Or most of it.
Once I decided to write about Harrow, I wondered whether there was a Byron angle to include in the book. (Yes, I was that casual about it—I was in what my friend Patricia calls the “wool-gathering” phase of creativity.) I actually had read very little Byron before starting this project, and knew next to nothing about his life. I started with his Wikipedia entry… and I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Then I picked up Benita Eisler’s fine biography of Byron, and then I REALLY couldn’t believe what I was reading. Byron’s life is not the stuff of one novel—it’s fuel for twenty. His biography is the dirtiest book I’ve read in a long time.
By necessity, I focused on a few “true facts” about Byron and kept a tight focus on those. In 1809 Byron left England under mysterious circumstances—why?
Why not link it to a murder? I decided that this would be part of the mystery that my characters must solve.
Byron did have a very serious male lover, John Edleston, when he attended Cambridge. Edleston was a local boy. Edleston did die of tuberculosis. Byron did write some amazing poetry about him, especially after Edleston died, including the chilling line What are a thousand living loves / to that which cannot quit the dead? Byron did have a lame schoolmate, named William Harness, at Harrow, who became a lifelong friend. I conflated the two into “John Harness,” and added details to Harness’s character from the lore about the poor local boys who attended Harrow on scholarship and were abused, based on Christopher Tyerman’s authoritative History of Harrow School.
I love the name Harness, the reason for which I will explain elsewhere.
Harrow was rife with erotic, physical homosexual relationships in Byron’s day—according to the books anyway—and in Byron’s time, did go through a period of being squalid and overrun.
Byron really did—I just love this anecdote—have a serious relationship with a hooker that he “bought,” and he really did dress her up as a boy and drag her around introducing her as his (male) cousin. She really did have a miscarriage in a hotel while dressed as a boy. Her name was Caroline Cameron. I conflated her with the “Mary” of Byron’s poem “To Mary”—who is quite certainly a different person—to elevate her significance by linking her to his poetry.
In addition to reading Byron’s (and Harrow’s) biography for the novel, I also read a lot of Byron’s poetry. This is being thrown into the briar patch. While the early stuff is very conventional, the later work is incredibly fresh even to a 21st century reader. It seems to be divided between what I would call Byron’s posing, lugubrious stuff (Childe Harold, Manfred) and his hilarious, novelistic comic stuff (Don Juan). I will cease my lit-crit there, since my take on Byron is not what either of us is here for. I do remember being in a Manhattan emergency room (for some injury), and enduring that interminable wait for treatment, and having this fat collection of his poems in my bag with me, and passing the time by whipping eagerly through the pages of Don Juan. I got a comment from the Wall Street guy on the next bed. “That’s an unusual book to be reading in here,” or something like that. Of course he didn’t know that I was just racing to the end of the Canto to find out whether or not Juan shtups the Moroccan girl.