Conversations with Lord Byron (1824)

May 23, 2013



On 17th May 1824, a month after Lord Byron died, his memoirs were burnt in the upstairs drawing room of a house on Albemarle Street, London. The manuscript pages of the memoirs had been entrusted by Byron to his literary executor Thomas Moore two years earlier with a mind that one day they would be published. But with Byron dead, Byron's publisher John Murray, thinking the pages' supposedly scandalous contents far too damaging to both the reputation and legacy of Byron himself and presumably also to the publisher who would publish them, ripped them up and placed them in the fire. In his book Journal of the conversations of Lord Byron noted during a residence with his lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822  by Thomas Medwin, published that same year, the author endeavours to "lessen, if not remedy, the evil" of the burning of Byron's memoirs.