker 2: not the way that it happened, Margaret.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And if there's any moments like that, you should interject them,
Speaker 2: because I didn't give a shit about Lord Byron until
Speaker 2: he was in the background of all of these stories.
Speaker 2: I did know and care about, and finally I was like,
Speaker 2: all right, I need to know. A byronic hero is
Speaker 2: an anti hero. It's a it's a fuck boy. It
Speaker 2: is a Victoria pre Victorian fuck boy. And people would
Speaker 2: throw that phrase around byronic the way that we might
Speaker 2: talk about Orwellian or kafka esque today, not meaning the
Speaker 2: same thing. But if you have like a brooding, sexy
Speaker 2: anti hero, he has a byronic figure. He absolutely fucked,
Speaker 2: he broke hearts. He spit on the conservative morals of
Speaker 2: his society. He wrote poetry. It was that was like
Speaker 2: the rock star job at the time, not the way
Speaker 2: it comes across now. When you tell people that you
Speaker 2: write poetry, which everyone should still do, mind you, but
Speaker 2: it doesn't carry the same weight. It's like telling someone
Speaker 2: you're a podcaster or something. You know. He spent his
Speaker 2: fortune and his fame on revolution and liberation. He pissed
Speaker 2: off an awful lot of people. Despite not being conventionally
Speaker 2: attractive and being disabled, he was the most sexually desired
Speaker 2: man in high society in London. This is literally the
Speaker 2: guy who wrote Don Juan, or as he pronounced it,
Speaker 2: don Juwan, I think, just because he was English, not
Speaker 2: as like a weird Yeah, and it's semi auto biographical.
Speaker 2: It's also semi auto biographic about his fuck up dad too,
Speaker 2: because his fuck up dad was a lot like him.
Speaker 2: He home wrecked constantly, He ruined lives, He was sleeping
Speaker 2: with his half sister. He was not around to raise
Speaker 2: his kids, although this was not entirely his fault always
Speaker 2: he honestly could potentially have fathered hundreds of children. There's
Speaker 2: only a few that we know about. He spoke up
Speaker 2: for the working class when no one else would. He
Speaker 2: went into exile because his sexuality was a capital offense
Speaker 2: in his native country, the backwards, a little island called England.
Speaker 2: Someone's going to get mad that England is actually the
Speaker 2: name of a specific country, not the larger island whatever.
Speaker 2: And he died young trying to free far off Grease
Speaker 2: from foreign occupation. So people argue about him today. They say,
Speaker 2: was he a hero? Was he a monster? Was he misunderstood?
Speaker 2: I have come to the conclusion, and I'm curious your take.
Speaker 2: He's all three of these things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree with you.
Speaker 4: I think complicated person like I think trying to be like, oh,
Speaker 4: he's just purely a hero, purely a monster. I think
Speaker 4: his legacy is a little too complex to boil it
Speaker 4: down in that way.
Speaker 3: I think all of these things.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And the thing that I'm like, well, i'll get
Speaker 2: into it. The way he specifically handled a few relationships
Speaker 2: is the thing that I'm like, Wow, I wish I
Speaker 2: had more details. I wish I kind of knew better.
Speaker 2: But I mean it's like, who am I to sit
Speaker 2: in judgment of these people who have been dead for
Speaker 2: hundreds of years. But I'm like, that's literally my job
Speaker 2: is to try and find entertaining ways to sit in
Speaker 2: judgment of people who've been dead for hundreds of years.
Speaker 4: So I do think is like the way that he
Speaker 4: showed up in reallyationships does relate to his work and legacy.
Speaker 4: So it's not like we're just being petty and being like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: he wrote this, but also he was a scoundrel.
Speaker 3: Like those things are kind of related totally.
Speaker 2: He wasn't like writing about a wandering fuck boy out
Speaker 2: of like an insul imagination sitting in his parents' basement.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: He was a.
Speaker 2: Wandering fuck boy. And in seventeen eighty eight, Lord Byron
Speaker 2: was born into minor nobility in the center of that
Speaker 2: world spanning nightmarish hydra called the British Empire. His first
Speaker 2: name was not Lord, it was George, but no one
Speaker 2: as soon as he becomes Lord Byron, he's just Lord Byron, like,
Speaker 2: which is a move. But he was born George Gordon Byron.
Speaker 2: He was born in London to a Scottish heiress and
Speaker 2: a father named mad Jack. To be fair, Lord Byron
Speaker 2: named his own father mad Jack in like an obituary
Speaker 2: of the aforementioned mad Jack. But that's the name that's stuck,
Speaker 2: because Lord Byron, if he names something, that's the name
Speaker 2: that's going to stick. Matt Jack was lived up to
Speaker 2: his name. He fought against the American Revolution. He blew
Speaker 2: all of his money gambling. He fucked around on his
Speaker 2: wife with other married women. He left his second wife
Speaker 2: and all of his kids to go live in France
Speaker 2: with his own sister, whom he was probably fucking. Then
Speaker 2: he died at thirty four, probably from friend of the
Speaker 2: pod tuberculosis, but possibly by his own hand. Meanwhile, Young
Speaker 2: Byron not quite yet Lord, although he's going to become
Speaker 2: a lord at ten, which is not a thing you
Speaker 2: should do to a child. He moves with his mom
Speaker 2: to Scotland. He was born with a club foot. He
Speaker 2: will walk with a limb his entire life. And he's
Speaker 2: never able to dance, at least like in a way
Speaker 2: that is presentable to high society. Through vagaries of inheritance,
Speaker 2: I refuse to study in depth. My opinion about the
Speaker 2: English nobility is already on record. A series of dead
Speaker 2: airs mean that our young Lord Byron winds up inheriting
Speaker 2: the title Lord Byron from his great uncle who is
Speaker 2: named Lord Byron. The new young Lord Byron is ten
Speaker 2: when he becomes the sixth Lord Byron, which is a baron.
Speaker 2: He's a baron.
Speaker 4: Again, we don't really know how the titles work. I
Speaker 4: don't know either, and I refuse to look it up.
Speaker 4: So if you do know that, I feel like, keep
Speaker 4: it to yourself.
Speaker 3: Maybe.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So he suddenly becomes a character in a weird
Speaker 2: old movie, only he predates old movies right by one
Speaker 2: hundred years, so he's actually the things that they're all
Speaker 2: based on. It becomes a baron of this estate called
Speaker 2: Newstead Abbey in Nottingham, near Sherwood Forest and all that shit.
Speaker 2: It is old and run down, so his mom leases
Speaker 2: it out rather than living there, but he spends some
Speaker 2: time there as a kid in the like we can't
Speaker 2: afford to keep up our giant Gothic mansion, and he
Speaker 2: has a Gothic nightmare of a childhood. His mother was
Speaker 2: a drunk. A lot of biographers like to argue about
Speaker 2: whether or not she was shitty to him. His nurse
Speaker 2: was very shitty to him. The way that it's phrased
Speaker 2: in history books. I specifically disagree with because his nurse
Speaker 2: beat him regularly, sexually assaulted him regularly when he's like,
Speaker 2: you know, ten or something, and then would yell at
Speaker 2: him in scripture and you know, talk about what terrible
Speaker 2: person he is or whatever. Right, And one reason it's
Speaker 2: hard to piece out a lot of things is that
Speaker 2: people dance around both the things that he had inflicted
Speaker 2: upon him and that he inflicted upon others. People don't.
Speaker 2: People are like sly and vague, And I think that's
Speaker 2: like a British nobility thing, where when they talk about assault,
Speaker 2: child abuse, incest, homosexuality and affairs, and they're all like
Speaker 2: conflated as bad things, even though some of them are
Speaker 2: perfectly fine and consensual and some of them are horrific,
Speaker 2: nightmare things whatever. I'm not even going to repeat it.
Speaker 2: I don't like the way that about half the histories
Speaker 2: that I read about him refer to what he suffered
Speaker 2: at the hand of his caretakers. He was very happy
Speaker 2: to get sent way to boarding school. He called them
Speaker 2: the happiest days of his life. He met a bunch
Speaker 2: of his forever friends while he was at school. He's
Speaker 2: probably started sleeping with boys. I understand why men at
Speaker 2: the time talk slyly around homosexuality because it was a
Speaker 2: public hanging offense at the time, and he falls in
Speaker 2: love with girls a bunch too, and he's way more
Speaker 2: public about that. By college, the school is like, oh,
Speaker 2: you can't keep a dog in your room, and he's like, okay,
Speaker 2: So he gets a bear.
Speaker 4: Wait where did he get a bear? Like, what do
Speaker 4: we know about him obtaining this bear?
Speaker 2: I don't know enough. He keeps animals his whole life.
Speaker 2: He always has like a menagere that follows him around
Speaker 2: basically through all of his travels, and it's like whatever,
Speaker 2: weird animals, But he specifically likes dogs and birds, like
Speaker 2: giant birds, peacocks and eagles and stuff like that. Right,
Speaker 2: But it's referred to as a tame bear, and I
Speaker 2: refuse to like just say it was a tame bear
Speaker 2: because I only half believe that that's a concept. You know.
Speaker 2: I think you can have a trained bear. I think
Speaker 2: that's true. And yeah, I it's just one of these
Speaker 2: like rich European people things like every now and then
Speaker 2: you read about like someone who lives in Europe and
Speaker 2: they have a ton of money, so they have like
Speaker 2: a leopard or whatever, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if I you know that meme.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't tell anybody if I won the lottery, but
Speaker 4: there would be signs I would definitely get all kinds
Speaker 4: of weird animals.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean I would treat them
Speaker 3: well and have like specialists or whatever.
Speaker 4: Like.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't be you.
Speaker 4: Know, it wouldn't be one of those things where it's like, oh,
Speaker 4: this person had a alligator in their studio apartment or something,
Speaker 4: they would be well cared for. But yes, I get it,
Speaker 4: this is something I understand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, totally, And like, yeah, all of the birds
Speaker 2: and stuff that he keeps, I'm like, yeah, I would
Speaker 2: totally do that if I, like, if I got to
Speaker 2: hire people to take care of things, you know, for me.
Speaker 2: And while in school he got into poetry. His first
Speaker 2: poems were terrible love poems for his cousin Margaret, which
Speaker 2: I only included because I like the name Margaret and
Speaker 2: Margaret did not want him. He self published two poetry books,
Speaker 2: one of which he had to censor because of its
Speaker 2: like frank eroticism. He's like from a very young age,
Speaker 2: is like and then I like fucking you know, and
Speaker 2: then the priests are like you shouldn't say that, and
Speaker 2: he's like, and then I like vague metaphors, and.
Speaker 3: That's much better. Then I like intimacy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now he's constantly talking about his like
Speaker 2: intimate friendships with boys and then the like long curly
Speaker 2: locks that go down the back of this boy's you
Speaker 2: know back or whatever.
Speaker 3: I think we're picking up what he's putting down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. But it's funny because it took hundreds of
Speaker 2: years for people to pick it up because they were
Speaker 2: like and then late later spoiler, he leaves England because
Speaker 2: he can't come back, and it's because of scandal, and
Speaker 2: some of it's like kind of legit scandal. But he's
Speaker 2: pretty open in his letters. He's like, I can't go
Speaker 2: back becaus they hang me for having the sex that
Speaker 2: I have.
Speaker 3: You know. Yes, this is.
Speaker 4: Something that I've seen time and time again from history
Speaker 4: where the person they're writing about all but comes out
Speaker 4: and says it and it's like, ooh, what was the
Speaker 4: relationship here? And it's like, well, you can read what
Speaker 4: they wrote where they talked about how they have it's
Speaker 4: a sexual one, or he can act like it's like
Speaker 4: very cloudy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we just do it as they do in Greece,
Speaker 2: and we're buried next to each other, like uh huh.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So he self publishes two poetry books, right, and then
Speaker 2: his third book finds a publisher and it's called his
Speaker 2: first published book by someone else's called Hours of Idleness,
Speaker 2: and it's not particularly impressive. It is widely panned. People
Speaker 2: are like, it's no good, it's derivative. I honestly didn't
Speaker 2: totally love his poetry, so I'm not going to like
Speaker 2: include much of it in this episode. I actually really
Speaker 2: like a lot of his contemporaries poetry like Percy Shelley,
Speaker 2: which I'm not going to quote in here. But anyway,
Speaker 2: so he turned around and he wrote poems making fun
Speaker 2: of his reviewers, and these were his first good poems
Speaker 2: that people like, where his poems talking shit and if
Speaker 2: you want to talk shit, you can talk shit about
Speaker 2: are well, no, you should never talk shit about our advertisers.
Speaker 2: We think that all of them are perfect in every way,
Speaker 2: especially the ones that are about things that go exactly
Speaker 2: against everything that we believe in. Here's Dad's and we're back.
Speaker 2: So he won't dance for obvious reasons, but he is
Speaker 2: an athlete. He is a fairly obsessive athlete. He's not
Speaker 2: particularly talented, he's not particularly bad at it either, but
Speaker 2: he's like always like swimming canals and doing all of
Speaker 2: this stuff right his whole life. And he ends up
Speaker 2: going to the same college, Trinity College at Cambridge, that
Speaker 2: are later bisexual hero Oscar Wilde would go to almost
Speaker 2: a century later, and they're both into boxing, and they
Speaker 2: both self publish bad poetry while in college. And I
Speaker 2: just we did an episode about him like a month ago,
Speaker 2: and I just I'm going to forget the name Trinity
Speaker 2: College like in three months, but for now it sticks
Speaker 2: in my mind, top of mind. He gets out of
Speaker 2: college and he starts doing what he's really good at,
Speaker 2: becoming a wandering vagabond, and fuck boy, this is nit
Speaker 2: his niche niche. How do you pronounce that word niche?
Speaker 3: I think I've heard both.
Speaker 4: I know, it's one of those words that whenever I
Speaker 4: say on a podcast, I second guess myself.
Speaker 3: Yoh, I don't know tbd.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he went on a grand tour like all rich
Speaker 2: assholes do when they're like done the school, you know,
Speaker 2: and they traveling around and now, don't get me wrong,
Speaker 2: dropping out of college or finishing college and going and
Speaker 2: wandering around for a couple of years or whatever. That's fine.
Speaker 2: It's a rich asshole move when you have all of
Speaker 2: your friends and servants in your meningerie with you, that's
Speaker 2: that going.
Speaker 4: It's like what an artist, like a musician, goes on tour,
Speaker 4: Like everybody's.
Speaker 3: Coming with us.
Speaker 4: We've gotta cook, get a servant and a cleaner, and
Speaker 4: everybody that I'm sleeping with all in one group.
Speaker 2: Yep, which is often for him an overlap between those
Speaker 2: various positions.
Speaker 3: It actually doesn't sound bad. I'm not gonna know, it's not.
Speaker 2: He's lived a final life and like there's only one
Speaker 2: thing that is gonna comp up in his life that
Speaker 2: may not have been consensual on his part, and like
Speaker 2: even that, honestly, I'm not so sure, at least in
Speaker 2: everything that I've read. So he's off adventuring, and the
Speaker 2: Napoleonic Wars have like shut down Europe to travel, right,
Speaker 2: it's not a good idea to go wander around with
Speaker 2: peacocks and like your lovers around Europe. So he goes
Speaker 2: to the Mediterranean, and he also picked that area, and
Speaker 2: he wrote about this, and again people didn't bother me.
Speaker 2: They're like, oh, it's just the wars. He picked that
Speaker 2: area because homosexuality is more tolerated and autumn and controlled
Speaker 2: areas than European areas. He was also into like esoteric
Speaker 2: shit and orientalism. He's pretty into like being a white
Speaker 2: guy in a Sufi mysticism and all that shit.
Speaker 4: I feel like, I know guys like this. This is
Speaker 4: as like you're just like this as a type. This
Speaker 4: guy is still out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he is the first, and I was gonna say finest,
Speaker 2: but I'm not sure. But I challenge if you are
Speaker 2: listening to this and you're like, I'm kind of this
Speaker 2: kind of asshole, commit your life and possibly lose your
Speaker 2: life to progressive causes of liberation. That's what I'm gonna say.
Speaker 2: That's the thing you should do, and always stay consensual.
Speaker 2: The sketchiest thing that we can immediately point to is
Speaker 2: that during these travels, and he's just out of college,
Speaker 2: he is almost certainly fucking a fourteen year old boy
Speaker 2: who's like with him on these travels, and he's also
Speaker 2: in love with like every woman he meets, including three sisters,
Speaker 2: one of whom is twelve. However, usually when people are
Speaker 2: like he is in love with it means that he's
Speaker 2: fucking them. I actually don't think he's fucking these sisters. Then,
Speaker 2: the most part is that the only thing that's abnormal
Speaker 2: about what I just described is that one of them
Speaker 2: as a boy for the time. This is not to
Speaker 2: say it was all right, but it wasn't a thing
Speaker 2: that people bothered to note as weird. He starts writing
Speaker 2: epic travelog poetry. His first successes came from a poem
Speaker 2: called Child Harold's Pilgrimage, and this did real well, like
Speaker 2: selling tens of thousands of copies right away. Byron says,
Speaker 2: I awoke one morning and found myself famous. Anywhere you
Speaker 2: go in England, someone has either read this or is
Speaker 2: talking to someone who has read this. I can't imagine
Speaker 2: poetry ever finding that same niche in society ever. Again,
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna switch between niche and niche every single
Speaker 2: time I say it. That's my plan.
Speaker 3: I like it. The only poem, the only poet that
Speaker 3: I can think of like that is.
Speaker 4: Who's the poet who writes kind of sparse poems that
Speaker 4: It's like.
Speaker 2: I'm going to embarrass myself by not knowing.
Speaker 3: Her first name is Rupee. She's very famous.
Speaker 4: Okay, she might have been dating Corey Booker for a while,
Speaker 4: like like she's the last poet that I remember that like.
Speaker 3: Blew up everywhere, k A you are, and.
Speaker 4: Every every poem is like the lines, the breaks are
Speaker 4: really interesting, so it'll be like the milk line break
Speaker 4: in my heart line break. Like it's like very like
Speaker 4: the poems are sparse and broken on the page in
Speaker 4: a specific kind of way.
Speaker 2: These go on Instagram a lot, right.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's like Instagram famous poet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is that's her name it? But I think
Speaker 1: it's I think it's not Ruby.
Speaker 3: I think it's Rupee Rupee, Yes, thank.
Speaker 1: You, Yes, so yeah, check her out.
Speaker 2: I think that we've just hit this place where it's
Speaker 2: just a media saturation thing where it's like because at
Speaker 2: the same time you're like, oh, the novelist and you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: which one. There's ten there are ten novelists available for
Speaker 2: you to listen to to read, you know, and now
Speaker 2: everyone can write novels and that's great, but it does
Speaker 2: make it harder to become an overnight success. He was
Speaker 2: writing basically pulp fiction adventure tales about different wandering fuck boys,
Speaker 2: but in poetry form it has lots of Orientalism. Literally,
Speaker 2: these are referred to as his Oriental tales, and his
Speaker 2: particular obsession is with Greece and Albania. And since he's
Speaker 2: a lord, as soon as he comes of age, he
Speaker 2: goes and he joins the House of Lords. I again
Speaker 2: refuse to know if this is automatic, but he is
Speaker 2: now in government because because an uncle died, right, that's
Speaker 2: how government should work. He gives three speeches total his
Speaker 2: entire career, and all of them are super radical and
Speaker 2: unpopular because he's politically he's really fucking cool. The first
Speaker 2: speech he gives there I actually covered in the episode
Speaker 2: about the Lattites. Basically, all of these people are rioters,
Speaker 2: are destroying machinery that was destroying their livelihood. They didn't
Speaker 2: hate technology, they hated specific technology that was putting them
Speaker 2: out of a job. It's very applicable to a lot
Speaker 2: of people. Right now, we're listening to this m HM
Speaker 2: and the House of Lords was considering a bill that
Speaker 2: they passed which was let hang everyone who breaks machines,
Speaker 2: because that's England's solution to everything at this point. Hangings, yeah,
Speaker 2: just public hangings, which to be fair is a lot
Speaker 2: less gruesome than what England was doing to kill people
Speaker 2: about two hundred years earlier. So he stands up and
Speaker 2: he gives this long speech about like, hey, actually the
Speaker 2: Luddites are kind of cool and at very least don't
Speaker 2: murder them. His second speech in the House of Lords
Speaker 2: was what if we treated the Catholics over in Ireland
Speaker 2: a little bit better? Huh how about that? Doesn't that
Speaker 2: seem like a good plan? That one was equally unpopular.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't imagine that going over well.
Speaker 2: No, and like, Okay, the one cool thing about an
Speaker 2: inherent nobility is that every now and then you're just
Speaker 2: gonna have this guy who's just like, I guess I'm
Speaker 2: in government now, but I fucking hate all of you,
Speaker 2: like because he's not trying to play nice with the
Speaker 2: House of Lords. He doesn't care about any of this stuff,
Speaker 2: you know. All he cares about is getting his dick
Speaker 2: wet and like writing poetry and wandering around and actually
Speaker 2: trying to be nice to everyone constantly, and like really
Speaker 2: like he gives all of his stuff away constantly. He
Speaker 2: is selfish romantically in some ways, but he's also he
Speaker 2: doesn't care when the people he sleeps asleep with other people,
Speaker 2: so I don't know. I don't So he spends four
Speaker 2: years of his life in society, which is like I'm
Speaker 2: gonna put in air quotes because he gets capitalized. This
Speaker 2: is the rich asshole clique of five thousand people in
Speaker 2: a city of one million that, like all of the
Speaker 2: books and shit are all about. He is a rock
Speaker 2: star when he enters society because he's just come back
Speaker 2: from his grand tour and he's famous as hell, and
Speaker 2: so he's invited all the fancy poets and he either
Speaker 2: starts seducing or honestly, the way that most histories present it,
Speaker 2: being sought after by everyone in society. Everyone is trying
Speaker 2: to fuck this guy. Everyone's like mailing him blocks of
Speaker 2: hair and like writing him weird letters and shit, Yeah,
Speaker 2: this fucking guy.
Speaker 4: Like I mean, like it's like throwing a bra up
Speaker 4: on stage or something, you know, like can't go anywhere
Speaker 4: without people sending me.
Speaker 2: A weird letter totally, And like I remember when at
Speaker 2: some point there's this like reckoning that will eventually happen
Speaker 2: to the history of rock and roll, where we realize
Speaker 2: that all of these men are like mass rapists, right
Speaker 2: and people are like, well, if you can't just like
Speaker 2: randomly fucked group is, why would you be a rock star?
Speaker 2: Like I don't know, like make music and like change
Speaker 2: people's lives and shit. And that's also say that you
Speaker 2: can't have like wild consensual sex with lots of people.
Speaker 2: But like, obviously the way that the rock stars were
Speaker 2: doing it overall was not so good. Lord Byron starts
Speaker 2: up an affair with a woman named Lady Lamb, which
Speaker 2: is a funny name. Her name is Lady Caroline. Lamb
Speaker 2: definitely pursued him. She sent him a bunch of letters
Speaker 2: and lock of hair, and then she learned how to
Speaker 2: copy his prose style and wrote him in his own
Speaker 2: voice to try and get his attention.
Speaker 3: Whoa pretty intense, Lady Lamb.
Speaker 2: She is going to get way more intense. This is
Speaker 2: the relationship that I like. I think they're just bad
Speaker 2: for each other, but it's like the relationship where he
Speaker 2: is either the worst person or she is either the
Speaker 2: worst person, or they're both just really bad for each other.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, I know this relationship where it's like
Speaker 4: both of y'all are really toxic and together it's like
Speaker 4: unleashed something really wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. You're like, well, yeah, no, he is absolutely
Speaker 2: awful if in this context, and you're really awful in
Speaker 2: his context too, And I wish he would just get
Speaker 2: away from each other. She called him while she was
Speaker 2: still pursuing him. She called him mad, bad, and dangerous
Speaker 2: to know, which is like the quote about him that
Speaker 2: it's not on his tombstone, but practically, and she wasn't wrong.
Speaker 2: This relationship absolutely wrecks her. You could make the case
Speaker 2: that she was emotionally abusive to him. You could make
Speaker 2: the case that she was acting in the ways that
Speaker 2: she was because of the way that he was acting
Speaker 2: to her. I think I usually tend towards siding with
Speaker 2: women in any such pairing. I couldn't tell you in
Speaker 2: this case, and maybe that's because of there's entire books
Speaker 2: written for hundreds of years arguing one side or the other.
Speaker 2: It annoys me how much has been written about this, honestly,
Speaker 2: even though I'm like, I wish I knew more about it,
Speaker 2: but I wish I knew more about it without having
Speaker 2: to read like all of these politicized triestises arguing one
Speaker 2: position or the other. Lady Caroline Lamb was already married
Speaker 2: to a future prime minister, but that did not stop
Speaker 2: her and Lord Byron from having this very public affair,
Speaker 2: which I think was kind of just normal in society.
Speaker 2: I think it was all just swingers, but they all
Speaker 2: had weird rules about it.
Speaker 3: I think so too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she would do things like mail him her pubic
Speaker 2: hair cut so close there's still blood on it. That
Speaker 2: is a move, show up at his house, grab a
Speaker 2: letter opener, and threaten to kill herself if he doesn't
Speaker 2: date her, and she's mad that he's not faithful to
Speaker 2: her even though she's married. On the other hand, I
Speaker 2: think he's fucking her. Mother in law.
Speaker 3: Is one messy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's messy, then there's fucking mother he's getting He's
Speaker 1: gonna get messier.
Speaker 2: Both of them are going to get messier. What's messier
Speaker 2: than mother in law? Half sister?
Speaker 1: Oh god, I think mother in law is messier.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, wait, I'm I think his own half sister.
Speaker 2: He is half sister.
Speaker 3: His half sister might up.
Speaker 2: With his wife, but we'll get to that. He's not
Speaker 2: married yet at this point, sir. Yeah, So he hates
Speaker 2: dances because he can't dance because of his club foot,
Speaker 2: but he goes to dances with her, and he's embarrassed
Speaker 2: because she dances with everyone else, and so eventually he's like,
Speaker 2: if we go to these dances, you can't dance with
Speaker 2: anyone else, which is him being controlling whatever. After he
Speaker 2: leaves her, she gets wilder. At one point, he's getting
Speaker 2: his portrait done, so she copies his style of writing
Speaker 2: and writes the portrait artist and is like, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: I'll like send somebody by to pick up that painting.
Speaker 2: I'm totally Lord Byron.
Speaker 4: These people would have loved being in an era where
Speaker 4: you could have digital drama, because like, yeah, like forging
Speaker 4: someone's way of speaking, and then I guess the person's like, well,
Speaker 4: sounds like him.
Speaker 3: I guess that's right.
Speaker 4: Like imagine the damage these two could have done to
Speaker 4: each other with Instagram.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, the friend's only close friends stories that these two.
Speaker 1: Were, stories with like quotes like oh my god, all
Speaker 1: of Koe Kardashian style dramatic quotes.
Speaker 2: And they would be like screen capping I noticed you
Speaker 2: saw my story but didn't heart react it and then
Speaker 2: like sending that to each other nikes. So she steals
Speaker 2: this portrait of him and won't give it back unless
Speaker 2: he sends a lock of his hair. This is after
Speaker 2: they're broken up, so he sends a lock of his
Speaker 2: new lover's hair instead. I'm not sure whether it was like, haha,
Speaker 2: fuck you is my new lover's hair, or if he
Speaker 2: was pretending it was his own. Later he's going to
Speaker 2: like straight up like write her back from like his
Speaker 2: new lovers of address and shit, just to piss her off.
Speaker 2: At one point, he runs across her at a dance
Speaker 2: and she's like, well, I guess I can dance now,
Speaker 2: ha ha ha, because I'm not dating you anymore. And
Speaker 2: he's like, sure, because you dance with everyone in a
Speaker 2: like you're a dirty slut kind of implied way. Right,
Speaker 2: So she smashes a glass and starts cutting at her
Speaker 2: wrist in front of everyone. She does not seriously wound herself,
Speaker 2: but this is not great. So they're bad for each other,
Speaker 2: and they're bad to be in the same society as
Speaker 2: each other, and she wants him back to the end
Speaker 2: of her life. None of the people who lives he
Speaker 2: wrecking Balld stop spending the rest of their life even
Speaker 2: after he dies, pining for him. I am guessing this
Speaker 2: man could fuck yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean when the hold lasts longer than your actual
Speaker 4: life on this earth when you've died, and they're still like, hm,
Speaker 4: the one that got away.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that really says something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And he, like I does, I think on some
Speaker 2: level genuinely cares for her, and he's like writing her
Speaker 2: for a long time, but then like after they're breaking up,
Speaker 2: he's like, oh, I should probably really stop writing her
Speaker 2: and stuff.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: At one point in desperation, she builds a huge bonfire
Speaker 2: and makes all the servant women. It's like it's like
Speaker 2: all of the women in town, but I think it's
Speaker 2: like her town, because she's like, fucking she's a higher
Speaker 2: up richer, noble, right, So it's like all the women
Speaker 2: have to like come out and like burn all of
Speaker 2: his shit, like all of the trinkets and letters and
Speaker 2: stuff that he sent her in a big public spectacle.
Speaker 2: And then and this far it's fun. I kind of
Speaker 2: like this. She's like, fuck my own reputation, I am
Speaker 2: going to write a novel about this man with a
Speaker 2: thinly disguised chriacature of Byron named Lord Ruthven. Because she's
Speaker 2: actually a really good writer on her own right, and
Speaker 2: she writes this whole Gothic novel at a different point
Speaker 2: that I haven't read yet but kind of want to.
Speaker 2: It seems up my alley. So she puts this out
Speaker 2: and it like torpedoes are standing in society. But it
Speaker 2: kind of takes him down a little bit too. Right.
Speaker 2: Of all the affairs he started, the most scandalous besides
Speaker 2: the men that he can't admit he's fucking, is that
Speaker 2: he is fucking his half sister Augusta. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of like, oh, maybe he is fucking his half sister Augusta.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go on a limb here, and this
Speaker 2: is his father's kid from a previous marriage. It is
Speaker 2: scandalous because it is incest, but it is not as
Speaker 2: scandalous as it could be. I am not making I
Speaker 2: am making a moral judgment. My moral judgment is separate
Speaker 2: from the one that I am now describing. The moral
Speaker 2: judgment of this pre Victorian English society is that it's
Speaker 2: not as scandalous as it could be because they did
Speaker 2: not grow up together, it did not really know each
Speaker 2: other too well until they were adults, and because of
Speaker 2: the fact that they had different mothers rather than different fathers.
Speaker 1: Some Game of Thrones, ash ship Margaret.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The more I read history, the more I'm like,
Speaker 2: George R. Martin was just just pulling on some he was.
Speaker 1: Just he was just going off of what actually happened. Yes,
Speaker 1: with some with some magic and some dragons mixed in.
Speaker 2: Yeah. God, I wish we.
Speaker 1: Had dragons like that.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 1: Oh, I would commit war crimes or a dragon. A dragon,
Speaker 1: I would write a dragon and you're blonde.
Speaker 3: I am yeah, not a dragon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I don't.
Speaker 1: But I'm not into the incest.
Speaker 3: Sorry, Oh you're not weird.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. That's a firm modern sensibility, the incest dragon writing. Yes,
Speaker 2: that's about it. So at this point, Lord Byron, who
Speaker 2: was not successfully acquired a dragon, is like, I know,
Speaker 2: He's like, I better get married to quell this scandal.
Speaker 2: Plus I keep blowing all my money, so I better
Speaker 2: marry someone rich. He refused to take money for poetry
Speaker 2: because of like weird nobility ethics. But the cool thing
Speaker 2: he did is that he gave away the copyright to
Speaker 2: his works to like anyone who like needed money. Like,
Speaker 2: instead of being like, oh, I made some money off
Speaker 2: my work, here's the money for it, he just a
Speaker 2: straight up like, ah, it's your poem. Now you can
Speaker 2: sell it under my name. I don't care.
Speaker 3: That's kind of bad ass, I know.
Speaker 2: Like his political ethics, I'm chill with. And I also
Speaker 2: understand why, coming from the society that he does, he
Speaker 2: spits on conventional morality. You know, I just think that
Speaker 2: there's some babies in bathwater problem happening. But most people
Speaker 2: paint this marriage as a marriage of convenience that he
Speaker 2: ends up in.
Speaker 3: I see why.
Speaker 2: The two of them get along pretty well. He marries
Speaker 2: a woman named Anna Isabella Millbank or Annabella for short,
Speaker 2: who is mostly known to history as Lady Byron. She
Speaker 2: is interesting in her own right. We're actually going to
Speaker 2: talk about her more in the second half of this
Speaker 2: particular episode. She is his opposite in all ways but politics.
Speaker 2: She's like into non hedonism, and she likes math not poetry.
Speaker 2: And she also said no the first time he proposed
Speaker 2: to her, which probably just like is probably why he
Speaker 2: was so into her.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: They get married at his new wife's insistence, his half
Speaker 2: sister and lover, Augusta, moves in with the couple. Okay,
Speaker 2: most nights, Annabella is on the couch and Augusta's in
Speaker 2: the marriage bed is the way that it is often phrased.
Speaker 2: I think that there's a chance of that is a
Speaker 2: triad and not talked about. And plus he's just running
Speaker 2: around fucking other people. This marriage does not last. This
Speaker 2: is going to be shocking.
Speaker 3: Surprises me. What was that? A solid foundation?
Speaker 2: I know last less than a year. All that came
Speaker 2: out of it was Annabella's life being like pretty fucked
Speaker 2: up by it all. And they had a daughter named
Speaker 2: Augusta Ada because Ada Lovelace is named after the half
Speaker 2: sister that her dad is banging.
Speaker 3: It's pretty messy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Shortly after Ada's birth, Annabella takes Ada and leaves
Speaker 2: her husband, but Annabella doesn't stop loving and caring for
Speaker 2: Lord Byron. Annabella is like, you are fucking insane. That's
Speaker 2: what's happening here is you are non She was like,
Speaker 2: my ex husband is neurodivergent in ways that are problematic.
Speaker 2: Is the way she would have phrased it in her Instagram.
Speaker 2: She would not have been messy on Instagram. Well she
Speaker 2: would have had to be because he would have been
Speaker 2: messy on Instagram.
Speaker 1: Her.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you get you get pulled into this stuff, even
Speaker 4: if you are not the kind of person who is
Speaker 4: messy on Instagram. When you're in the orbit of people
Speaker 4: who are you get pulled in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Lord Byron never sees his daughter again, but he
Speaker 2: like writes about her constantly in his poetry. This is
Speaker 2: like the great loss in his life that he's not
Speaker 2: more part of his daughter's life as far as I
Speaker 2: can tell. And Annabella Mom continues to think fondly of
Speaker 2: Lord Byron for a long time, but is like pretty like,
Speaker 2: but you got to stay no influence. My kid cannot
Speaker 2: end up like you. You're just a weird crazy man
Speaker 2: that I miss and who's like soul. She's constantly trying
Speaker 2: to say, she's really religious. So in eighteen sixteen, Byron
Speaker 2: left England for good. Most accounts refer to the scandal
Speaker 2: of the failed marriage, but his own correspondence was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I could get hanged for you know the way I
Speaker 2: like to have sex, which is with men. But what
Speaker 2: isn't a hanging offence is taking advantage of these sweet deals.
Speaker 2: This is the worst one. This is the worst one
Speaker 2: I've ever done. It's like Robert Evans level. I know,
Speaker 2: I I try to rise above such it's because I'm
Speaker 2: doing someone who isn't actually because I'm doing someone who
Speaker 2: could easily be a bastard. That's why valid valid. But
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean that these deals are bastards. The fact
Speaker 2: that they are is completely unrelated. Here's the ads geesus.
Speaker 3: You you got there. I feel like you got there.
Speaker 3: You laided the plane.
Speaker 2: So we're back, much like our wanderers, back to wandering.
Speaker 2: This time I'm among his uh menoche. He brings a
Speaker 2: Catholic personal physician named Polardari, whom he was probably fucking.
Speaker 2: Who is a man, and he was probably fucking Polardari.
Speaker 1: No one. I don't try him to do anything else
Speaker 1: when he's just consistently fucking all the time.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: He writes about writing poetry as like it's like hard,
Speaker 2: and he does that annoying thing where writers are like,
Speaker 2: this is the hardest thing anyone's ever done. I am
Speaker 2: forcing the muse out of me or whatever, you know,
Speaker 2: because I think the thing that he actually enjoys, yeah,
Speaker 2: is just having sex constantly. He was absolutely nagging and
Speaker 2: monstrous to Polardari if they were dating. Whether or not
Speaker 2: they were dating, he was absolutely just like pretty verbally
Speaker 2: abusive to Polardari. And so that kind of implies that
Speaker 2: that might have been. He has tempestuous moods, and so
Speaker 2: I think a lot of the way that people are
Speaker 2: behaving around him is like understandable in that context. You know,
Speaker 2: he settles in Switzerland, where the most famous thing about
Speaker 2: him happens. Well from the modern sense, at the time,
Speaker 2: he was famous for like everything else. But at the time,
Speaker 2: but now these days people are like, oh, yeah, the
Speaker 2: guy whose fucking house Frankenstein was written at because he
Speaker 2: was staying at some chateau or whatever the fucking Switzerland
Speaker 2: for the summer. Because he's rich as fuck, you know,
Speaker 2: he's like they're always like, oh, and then he was
Speaker 2: like broken in debt, and they're like, there's noble rich,
Speaker 2: and then there's like normal people like like there's noble poor,
Speaker 2: which is way the fuck above like even like middle
Speaker 2: class rich.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's not broke, like like someone like me is broke.
Speaker 4: I gu it's a different level of broke we're talking.
Speaker 2: About, Yeah, exactly. So he's at the chateau. I've covered
Speaker 2: this a little bit on other things. The writers Mary
Speaker 2: Shelley and Percy Shelley show up to his house in
Speaker 2: Switzerland on the lake. They spend the summer and the
Speaker 2: year without a summer there because the reason the year
Speaker 2: was without a summers because some volcanos fucked up the weather.
Speaker 2: Guests in the hotel across the lake would pay to
Speaker 2: use telescope to spy on the famous rockstar poets over there,
Speaker 2: and people like to conjecture about what they got up to,
Speaker 2: and I suspect it was horny, but who knows. Mary
Speaker 2: Shelley wrote Frankenstein there and invented science fiction. And Polodori,
Speaker 2: the physician who was also there, who's never remembered because
Speaker 2: he's a servant, because there's a ton of people there,
Speaker 2: because they have fucking servants there, who are people people
Speaker 2: You can get that.
Speaker 4: Fucking servants as in servants, they are fucking or fucking
Speaker 4: servants like fucking servants.
Speaker 2: I you know, probably both in this kind of a
Speaker 2: little bit of both. Yeah, Polodori started writing The Vampire.
Speaker 2: If you want to hear me do a reading of
Speaker 2: The Vampire, listen to Coolsone Media book Club. I read
Speaker 2: it recently because it's about an evil, seductive vampire named
Speaker 2: Lord Ruthven, the same name that Lady Lamb used to
Speaker 2: make fun of Lord Byron and this Lord Ruthven, who
Speaker 2: is clearly Byron, is traveling around with his friend around
Speaker 2: year up especially the Mediterranean, and just fucking up people's lives.
Speaker 2: And it is just the barest, most obvious. I am
Speaker 2: traveling with a vampire. What the fuck is my life?
Speaker 2: Which is to say, Lord Byron is the first vampire,
Speaker 2: and therefore I can tie computers back to vampires. It's
Speaker 2: the whole.
Speaker 4: Point, masterfully, that weaving is quite masterful.
Speaker 2: Thanks with a ready yarn on a big bulletin board.
Speaker 3: When you're using your computer, think vampires.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Bulladori is going to die young as hell,
Speaker 2: probably by suicide. The toxicology reports are like, oh, it
Speaker 2: was like some reason to think it might not have been.
Speaker 2: His life was functionally ruined by Lord Byron. Or maybe
Speaker 2: he died because he was sucked dry of all his
Speaker 2: blood because Lord Byron is actually a vampire who's to tone.
Speaker 2: After Switzerland, the vampire Lord Ruthven, sorry, Lord Byron went
Speaker 2: on to where he slept his way into a secret
Speaker 2: society trying to free Italy from the Austrians, which is cool.
Speaker 2: Then he started a newspaper called The Liberal, which is
Speaker 2: about revolution because they liberals were made different back then.
Speaker 2: He studied Armenian. He wrote I think the first English
Speaker 2: language Armenian grammar book, but I'm not sure, and he
Speaker 2: wrote about the needs for Armenian liberation. He kept fucking
Speaker 2: people's wives the whole time. Of course, he would write
Speaker 2: a three thousand word letter to his publisher back in
Speaker 2: England just talking about how he's fucking the wife of
Speaker 2: some baker.
Speaker 4: Like like, his publisher is like, why are you telling
Speaker 4: me this?
Speaker 3: Where are your pages?
Speaker 2: I know I can't publish this until you die, like,
Speaker 2: and those letters are definitely published now because everything he
Speaker 2: wrote that didn't get burned is published. But and meanwhile,
Speaker 2: Greece is like, what have we didn't have Ottoman rulers anymore?
Speaker 2: What if we were like Greece again? So you have
Speaker 2: the Greek War of Independence that goes from eighteen twenty
Speaker 2: one to eighteen twenty nine. In eighteen twenty three, pretty
Speaker 2: early on, Lord Byron joins in accounts that dislike him
Speaker 2: are like he was like, oh, I'm so special and important.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go become the king of Greece and
Speaker 2: I'm going to be a famous war hero because war
Speaker 2: is fun, adventure and I like adventure. I think there's
Speaker 2: some of that, But I think it's two things happening. One,
Speaker 2: I think this man had a death wish. I think
Speaker 2: he felt like his race was run at this point,
Speaker 2: but I'm not sure that's my own conjecture. And Two,
Speaker 2: the thing I know a little bit more about is
Speaker 2: that Greek rebels were writing him, being like, hey, you
Speaker 2: know how you like Greece and always write about us
Speaker 2: and like exoticize us and made all your money writing
Speaker 2: about it. Why actually he didn't take any money, made
Speaker 2: all your fame writing about us, Why don't you come
Speaker 2: throw down? And so they talk him into going, and
Speaker 2: he's like, yeah, all right, I talk a big game.
Speaker 2: Time to fucking put my money where my mouth does.
Speaker 2: He's in his mid thirties at this point. He sailed
Speaker 2: to Greece. He had to dodge Ottoman patrols in order
Speaker 2: to do it. He spent his fortune retrofitting the Greek
Speaker 2: navy and supporting the rebel cause. Like literally, he sells
Speaker 2: his estate in England like he actually now he like
Speaker 2: actually goes broke for something, and he gives all of
Speaker 2: his money to the cause, and especially a younger man
Speaker 2: who he was trying to fuck but who didn't love
Speaker 2: him back? And then he gets sick. It's the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: Don't catch a cold in the nineteenth century. But his
Speaker 2: doctors they tried everything, you know what they tried. They
Speaker 2: tried everything. They tried blood letting, they tried animas, they
Speaker 2: even tried bringing up blisters on his skin. None of that,
Speaker 2: friend was working. No, not of it, which is funny
Speaker 2: because Polodari his like personal physician. That was the thing
Speaker 2: he was trained into. There's a word for it. I
Speaker 2: forget the word for it, but it's like the like
Speaker 2: doctors at the time or like we have to get
Speaker 2: the bad out of you through whatever, which is like,
Speaker 2: I mean, you can physically remove an infection from your
Speaker 2: body in certain contexts, but really it's like really rare,
Speaker 2: like like if you have like a cut that's infected,
Speaker 2: you can kind of don't I'm not advocating anyone do this.
Speaker 2: You can kind of like get all that stuff out
Speaker 2: of there and clean it again, you know, like if
Speaker 2: you catch it early enough. I'm not This is not
Speaker 2: how you do medicine overall. There's every now and then
Speaker 2: you can get the bad out of you. It is rare.
Speaker 4: So when they were like putting leeches on people, it
Speaker 4: wasn't like completely crazy that it's not based out of
Speaker 4: absolutely nothing that that was going to be effective.
Speaker 2: Maybe I know less about blood letting, okay, and I
Speaker 2: only know a little bit about like removing like literally,
Speaker 2: I mean, there's just some things that you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: we're going to go in and cut out that tumor,
Speaker 2: or we're going to you know, so they're at least
Speaker 2: coming from a cause of like, oh there's a bad
Speaker 2: thing in you, We're going to remove it, right. You know.
Speaker 2: I want to know more about this stuff because I
Speaker 2: think eventually the way that we currently look at medicine
Speaker 2: and is going to look as silly as the Four
Speaker 2: Humors did, you know?
Speaker 3: I totally agree.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they'll be like the way that we talk about
Speaker 2: tuberculos is killing everyone and people are like, god this
Speaker 2: people just didn't have antibiotics one day. If humanity survives
Speaker 2: the current climate crisis, people are going to look back
Speaker 2: and say that about cancer. You know, they're like Wow,
Speaker 2: They'll be like given doing a history podcast and he'd
Speaker 2: be like, you would't believe what this bitch died of
Speaker 2: fucking cancer? Just everyone's just dying of cancer.
Speaker 4: Don't get cancer in twenty twenty four, y'all. I know
Speaker 4: we're making like pithy little jokes about it, like we
Speaker 4: are now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, and that will be good. I am glad that.
Speaker 2: I mean, people still die of tuberculous all the time,
Speaker 2: but that is a crime of poverty, not a anyway whatever.
Speaker 2: So he's sick, and at one point he says there
Speaker 2: are many more die of the lancet than the lance,
Speaker 2: which is his pithy way of saying, I don't think
Speaker 2: that all this blood letting is good for me. Later
Speaker 2: doctors have been like, this is the reason he died
Speaker 2: is they took out all of his blood while he
Speaker 2: was trying to fight a cold. He died on April nineteenth,
Speaker 2: eighteen twenty four, on the west coast of Greece, at
Speaker 2: the age of thirty six. He never fought a battle
Speaker 2: in Greece. He failed at uniting all the various factions
Speaker 2: while he was alive. But while he was there he
Speaker 2: did a fuck ton of humanitarian work for both Christians
Speaker 2: and Muslims there, and he became a symbol and an
Speaker 2: icon of Greek rebels, succeeding in death what he failed
Speaker 2: to do in life, Like there's a suburb of Athens
Speaker 2: that's named after him, and his friends immediately burn his
Speaker 2: memoirs lest his reputation be forever tarred, tarred with what
Speaker 2: I wish I knew, Like realistically, it's probably all the
Speaker 2: stuff that I was like conjecturing about. But I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's what happens when you're dangerous to know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as he was dying, he said, let not my
Speaker 2: body be hacked or sent to England. Both requests were denied.
Speaker 2: His lungs or maybe his heart of read both were
Speaker 2: like taken out and put in an urn in Greece,
Speaker 2: so that Greece got to hold onto a little bit
Speaker 2: of him their new hero, you know. And the rest
Speaker 2: was sent to England. His body was sent to England,
Speaker 2: and there was a place that was the most obvious
Speaker 2: and logical place to bury him. In Westminster Abbey. There
Speaker 2: was all the famous poets got buried at Poet's Corner.
Speaker 2: The dean was like, this man is the devil. He
Speaker 2: is not getting buried here, no fucking way. Probably didn't cuss.
Speaker 2: It wasn't until nineteen sixty nine that a memorial was
Speaker 2: placed for him at Westminster Abbey with all of the
Speaker 2: other poets of his generation.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's so late.
Speaker 2: People did not the nobility did not like him for
Speaker 2: a very long time. Instead, he was buried near his
Speaker 2: own home, Nottingham, with a marble slab donated by the
Speaker 2: King of Greece because Greece wins its independence. Although he
Speaker 2: really win independence. He rand up by the king.
Speaker 3: But whatever.
Speaker 2: His friends mission to statue, but nowhere would take it
Speaker 2: for a long time. I think eventually it ends up
Speaker 2: at Cambridge to this college, but like for years they're like,
Speaker 2: we made a statue of the guy, and everyone's like, nah,
Speaker 2: we're good like that guy. He was kind of sketchy,
Speaker 2: and it's like not for the right reasons, you know, Like,
Speaker 2: but no one wants a statue to evil hedonism. He
Speaker 2: was mourned by the working class of England and he
Speaker 2: was spurned by the nobility because even the way he
Speaker 2: wrote was like pulp adventure poetry. And almost two hundred
Speaker 2: years since his death, some of us still don't know
Speaker 2: what to make of him. That's where I land, like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, you promised a complicated character and you
Speaker 4: sure delivered.
Speaker 2: I like my clean cut moral that's not true. I
Speaker 2: always like it into the messy moral complexities of people,
Speaker 2: but like, don't treat people the way he treated people.
Speaker 2: But also like there's nothing in apparently wrong with like
Speaker 2: sleeping with a bunch of people who want to sleep
Speaker 2: with you, you know, and like the society telling him that
Speaker 2: that was wrong, especially the society had told him that
Speaker 2: he'd get hanged for. Like part of the scandal was
Speaker 2: that he liked performing anal I don't like to usually
Speaker 2: talk much about like specifics of sex because I'm kind
Speaker 2: of a kind of a prude on my own podcast,
Speaker 2: But he liked performing that on men and women, And
Speaker 2: so women who I believe consentually had that kind of
Speaker 2: sex with him would later like make a big deal
Speaker 2: out of like this is why he's bad. Is he
Speaker 2: likes this it's illegal. And then the other thing, I
Speaker 2: actually don't know how it didn't end up in the script.
Speaker 2: One of the things that Lady Lamb did to him
Speaker 2: was through like clever, weird wordplay, blackmail him and be
Speaker 2: like I know you like boys, so you should be
Speaker 2: nice to me, you know, by like I think she
Speaker 2: like wrote like remember me in one of his books.
Speaker 2: That was like by a fame, a man who was
Speaker 2: like famously gay.
Speaker 4: Something I don't like about the behavior here is people
Speaker 4: who enjoy all different kinds of sets then turning around
Speaker 4: and like using that to like blackmail or shame other
Speaker 4: people that they've had that kind of sex with. It's
Speaker 4: like you're getting down that way too, Like who are
Speaker 4: you to point a finger?
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, Or he was pressuring everyone into sex that
Speaker 2: you know. It's like, I don't fucking know, you know,
Speaker 2: And no one can talk honestly about it because of
Speaker 2: the laws criminalizing sodomy and homosexuality. No one can actually
Speaker 2: say what was happening. That's my somehow tie it all together? Takeaway?
Speaker 2: I don't know, But there's your archetypical, mad, bad and
Speaker 2: dangerous to no guy. Yeah, his daughter was really into
Speaker 2: him and she basically invented software and we're gonna talk
Speaker 2: about her and computers that I promised on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: This was a much more sexual episode than than I'm expecting.
Speaker 2: I love it, Okay, good, No, I like I again,
Speaker 2: like I'm not like and I feel like I mostly
Speaker 2: don't talk about the more details of this kind of thing,
Speaker 2: but I feel like it's just necessary in this particular case, you.
Speaker 4: Know, absolutely, Like I feel like you need to know
Speaker 4: that fact because I didn't know that about the anal sex,
Speaker 4: and so it does help contextualize exactly how these how
Speaker 4: these figures were interacting with each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I really I think part of why I like
Speaker 2: studying history so much because there's so many versions of
Speaker 2: history that people like take what they currently believe in
Speaker 2: project it backwards, like what we have is projections of
Speaker 2: ourselves backwards, you know, and trying to figure out how
Speaker 2: wild people were and weren't in the past is like
Speaker 2: so fast to me because there's all these reads where
Speaker 2: it was like, no, that was unheard of, no one
Speaker 2: did that, And then there's other reads where like, well,
Speaker 2: of course they did that. People have those bodies and
Speaker 2: they go together in that you know, they can fit
Speaker 2: that way, so of course people did it. You know.
Speaker 2: It's like it's really interesting to me because I think
Speaker 2: it says so much about you know, like like the
Speaker 2: Victorians actually just trashed history because they just projected Victorian
Speaker 2: values out to the past, and so we're still unpacking
Speaker 2: all of the things that the Victorians tried to apply
Speaker 2: retroactively and then it's annoying because it's like five thousand
Speaker 2: rich white assholes in fucking London that the entire world's
Speaker 2: history lives in the shadow of their moral values, and
Speaker 2: it's so annoying.
Speaker 4: Anyway, Yeah, this is why it would be helpful of
Speaker 4: some of this if there weren't laws that made people
Speaker 4: squeamish about writing some of this stuff down.
Speaker 2: Clearly, Yeah, totally. Well, if people want to, I don't
Speaker 2: have a good way to transfer that into your plug
Speaker 2: for your podcast. But where can people listen to you
Speaker 2: talking about stuff?
Speaker 4: Anal Sex doesn't come up a lot, but if you
Speaker 4: still want to hear the podcast, you can.
Speaker 1: Check it out.
Speaker 2: I come up on this show. I'm being like, I'm
Speaker 2: blushing and defensive.
Speaker 3: Anyway, please kids, has it come up?
Speaker 4: But all other kinds of things do that are still
Speaker 4: very interesting. The show was called There Are No Girls
Speaker 4: on the Internet.
Speaker 2: Please check it out, all right, and we'll be back
Speaker 2: on Wednesday. By everyone.
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