Rare Intimate Lord Byron Letters to Auction
The letter in which Byron talks about the of an affair
Two autograph letters by Lord George Byron offering a glimpse into his early life and scandalous affairs will go under the hammer at Chorley’s Auctioneers on September 23.
The letters were written in 1805 and 1808 to his London landlady and moneylender Mrs Massingberd, and feature the polite Cambridge University undergraduate arranging his lodgings as well as the notorious libertine dismissing a mistress.
The first letter (estimate: £4,000 – £6,000), written from Trinity College, Cambridge, in December 1805, requests accommodation for Byron and his servant at Mrs Massingberd’s home at 16 Piccadilly. “I should prefer mixing with the family," he writes. "I should be unwilling to put you to the least trouble.” In fact, the relationship between Byron and the Massingberds was fraught as, acting as intermediaries with moneylenders on his behalf, they were frequently left exposed by Byron’s unpaid debts and by 1811 they faced the threat of imprisonment due to his unpaid borrowings.
In contrast, the second letter (estimate: £3,000 – £5,000), dated July 20, 1808, from Brighton, announces the end of his affair with Caroline Cameron, a 16-year-old sex worker: “I have parted with Miss Cameron, and I beg she may have her clothes & the trunk containing them,” he writes.
Byron had taken Cameron to Brighton in disguise, passing her off as his brother, a scandal that fed London gossip columns for years and significantly damaged his reputation. In other private letters, Byron admitted the intensity of their relationship, which left him “nearly worn out.”
Both letters carry interesting provenance, passing from Edmund Lionel Wells-Dymoke (1814–1892) through the novelist Anthony Powell (1905-2000), before being presented to journalist and historian Hugh Massingberd (1946-2007), direct descendent of the Massingberd’s with whom Byron corresponds in these letters.
“These two letters vividly illustrate the radically different sides of Byron’s early adulthood,” said Werner Freundel, Chorley’s Director. “In one, he is the courteous student negotiating lodgings; in the other, the rakish young aristocrat embroiled in scandal. Together, they offer collectors an unusually intimate insight into the private world of one of literature’s greatest and most controversial figures.”
The letters will be offered in Chorley’s forthcoming Fine Books, Maps and Manuscripts sale on 23 September.
