If she lived today, Lady Caroline Lamb would be a weekly tabloid headline. Her exploits in an era when scandal was forever threatening to burst the bonds of propriety like the stitches of a lady’s corset rival anything that the ever-marrying Kardashians or the dress-code defying Miley Cyrus could possibly do. Born into the aristocracy, Caroline was fluent in several languages, and was an accomplished artist and later a novelist, whose personality intrigued Charles Dickens. But in early 19th century England, the daughter of a future Earl was expected to do one thing: marry and bear an heir. And a young man of a pedigreed family had the same responsibility. As Regency author Jane Austen famously phrased it in Pride and Prejudice,
Although the paternity of William Lamb’s birth was in doubt, he nonetheless inherited his father’s title and married Caroline Ponsonby in 1805, when she was 19 and he was 26. It was a love match, although Caroline was shocked by some of her husband’s sexual proclivities. Caroline suffered two miscarriages before delivering the requisite heir, but her son was mentally handicapped. Remarkable for the times, the young mother chose to keep her son at home instead of having him hidden away, an early and impressive instance of her resistance to what other people thought.
That immunity to public opinion was about to explode. In 1812, Caroline read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written by a man who would likewise have been at home in the tabloid headlines of the modern era. When told that the writer had a physical deformity, Caroline was undeterred, saying, “If he was as ugly as Aesop, I must know him.â€
George Gordon Byron was an aristocrat, a member of the House of Lords, and after the publication of Childe Harold in 1812, famous. Upon seeing Byron for the first time, Caroline uttered the quote that is most often associated with her, describing him a “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.†Byron described Caroline as “the cleverest, most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little thing that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.â€
The affair that become the stuff of legend lasted for six months and shocked Regency England, which was no stranger to scandal but took offense at Caroline, who conducted her tumultuous romance and later rejection by her lover in full view. Donning the garb of a page, she would visit him, without a female companion, at his home, which was an unpardonable social gaffe for a woman. On one such uninvited visit, she wrote “Remember me†in a book on his desk. This inspired Byron, by now tired of her and her emotional unpredictability, to write the unflattering Remember Thee! Remember Thee which ends, “Thou false to him, thou fiend to me.â€
Byron’s marriage to Caroline’s wealthy cousin Annabella Milbanke did not help the cast-off lover’s emotional state, but when the marriage proved a failure, Caroline did not hesitate to add fuel to the rumors of Byron’s depravity. She wrote a novel, Glenarvon, which featured a thinly disguised portrayal of her ex-lover as one of the characters. Byron’s review , although disgruntled, was at least poetic: “I read Glenarvon, too, by Caro Lamb; God damn!â€
But Caroline, or Caro as Byron had nicknamed her, did not have the physical stamina for such a dramatic life. The novel earned her the aristocracy’s outrage and she was shunned in society. She fell victim to alcohol and laudanum, and near the end of her life was in the care of a full-time physician. Her husband was at her side when she died at the age of 43. Byron had died four years earlier. Their passion, however, lives on in their writings, and in their quotations. Time will tell if the Kardashians prove to be as eloquent.