On May 17, 1824, the publisher John Murray gathered six of Lord Byron’s closest friends and executors in his office—to commit what is sometimes described as “the greatest crime in literary history.”

Byron, who had died in Greece almost exactly one month before, had earned quite a reputation by the time of his death—and he was only 36. When he wasn’t busy publishing his own bestselling work and denouncing the work of others (especially Keats), the poet—famously “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” according to a woman who later sent him a sample of her pubic hair in an envelope—could be found taking numerous lovers of both genders, including his half-sister, calling William Wordsworth “Turdsworth,” keeping a bear in his Cambridge dorm (the rules said they didn’t allow dogs, not bears), reinventing the wild horse in the name of poetry, joining secret societies of revolutionaries, carving his name into dungeon pillars, swimming across the Hellespont because a Greek hero did it. He was, by all accounts, the baddest boy of the Romantic period.

A few years earlier, Byron had given a manuscript of his memoirs to his friend Thomas Moore, instructing him that they were only to be published after his death. In 1821, Moore, struggling to make ends meet, sold the copyright to the publisher John Murray (with Byron’s blessing—despite the fact that he had once described Murray as “the most timid of God’s booksellers”). But when Byron died, Murray—though he would have made a tidy profit by publishing them—decided to burn the memoirs instead. Byron’s executor John Cam Hobhouse agreed, wanting to safeguard Byron’s reputation (and his own), and so did the representatives of Byron’s wife and half-sister, for obvious reasons. Only Moore wanted to publish his friend’s memoirs, but he was overruled. So the men stood around the fire, ripping pages from the manuscript and throwing them into the flames, chunk by chunk.

As for the secrets they contained, we’ll never really know. Opinions from those who read them at the time differ. Were they scandalous? Were they humdrum? Were they brilliant? Were they boring? Well—considering the source, I’m sure they weren’t that. Alas!

FINAL GOODBYES

“If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: ‘Byron is dead!’”

—JANE WELSH CARLYLE
IN AN 1824 LETTER TO THOMAS CARLYLE

“The world is rid of Lord Byron, but the deadly slime of his touch still remains.”

—JOHN CONSTABLE
IN AN 1824 LETTER TO THE REV. JOHN FISHER

In other (old)

news this week

Voltaire is banished from Paris and locked up in the Bastille (May 16, 1717) • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is published for the first time (May 17, 1900) • James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, is published (May 18, 1953) • Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and other luminaries dine together at the Hotel Majestic (May 18, 1922) • Malcolm X is born (May 19, 1925) • Oscar Wilde is released from Reading Gaol and sent into exile—his last stop before catching his train is Hatchards bookshop (May 19, 1897) • Lorraine Hansberry is born (May 19, 1930) • Sarah Bernhardt premieres an adaptation of Hamlet with herself in the title role (May 20, 1899) • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett meet for the first time, after exchanging many letters (May 20, 1845)

Born this week in 1944

“If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up. You begin by stopping the torture and killing of the unprotected, by feeding the hungry so that they have the energy to think about what they want beyond food. … Food, health, literacy, like free contraception and abortion, are basic feminist issues.”

–ADRIENNE RICH

Born this week in 1929