Byron

LORD BYRON (1788 - 1824)

Deep in the plantations off the road to the right from New Pittington to Easington Lane, stands Elemore Hall, the birthplace of Annabella (Anna Isabella) Milbanke, wife of Lord Byron. The family home was Seaham Hall where Annabella married Lord Byron in 1815. The drawing-room where the ceremony took place still exists, but has none of the original furnishings.

Byron's doubts as to his marriage and the necessity to 'reform thoroughly' keep surfacing in the letters of this period. Annabella had turned him down before and Byron seems to hope for the like again, though no doubt flattered that she had refused six suitors before him. He always speaks rather distantly of Annabella to his friends, and any praise has an unenthusiastic air of duty about it. There is usually a touch of mockery in his description of her virtues and her talents; her interest in mathematics caused him to dub her his 'Princess of Parallelograms'.

Byron had begun writing his Hebrew Melodies during October of 1814 at Seaham and worked on them in the library of Halnaby Hall while on honeymoon. Annabella copied them out. Byron was discussing publishers for the work in January 1815, while still at Seaham, and the collection of short poems, mostly on scriptural subjects, was published in April 1815. The work includes 'The Destruction of Sennacherib' ('The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold...') and has appended 'She Walks in Beauty like the Night'. After the honeymoon, Byron was more relaxed among company (he got on well with his mother-in-law) but soon he appears to have felt trapped again: walks to Featherbed rocks began to pall. Of Seaham, he says in a letter of February 1815:

'Upon this dreary coast, we have nothing but county meetings and shipwrecks: and I have this day dined upon fish, which probably dined upon the crews of several colliers lost in the late gales. But I saw the sea once more in all the glories of surf and foam...'

The character of Donna Inez in Byron's great comic masterpiece Don Juan is based on Annabella, as are Miss Millpond and Aurora Raby. The marriage had lasted a year when Annabella left Byron on grounds of cruelty, and alarm over his past sexual irregularities, including incest with his half-sister Augusta, and returned to Seaham Hall with her child, Ada. She wrote, with touching ineptitude, a poem 'On Seaham - 1817' where, in her grief, she recalls the beach which she, 'Hope's unchidden rover/ So joyfully has bounded over':

I would lead thy blithesome footsteps o'er
The sparkling sands of my native shore.
And see thee mount the rocky isle
Where visions of peril seem to smile,
As the waves foamed round my childhood's throne,
And I fearlessly joyed to be alone!

After Byron died, leaving nothing to either Annabella or Ada, she moved in radical circles, and was a friend of Barbara Bodichon, the pioneering feminist. She also became a force in technical education. Harriet Martineau (q.v.) writes of her in Biographical Sketches:

'She preserved such a love for the place [Seaham], up to her latest years, that a pebble from its beach was an acceptable present to her... She spent her income (such as her husband left of it) in fostering every sound educational scheme, and every germ of noble science and useful art, as well as in easing solitary hearts, and making a desert place cheerful with the secret streams of her bounty.'

The Seaham estate was sold in 1821. Annabella's father was oppressed by election debts and her dowry had been a severe drain. Lady Byron's beloved beach, still recovering after a hundred years of colliery tipping, was used as one of the locations in the film Alien III.

Ada (1815-52) who became Lady Lovelace in 1838, had inherited her mother's interest in mathematics and supported the work of Charles Babbage, the computer pioneer. She wrote programmes for his Analytical Engine, and the computer language ADA was named (in 1970) in her honour. The pair's application of probability theory to horse racing was. alas, an expensive failure. On her early death (from uterine cancer), Ada left instructions to Babbage that she was to be interred next to her father (from whom she had parted aged one month) at Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire.

Myers Literary Guide:	The North-East
LORD BYRON (1788 - 1824) Deep in the plantations off the road to the right from New Pittington to Easington Lane, stands Elemore Hall, the birthplace of Annabella (Anna Isabella) Milbanke, wife of Lord Byron. The family home was Seaham Hall where Annabella married Lord Byron in 1815. The drawing-room where the ceremony took place still exists, but has none of the original furnishings. Byron's doubts as to his marriage and the necessity to 'reform thoroughly' keep surfacing in the letters of this period. Annabella had turned him down before and Byron seems to hope for the like again, though no doubt flattered that she had refused six suitors before him. He always speaks rather distantly of Annabella to his friends, and any praise has an unenthusiastic air of duty about it. There is usually a touch of mockery in his description of her virtues and her talents; her interest in mathematics caused him to dub her his 'Princess of Parallelograms'. Byron had begun writing his Hebrew Melodies during October of 1814 at Seaham and worked on them in the library of Halnaby Hall while on honeymoon. Annabella copied them out. Byron was discussing publishers for the work in January 1815, while still at Seaham, and the collection of short poems, mostly on scriptural subjects, was published in April 1815. The work includes 'The Destruction of Sennacherib' ('The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold...') and has appended 'She Walks in Beauty like the Night'. After the honeymoon, Byron was more relaxed among company (he got on well with his mother-in-law) but soon he appears to have felt trapped again: walks to Featherbed rocks began to pall. Of Seaham, he says in a letter of February 1815: 'Upon this dreary coast, we have nothing but county meetings and shipwrecks: and I have this day dined upon fish, which probably dined upon the crews of several colliers lost in the late gales. But I saw the sea once more in all the glories of surf and foam...' The character of Donna Inez in Byron's great comic masterpiece Don Juan is based on Annabella, as are Miss Millpond and Aurora Raby. The marriage had lasted a year when Annabella left Byron on grounds of cruelty, and alarm over his past sexual irregularities, including incest with his half-sister Augusta, and returned to Seaham Hall with her child, Ada. She wrote, with touching ineptitude, a poem 'On Seaham - 1817' where, in her grief, she recalls the beach which she, 'Hope's unchidden rover/ So joyfully has bounded over': I would lead thy blithesome footsteps o'er The sparkling sands of my native shore. And see thee mount the rocky isle Where visions of peril seem to smile, As the waves foamed round my childhood's throne, And I fearlessly joyed to be alone! After Byron died, leaving nothing to either Annabella or Ada, she moved in radical circles, and was a friend of Barbara Bodichon, the pioneering feminist. She also became a force in technical education. Harriet Martineau (q.v.) writes of her in Biographical Sketches: 'She preserved such a love for the place [Seaham], up to her latest years, that a pebble from its beach was an acceptable present to her... She spent her income (such as her husband left of it) in fostering every sound educational scheme, and every germ of noble science and useful art, as well as in easing solitary hearts, and making a desert place cheerful with the secret streams of her bounty.' The Seaham estate was sold in 1821. Annabella's father was oppressed by election debts and her dowry had been a severe drain. Lady Byron's beloved beach, still recovering after a hundred years of colliery tipping, was used as one of the locations in the film Alien III. Ada (1815-52) who became Lady Lovelace in 1838, had inherited her mother's interest in mathematics and supported the work of Charles Babbage, the computer pioneer. She wrote programmes for his Analytical Engine, and the computer language ADA was named (in 1970) in her honour. The pair's application of probability theory to horse racing was. alas, an expensive failure. On her early death (from uterine cancer), Ada left instructions to Babbage that she was to be interred next to her father (from whom she had parted aged one month) at Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire.
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