The Romantics are figures that persist in the public’s memory, whether through English Literature set texts, new film adaptations of Frankenstein, cheesy vampire books or pop culture references to the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” rockstar of his era, Lord Byron. Why is it we keep returning to these historic figures and their great works time and time again? 210 years on, the same issues and questions that faced this set of revolutionaries now face us – and maybe the answers can be found in texts that have been with us for over 2 centuries.

When show cowriter Natasha Atkinson and I started writing 1816, a new musical about the summer that brought us Frankenstein and the first modern vampire novel, I thought we were writing a comedy about 5 overdramatic poets on a disastrous writer’s retreat. There is much a modern audience can connect to within the show – Mary Shelley’s struggle for recognition as a young woman with famous parents and a famous husband after the traumatic loss of her child, Byron as the first modern celebrity and his struggles with fame, Percy Shelley’s political activism, Polidori’s exclusion from the group and strained, complex relationship with Byron, and Claire Clairmont’s desperation for support from a man who used her and cast her aside, in a world staged against her. But that was as far as the connection went. Romanticism as a movement only influenced musical inspiration and Percy Shelley’s grandiose speeches.

But, as the show has grown, going on to sell out two nights at the Camden Fringe and a run in Cambridge, and as drafts upon drafts have been edited and staged, I find myself relating more and more to the motivations of these five literary legends. Back then, Europe was in a post-Napoleonic war recession, exacerbated by a volcanic eruption responsible for mass food shortages and constant rain. Industrialism was in its early stages and the future was uncertain. Sounds familiar, in many ways. In an uncertain modern world, standing on the precipice of a technological revolution, I found myself drawn to the concepts of Romanticism. Art for art’s sake – and the value in the process of creation – in the face of a generative AI revolution. Connection with nature, in an increasingly digital world. The themes continued to weave themselves into my life, and with each draft, they came out stronger and more personal.

The writers, too, have cemented themselves in my mind, now that we near the one-year anniversary since the debut of the show, and nearly 4 years since the idea was first agreed upon. Polidori has always been a driving force within the show, as someone on the fringes of a group of successful creatives, a scientist aspiring to write something great, using his words as a tool to wield power and enact revenge in an unjust situation. But Lord Byron has continued to grow on me, despite my personal loyalty to the travelling doctor who wrote a revenge novel about his mistreatment.

As a famous figure drowning in infamy, scandal, and affair accusations, Byron can sometimes reach a mythical status among both his fans and his enemies. This is not by accident. A lot of his reputation and the reports of his personality that survive are an image he carefully curated and chose to project. Any man with an upbringing as turbulent as his, coloured by his disability, queerness, abuse and religious guilt, would struggle with self-image. Then, he was thrown into the public eye. Surrounded by devotees and critics, who wouldn’t turn the pedestal they’d been raised onto into a fortress of legend, rumour and glory? We see the exact same issues with parasocialism and blurring the boundaries between stage persona and personal life now. It does not absolve damage done, but it explains why he makes the choices he does to an audience who understands exactly the damage fame can do.

1816 has tended more and more towards these grey areas as the show has gone on. Explicitly asking what price would you pay for greatness? and are the works that survive the full story, or just warped perspectives that we piece together into a finished product?. Though the musical is, at its core, material taken from Polidori’s diary, bringing justice to his and Claire Clairmont’s often-forgotten stories, it is so much more than that. It is a discussion of Romanticism and the vital importance of creation and art. It is a reflection on the issues facing women, both in the 19th Century and now. It is legacy, ambition and how the collective memory reinterprets history. We will never have answers to the questions we pose (not without a time machine to help), but we can do our best to be open about who these people were – flawed humans, outcasts from British society, revolutionaries, legends, failures, all of the above. Thoroughly modern, yet lost to time. We hope to capture this, in a show that throws together Romantic-classical music with jazz and pop, weaving original poetry excerpts in with fanfiction jokes.

The Romantics may be long gone, but their ambitions, the hurdles they faced and their impact on the world around them persist to this day for a reason. Though we, as a theatrical production, like to joke about Byron Summer and #BringBackRomanticism2026, maybe there are some things we can genuinely learn from this summer, 210 years on. Whether it’s Percy Shelley’s call to write as a way to free yourself from the weight of expectations and capture the world around you, or how Polidori reclaims the power in his narrative, we hope the show does more now than provide an hour of entertaining jokes shared between five young adults thrust into the spotlight – now somewhat literally.

1816 is running at the Brighton Fringe, at the Lantern Theatre, 9pm on the 18th May and 2pm on the 19th May. 1816 will also be performed at Southwold Arts Centre on the 30^th October. The official cast album for 1816 is set for release to all streaming platforms in early June. Find out more at 1816musical.com

With Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, the man Byron had idolized since his youth meets an inglorious end, and with him, Byron’s hopes for a new age. He laments: ‘I am utterly bewildered and confounded’! After such disappointment, how does Byron view his fallen hero?

In ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’ (1814), Byron summons a cast of characters from history, mythology, fact and fable, searching for some counterpart for Napoleon who can ‘dazzle and dismay’, and represent both the best and worst of humanity. ‘Weigh’d in the balance’, Byron writes, ‘hero dust is vile as vulgar clay’. This paper goes through the Ode, introducing Byron’s dramatis personae and discussing what they reveal about Byron’s imagination.

In a final twist, however, less than a year since the Ode, Napoleon escapes from exile in a sensational return to power. As he looms over Europe again, how will Byron’s characterizations hold up?

The Byron Society presents a lecture by Prof Greg Kucich (University of Notre Dame).

This talk considers the ‘Trans-Mediterranean’ contexts of Byron’s life and writings in relation to the riveting correspondence between the geopolitics of his time and our own.  The term ‘Trans-Mediterranean’ derives from an ongoing Byron Project initiated by Jeffrey Cox and Greg Kucich with a bicentennial Symposium in Rome (2024), featuring a cluster of world-renowned Byron scholars, on the topic of Byron’s literary and biographical engagements with the multitudinous cultures of the Mediterranean region.  Inspired by what the eminent scholar Marilyn Butler has designated as Romanticism’s ‘Cult of the South’, Byron drew on his extensive lived and literary experiences of the widely varied inflections of the Mediterranean ‘South’ to formulate in his poetry a transformative and liberatory embrace of racial, ethnic, national, and religious hybridity—a fluid identity and poetic consciousness most vibrantly manifested in the so-called Turkish tales, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Don Juan.  This presentation will track the Byron Project’s developing take on the high contemporary relevance of such personal and poetical hybridity from its 2024 Byron Rome Symposium (which featured a rousing event at the Keats-Shelley House), through a special journal issue of Studies in Romanticism, and toward a forthcoming book collection of scholarly essays.  Attention will centre in this talk on Byron’s positioning of cultural hybridity against the post-Waterloo restorations of monarchial power and reactionary government throughout Europe and the keen messages of that confrontation for our own ‘tempestuous day’.

‘I have a thorough aversion to his character and a very moderate admiration of his genius; he is great in so little a way’ (Charles Lamb to Joseph Cottle, May 26^th 1820). Lamb’s takedown of Byron seems uncompromising, but what can we gain from putting the two authors in conversation? In this lecture, co-hosted with the Charles Lamb Society, Matthew Ward will tackle the prickly question of variance. His lecture will think both about textual variants, and about the potentially differing views of archival material offered by Byron and Lamb. What does each writer make of or feel about manuscripts, and what are we to make of theirs? In what ways are Byron and Lamb at variance with each other? And how might those apparent differences lead to or reveal a strange sort of resemblance or likeness in their writing?

When Byron published the first two cantos of Don Juan in 1819 the first readers of the poem did not know what to make of it. It was a poem that they had to learn how to read. In exploring this claim, Prof Richard Cronin (University of Glasgow) will make another, much larger claim: the strategies Byron’s readers had to develop to understand this strange new poem were then applied to other works, as well. By the time Byron died, his readers were opening their copies of Chaucer or Shakespeare and were surprised to find that they seemed to be reading Byronic poets. Learning to read Don Juan had changed the way that they understood the whole history of English literature. Cronin suggests that Byron’s poem retains that power. In his talk, he will detail how after immersing himself in Don Juan for three or four years in order to write a book on that poem, he was surprised to find himself returning to Jane Austen and reading her very differently. ‘Jane Austen and Byron knew each other’s work but Jane Austen never had the opportunity to read Don Juan’, Cronin says. ‘Nevertheless it was the poem that Jane Austen never read, I now recognize, that had changed the way that I was reading her novels.’ In his talk, Prof Cronin will ask what that tells us about Jane Austen, and what it tells us about Byron.

This talk explores how Thomas Wildman curated Byron’s ancestral home of Newstead Abbey and the experience of visitors, both literary and utterly disinterested, thus creating a plethora of enduring impressions and lies about Byron. Dr Sam Hirst explores the research process in sorting through the rumours as well as the impact of Wildman’s curation on both contemporary understandings of Byron and on common present-day myths and misconceptions.

This talk explores how volcanos have shaped the Gothic as a genre and how Lord Byron emerged as the ultimate ‘Volcanic Gothic’ celebrity.

Byron’s public image as a scandalously ‘vampiric’ figure is well known from Polidori’s ‘The Vampire’ and Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, but this paper explores how Byron and his admirers often preferred the volcanic metaphor to the vampiric as a means of talking about his poetic genius and fiery public persona.

This talk will set Byron’s work in the context of widespread scientific and popular interest in volcanos in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, from geological studies of Etna and Vesuvius to popular fascination with the excavations at Pompeii. I suggest that, as Gothic signifiers, the volcano and the vampire emerge as cultural cousins: both serve as portals in time where menaces from the past might be spewed forth to menace the present, and both producing uncannily petrified people as embodiments of Gothic anxiety.

Understanding how the Gothic has been shaped by volcanos affords us a new way of reading some of Byron’s most famous works and tracing his influences in texts as diverse as Little Women, Dracula and The Lord of the Rings.

IN-PERSON EVENT

Time: 6:30-8:00 GMT

Registration: Here

Enquiries: 

contact@thebyronsociety.com

Come and celebrate Byron’s birthday by reading and discussing together the poem in which he discovered his humorous poetic voice: the first work in which he used the Italian verse form of ottava rima to bring the characteristic light tone of his conversation and his letters into his poetry. In Beppo, published in 1818, the poet known for his melodramatic romances and gloomy meditations suddenly revealed himself as a witty and chatty raconteur, and this was the voice he chose for Don Juan from 1819.

The session—a reading of extracts from Beppo of about 30 minutes, followed by a discussion of the poem—will be chaired by Ken Robbie, Chairman of the Byron Society, and led by Dr Christine Kenyon Jones, Research Fellow of King’s College London and author of Dangerous to Show: Byron and his Portraits (2020) and Jane Austen & Lord Byron: Regency Relations (2024). Please contact us if you would like to volunteer as a reader for the event.

My father Mr. Chao-Chun Chou (周朝俊先生) completed an article in Taiwanese Min Nan entitled “George Gordon, Lord Byron: The Destruction of Sennacherib,” shortly before his passing at 90 in 2016.

Father introduces Byron and this poem to the Taiwanese people through this article, which is essentially a Biblical commentary on the passage in 2 Kings 18-19 that Byron’s poem is based upon. Imbedded within this work is father’s translation of this Byron poem in anapestic tetrameter into a Taiwanese Min Nan poem in the Seven Character Ancient Chinese Poetry format (七言古詩). 

Byron’s poetic prowess transforms the Biblical story into a lively drama. The vivid imagery makes father’s commentary engaging to read. Father emphasizes on Bryon’s creative vitality, boundless imaginations, witty expressions, and across the lands eye-witness on-the-spot reporting style that captures the essence of the story about God’s miraculous deliverance of His faithful believers. Father briefly touches on Byron’s unruly personality and scandalous life, and concludes with positive affirmations of Byron’s heroism for the Greek cause.  

The Taiwan Church News (TCN), the first newspaper in Taiwan founded by the British missionary Mr. Thomas Barclay in 1885, published my father’s work in the 1st issue of this year 2025(3801) in the paper form (please see the above photos) and the e-form:  https://tcnn.org.tw/archives/227593.

Father was raised in a big loving family with more than a dozen siblings to grow up with. His asthma not only greatly limited his life experiences, but also cut short a promising English teaching career.  He felt as if he’s running in a never-ending marathon, out of breath at all time, that his life could be snatched away at any given moment. My loving mother, a professionally trained nurse, was a true lifesaver to him whenever a severe attack required a shot to stabilize his condition.

Otherwise, my father, a gentleman scholar, was very much loved, supported, and respected by his big family, his students, and the church community where he served as an elder. It was this enormous blessing from all aspects of his life father received that propelled him to walk steadfastly with the Lord to safely sail through the vicissitudes of life. Father viewed his asthma a blessing like Apostle Paul’s” thorn in the flesh” that kept him humble before the Lord.

When every mortal being’s eventual Assyrian army, the horseman of death, finally arrived to take down the sacred Jerusalem within father, he resolutely kept his faith in God’s deliverance. The angel of the Lord came down and swiftly put everything in a standstill – ascending into eternity, father silently breathed out his last breath on earth. I like to think that wisdom gleamed in this broad stroke Byron poem played a part in father’s peaceful departure.

Nat and Natasha studied music together in secondary school before pursuing degrees in Science and Law, respectively, at Cambridge. Despite this, they continued to combine their creative passions, culminating in 1816. Uniting art and science, as Polidori and the Shelleys did in their own lives and literary works, is a key theme that runs throughout the show. Lord Byron’s connection to the University remains a great inspiration, especially as Nat studies at Trinity College. 

The show explores themes of Romanticism, academic pressure, and creative ambition. Byron battles inner turmoil as he attempts to write a masterpiece – the  pressure of his legacy, his fame, and his humanity weighing heavy on his mind. 

The writings of the Romantics play a central role in 1816 and is adapted both into the script and into various songs throughout the musical. An extract from Byron’s poem ‘To Thomas Moore’ is sung as a toast by Byron and Percy Shelley. Claire Clairmont’s ballad is structured as a letter to Byron and is made up of various snippets from her actual writings. The music itself takes inspiration from multiple places, with more typically Classical sounds in the earlier songs, including a strong Mozart and Beethoven influence for the opening. As the tension rises, more Romantic sounds are used, such as the Rachmaninoff-esque, heavy textures in Frankenstein, and rhythms like those of composers such as Liszt, who himself was greatly influenced by Byron’s poetry.

1816 is being performed at the Theatro Technis, London, on the 6th and 7th August 2025 at 9pm, the Lion & Unicorn Theatre, London, from 30th September- 4th October 2025 at 7.30pm, and the Corpus Playroom, Cambridge, from 15th – 8th October 2025 at 7pm. The link below contains tickets and more information about the show:

https://1816musical.com