‘Little Deevil Geordie Byron’

Abstract

The few personal reminiscences [of Byron’s childhood] that have been gleaned in later years scarcely deserve the same credence as those that belong to an earlier date. Some, however, are sufficiently characteristic to be chronicled. Here, for example, is a story which illustrates the love of practical joking that marked the ‘young English nickom’, the ‘little deevil Geordie Byron’. His mother had taken him to visit Lady Abercromby of Birkenbog: the two ladies were talking in the parlour window; the boy escaped to the room above. Suddenly a piercing scream was heard, and an object, clad in the boy’s coat and hat, shot headlong past the window where the ladies sat. Byron had dressed a pillow in his clothes and, with a shriek, launched it from the room above, in the hope of persuading his mother that he had accidentally fallen. It is, perhaps, as a sequel to this story that the following is told: Lady Abercromby advised his mother to punish him for some offence. He received his chastisement; but, that ended, walked up to Lady Abercromby and struck her in the face, saying, ‘That’s for meddling. But for you I should not have been beaten.’

‘The Childhood and School Days of Byron’, Nineteenth Century, XLIII (1898) 72–3.