A fascinating account the decline and ruin of a noble English family. We all know that the famous poet was, "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"and have been delighted by accounts of his flamboyance, colour, and genius. The fact that he was the heir of two generations who had burned their way through property, wealth and privilege helps to explain and enrich the background to his extraordinary talent. Throughout history it has been the nightmare of every noble family that a single dissolute heir can ruin the fortune assiduously built up by generations before. The Byrons had been a leading family since the Conquest and their glorious country home, Newsted Abbey was acquired in 1540 after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. Nearly a hundred years later in 1643, after exemplary service to the Crown the Byron barony was created. All went well until the succession of William, the fifth baron who, as this fine book describes, comprehensively ruined the wealth and reputation of the family not just through dissolution and stupidity, but also it would appear through arrogance, bitterness and malice.
In addition to the sad decline of the owners of Newstead this also details the constant struggle by the privileged and entitled members of the family to scrounge money to support their lifestyles. They nearly all seemed to be in debt and borrowing from each other. Despite this the family were capable of producing some of the old flair that created their prominence in the first place. In contrast to the character of William the fifth baron his brother John Byron was the famous "Foul Weather Jack" the intrepid explorer and admiral. As the book makes clear, in each generation their was usually one good brother and one bad. Unfortunately it was usually the wrong brother who inherited the title. Dissolution and idleness are the bane of families from generation to generation. We think of the Georgian period as a time of energetic achievement but as this excellent book makes clear, even in the greatest families fortunes are made by the good ones and lost by the useless and entitled.

It took me almost a month to read this book because it’s a lot to take in and maybe wasn’t for me.
The research for this book is obviously one of the best and went to a great length but many times I had to stop reading because I felt like reading a history book from my school years and not an actual fiction story with moments from real life.
It’s interesting and compelling and I’m sure many people will enjoy it but unfortunately it wasn’t for me.

Many thanks to the publisher for my review copy.

I've been looking forward to this .. it's always great fun to read about Byron and this volume purports to show us the lineage that resulted in the great poet. Since there are many biographies of him, his scandalous life is reasonably known, but his ancestors who are not known so much...at least to me .. (I'd like to have more about his mother) were equally outrageous and it's interesting to know that he inherited the traits of transgression. Very readable and presumably well researched, despite confusion about so many names!, this is a treat .. I like allusions to Newstead (sic) abby , and the opening effortlessly walks us through the place with byron and his mother seeing it for the first time. He was lucky to have such a canny mother even if he found her plain. She stuck to her guns keeping the place. His father sounds an appalling eccentric. Much fun and thanks to Brand for setting this history out. I couldn't put it down.

I am sorry I cannot finish this. It is simply a stream of factual sentences with no cadence. I am not drawn int o the era or the people. I have struggled through 20% but cannot take more

What a fabulous read - a fascinating romp through several generations of the Byron family, taking in events and news covering early exploration of new continents, seafaring adventures, murder, elopement and family scandals.

The stories of the Byron family span the Georgian period and the changing fortunes and characters that contributed to the slow decline of the family as it leads up to its finest and most famous member.

Emily Brand educates and entertains as she pulls you along in a whirlwind of events, written with a lovely light touch over evident and extensive research.

This is a really enjoyable book that ends with the ultimate Lord Byron; I would love to keep reading and see what the author has to say about Byron's life and historical context in more detail - it would make a super sequel!

An interesting take on Byron and his family with lesser-known facts. Well researched and presented.

Emily Brand in The Fall of the House of Byron gives us a carefully researched biography of the Byron family starting with the 4th Lord in 1722 and ending with the tragic death of Lord George Byron [ the 6th Lord ] in 1824. in the intervening 100 years we are hugely entertained with the Byron' family history. One in which the Lords and their families, undertake intrepid naval exploration, face accusations of murder, indulge in political intrigue, experience ever declining wealth and suffer fierce sibling rivalry. All this set against the background of Newstead Abbey, the family seat. The description of the physical decline of Newstead and its beautiful gardens is particularly vivid as are the tales of John Murray who loyally cared for the house and grounds for over 60 years. One might expect a tale of a family dynasty to be heavy and somewhat dry but, with so many colourful characters, this book succeeds in providing us with a thoroughly enjoyable read

When one thinks of Lord Byron, one immediately thinks of such things as his romantic poetry, an early tragic death and a how shall one kindly put it, a rather hedonistic lifestyle. The question posed on reading this extensive and meticulously detailed study of his 18th century forebears and relations is whether there was something inherent in the Byron family DNA that would perhaps explain his behaviour. The answer would appear that there probably was.

Inheriting not only a peerage but also the crumbling early eighteenth century, Newstead Abbey with little money to go with it, seems in retrospect something of a poisoned chalice. The book not only provides a detailed account of Lord Byron's ancestors over three generations but will also give the reader an insight into the tumultuous times of the 18th century. Jacobite rebellion, colonial wars and voyages of exploration are all found here. This is a fascinating and informative read that will provide an additional appreciation into the study and understanding of Byron.

The Fall of the House of Byron is a lavishly researched, deeply evocative, and substantial biography of the house of Byron, into which George Gordon — later known as Lord Byron, the poet and traveller — is born. I’ve had a fascination with Lord Byron since my university days, and back then I read Fiona MacCarthy’s Byron: Life and Legend, which I rather enjoyed. The Fall of the House of Byron is, in contrast, much broader in scope in that it covers the family itself, from his ancestors three generations back to Lord Byron’s own life.

This was a fascinating and easy read, if a little dry in places, but on the whole entertaining. It is, of course, rather scandalous given the family at its centre, and if your interest lies with the inter-generational politics and scandal that preceded Lord Byron himself, then this is a worthy addition to your reading list. However, if your interest is more in the man himself, that is George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron, whose poetry and exploits still rivet us to this day, then you may be disappointed as he is less present than perhaps a reader would like. After all, though, this book is about his family and the circumstances which lead him to inherit Newstead Abbey. Recommended.

I received an e-ARC from the publisher, John Murray Press, through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Not quite what I had envisaged! Have always been fascinated, like a million others, with the story of Lord Byron and so was intrigued and eager to read about him and his family. However, unfortunately this was not to be the case and the poet was very conspicuous by his absence! I found I was skipping most of the naval stories though I did find the lives of John, William and Isabella interesting. I felt the author couldn’t quite make up her mind as to whether she was writing a biographical novel or a factual account and was sadly disappointed with the general outcome.

Meticulous research by the historian Emily Brand enables her to introduce a credible cast of characters who all play their part in The Fall of the House of Byron. She has delved deep and so provides a wonderful biography, with 'warts and all' of the family Byron written with such lively style that you might be reading a historical novel.

Loved this book, the author really brings the characters to life. Very well researched, and extremely well written.

This is an excellent read about Byron, and his ancestors. It begins with the arrival of George Gordon Byron, as a child, arriving at Newstead Abbey, with his mother. The young Byron has inherited the property, against the odds, and we then learn how this happened and the history of some of his relatives. For, although the most famous Byron was known as, “Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know,” he certainly had some competition to be the most scandalous Byron. From, ‘the whore, my Lady Byron,’ mentioned by Samuel Pepys as all too familiar with the bedroom of Charles II, to ‘Foulweather Jack,’ who survived shipwreck and mutiny, this is a story of almost unbelievable scandals, gossip, tragedy and financial incompetence.

Obviously, author Emily Brand makes the suggestion that the branch, as it were, never falls far from the tree. It is all too easy to make this argument, in retrospect. Still, this is an interesting read, with the history of the family well-researched and the links between history, and family, well woven. Very readable and wonderfully scandalous.

The Fall of the House of Byron: Scandal and Seduction by Emily Brand
Publisher: John Murray Press
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Publish Date 16 April 2020

Star Rating 4.5 Stars

The Byron's of this book start three generations back from the infamous George Gordon, Lord Byron, the poet and continues down to him. Within these three generations the House of Byron, Newstead Abbey goes from being a premier house in Britain to a hollow derelict shell. However, Newstead Abbey also stands as a portrait of Dorian Grey to the fall of the family Byron. Each generation has its heroes and its villains but ultimately, they were brought up self-entitled and didn't have a healthy respect for either money or their reputation. Thus leading to a fascinating read!

Apart from the name Byron and knowing one was a scandalized poet when I began this read I did not know anything else about the family. After reading this book I've googled all of them. It's amazing that so many fascinating characters could all have lived at the same time in the one family. The 5th Baron Byron, William, oversaw the abbey to become great and also oversaw its ruin as he developed into a Scrooge-like character but without any financial sense. His sibling was Fowl Weather Jack Byron, who went missing for several of his early years in the Navy due to ship wreak and later rose to become an Admiral. His sister Isabella, put love before sense thereby destroying her name, and to make matters worse the poet's father was rumored to have had an incestuous relationship with his sister, which seems to have carried on down the line involving the poet and his stepsister. These persons are only a small part of the larger family!

I liked the author's writing style in telling the Byron's story. Some biographies you read are very dry but Brand's style is engaging and easy read. I managed to finish this book in around three sittings and I was equally shocked and amused.

Unfortunately, the Byron family suffered from what almost all families of that time suffered from, that is, the honor of naming children after relatives. This lead to a vast cast of Williams, Johns, Carolines, etc. The book became far too confusing to follow and I accept there isn't much an author can do about people's names when writing a biography. I really enjoyed this book and the confusion can be overlooked, so I gave it an additional half star to mitigate the one star it dropped due to such confusion. Final rating 4.5 stars. If you are interested in the scandalous Byron family you must read this book!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher John Murray Press for an electronic advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

The book is well-researched, and well-written but unfortunately I found it rather long, and dull in parts. I don't think the wider Byron family are sufficiently interesting to sustain an entire book.

Emily Brand has embarked on a labour of love and a thoroughly researched and detailed account of Lord Byron’s family over the preceding generations. While none are as remotely interesting or as scandalous as the most famous offspring, it’s always interesting to see from whence the poet sprang. If I have a question about this and other kinds of ‘family’ biographies is how much can we attribute greatness or indeed ‘badness’ to a family and how much comes from an individual’s genius and proclivities? I am not sure the author was sure in her own mind.

I think you need to be an avid fan for this to really work - I was merely vaguely interested in THE Byron, and this very detailed and very long tome was a little too much Byron-adjacent for a dilettante like me, I'm afraid. It has reams of biographical detail on the grandfather, the father, the aunt, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Clearly well-researched, well-written and containing intriguing insights into 18th century English aristocracy, but I found myself flagging at the sheer weight of information.

Interesting, especially if interested in the romantic poets. If you are interested, I would recommend visiting the Keats, Shelley, Byron house in Rome - you can see the room where Keats died!

I received an ARc from Netgalley in return for an honest review.

I have mixed feelings about this book.

The author has clearly done an enormous amount of research and it shows. In fact it shows too much. Chunks of it are like an info-dump - heavy, brutal and almost indecipherable. Other parts are beautifully descriptive and almost poetic. I found the flipping backwards and forwards in the timeline really disjointed and confusing. I realise the author was talking about the Byron family as a whole and using George, Lord Byron as the tease but it didn’t always work for me. I found the changing tenses really irritating. I prefer a consistent. Past tense in reporting historical events.

On the whole I commend the hard work that the author put in to this book; it will probably become a fixed text in academia but I cannot say I enjoyed it all. I think it’s a book to dip into for short tasters which will fascinate and entertain. It wasn’t a book that I found easy to read from beginning to end uninterrupted!

As modern popular opinion returns to something like its old disapproving view of Lord Byron, a book which situates him in the dynasty of which he was a part (albeit initially a fairly marginal one) and reminds us that compared to his family, he really wasn't that bad. Spendthrift, fuckboy and occasional whiner he might have been, but dear heavens, at least he was interesting about it, whereas plenty of them just read like lazy sketches of dislikeable aristocrats, fit only to serve as antagonists in broad-brush historical dramas. In particular, Byron's predecessor to the title, William, 5th Baron Byron, looms at the heart of this book like an especially disagreeable toad – killing a friend in suspicious circumstances while young, squandering his inheritance, selling off the family silver (and anything else), chiselling money wherever he can, even at one stage damming the river that runs through Newstead's grounds, in order that he might extort huge fees from those downstream for the privilege of his visiting neither drought nor flood on them. And then, when it was pointed out in the courts that even 18th century aristocrats couldn't take the piss quite that much, the very picture of outraged entitlement at this unforgivable intrusion on his perceived rights! Not that he was any better in his youth, having always been pushy and arrogant when he thought he was in the stronger position, and a snivelling coward the minute anyone pushed back - whether that be an intended 'romantic' conquest, or the Jacobites. Rackety in youth, miserly in old age, Brand gamely attempts to elicit some sympathy for the old bastard, but it's a losing battle. Although Doctor Who fans will be particularly interested in William's wife, Elizabeth Shaw - a possible alternative fate for her? And, while fairly ghastly, no worse than she normally seems to suffer in the spin-offs, poor woman.

It's clearly William's generation who most caught Brand's attention; the beastly Baron himself, his naval brother John, their romantic sister Isabella, and the other two. I suspect this may be at least in part down to the richness of the archival material for that period, and she has dug into the primary sources for it; earlier generations, on the other hand, are a little prone to getting lost in a thicket of 'might' and 'perhaps', and too much being inferred from comparison with a family of similar station when the whole reason we're reading the book is the particularity of this clan. Still, once she gets on to her stars, and to a slightly lesser extent their children (the generation including the poet's parents), the book comes alive. For all its research, it still dallies with the novelistic school of history/biography, and I'm sure the italicised passages of presumed interiority in particular will make some purists' skin crawl. Still, fuck it - history is always telling stories to some extent, and there are benefits to being blatant about that. If anything, my main problem is the stories missed along the way; compared to the last literary biography I read, Eleanor Fitzsimons on Nesbit, there's a sad lack of introductions to other characters of note whose paths cross the Byrons'. Sure, we probably don't need an explanation of Samuel Johnson, and even Charles James Fox you can maybe get away with just dropping in, but it seems a shame not to tell readers more about the now largely forgotten figures of the age, for example George Selwyn. He was a close friend of Isabella's son Frederick, and there are several quotes from their correspondence, but if you didn't know the period you'd assume that was about it, and have him down as a fairly generic gentleman and inactive MP, when in fact he was a spectacularly weird figure even by the standards of the time, dogged by (oddly fond, at least sometimes) rumours of necrophilia.

If there's any kind of hero in the book it's probably John, one of the figures here who'd merit the occasional biography even if he hadn't ended up with a more famous descendant. A sailor, he would rise to the rank of Vice-Admiral and command British forces in America's war of independence; on earlier missions, he'd established Britain's claim to the Falklands (the only other inhabitants at the time, it should be noted, were French – no indigenous people; no Argentinians, because they didn't exist yet; not even any Spaniards), completed what was at the time the fastest circumnavigation of the globe, and paved the way (if that's not an entirely inappropriate metaphor at sea) for the subsequent voyages of Captain Cook. Compared to most of the Byrons, he was also reasonably good at not being an utter swine to his spouse (even if, among various other infidelities, she did walk in on him screwing the teenage chambermaid) or spending way beyond his means (even if he still ended up having to sell his Grosvenor Square house to cover various debts – and worse, seeing it taken by his old foe John Adams, who would make it the first US embassy in Britain). He was also, alas, spectacularly unlucky. His first big naval trip turned into an epic tale of shipwreck, mutiny and woe, the account of which is filled with sentences like this: "Their first meal for two days was a miserable soup cobbled together from wild celery, a seagull and a bag of 'biscuit dust' which turned out to have been mixed with tobacco and prompted violent retching." Even speaking as a spectacularly fussy eater who once faced Sushisamba's attempt at a vegetarian tasting menu, this sounds like a contender for the worst meal ever, and it's by no means the end of their sorrows. Bodies start turning up, people start going mad, shoes get eaten. John meets and befriends a feral dog, which helps him hunt, but then also gets eaten. When the few survivors finally make it back to Britain, there's a strangely polite court martial which concludes that on the whole it couldn't be helped and doesn't dish out anything worse than a slap on the wrist to one ensign. And after all that, oblivious either to good sense or irony, he's given command of a ship called HMS Vulture!

The worst of it is, that's not even the trip that earned him the sobriquet 'Foul-Weather Jack'. Plenty more nautical nonsense lies ahead – sailors trading their spare shirts for monkeys, the lot. One is left with the impression of a decent-ish fellow with whom you'd nonetheless be reluctant even to go for a walk down the road to the pub, because it would somehow end up with you tumbling into a distant volcano. On top of which, it's an unfortunate alias because as is so often the way with aristocratic families (or indeed, just inefficient families), certain names recur; John's son was also John, but is referred to throughout the book as Jack. He's the one who fathered the poet, and while it might be considered prejudicial, it could also have been clearer to have him as 'Mad Jack' for avoidance of confusion. Lords know, it's not like the ghastly little prick doesn't deserve it, crowing about his own irresistibility and then kicking the maid downstairs at Christmas.

And then you have poor Isabella. In some ways she does very well for herself, marrying up into the Howards (of 'home used for eighties Brideshead' fame, but also one of England's great families in general). She rather takes to domestic life, too, amassing a considerable brood, not to mention a collection of helpful home remedies about as appetising as John's soup – viper broth for fever, anyone? Alas, as will tend to happen when you marry someone a lot older, he doesn't last long, leaving her young son Frederick as Earl of Carlisle (he will go on to be our chief negotiator with the rebellious American colonies, and be challenged to a duel by Lafayette). Isabella, still pretty young by our standards (and not that old even by her time's), likewise becomes Dowager Countess, a station not generally thought to be compatible with staying out dancing and flirting until four in the morning. This could easily be a story of a fun, unconventional woman brought low by sexist times, and to some extent it is, but dear heavens she has terrible taste in men, taking up with a succession of unsuitable types from quiet homebodies to grasping faux-noblemen, and always so softhearted that she keeps funnelling money she doesn't have to various of her impecunious relations, all of whom can then be guaranteed to spend it on something unsuitable before the week is out. In the end, she presents at once a tragic and bathetic figure, neatly summarised by Brand: "She had always been ready to forgive, especially where affairs of the heart were concerned – her downfall had been that she expected the same favour from others."

Running through all this, though, are the details which to us necessarily feel like they prefigure the family's most famous son. Isabella dallies with someone who ends up marrying one of her daughters, round about the same time as William's son breaks an engagement to marry one of John's daughters. As if that weren't sufficient incest theme to set it up, some of Mad Jack's letters to his sister Fanny (and no, the name doesn't help) are tough not to read extremely suspiciously. Nor do they restrain themselves to this line of debauchery; the whole pack (with the possible exception of Reverend Richard, one of the two less exciting siblings who don't feature much) seem to be massive shaggers in general; granted, this was not unusual for men of there age and station, but the women are at it too, not least Isabella's daughter Betty, who at 46 married a naval captain half her age - and who was her daughter-in-law's brother, at that. About the only innovation the most famous Byron seems to have introduced was going for his own sex too. Similarly, he wasn't the family's first writer; several of them wrote bits of poetry, and published works included John's account of his voyages, and Isabella's maxims for young ladies (the latter generally reviewed with an understandable raised eyebrow, as commendable theory she had not herself necessarily manifested in practice). Would any of them be much read now? Well, maybe not, but then how much is Byron actually read compared to how often he's used as shorthand? One of the ahistorical biases which always irks me is the reflex mockery of any creative stirrings by the child of a famous parent. Now, granted, in a world which offers Adam Cohen and Nikolai Tolstoy, the temptation makes sense, and I was as happy as anyone to rip the piss when Bono's son's band was tipped as one to watch in 2020. But equally we should remember how many figures who now seem to stand alone as blazing figures in history were themselves children of the famous when they began, and only subsequently came to eclipse their forebears. Wilde's one classic example, and really Byron is another – it's just that by any standard Byron's inheritance was an especially mixed one. "Some curse hangs over me and mine," he wrote, like the big old goth he was – but he was by no means the first of the line even to suspect that. "There is some Misfortune cast on our family," said Jack; Isabella, that "There is a Planet overrules sone Familys & blasts every Prospect". One might legitimately object that all three of these witnesses were, to use the technical term, messy bitches who live for the drama, but at one point even the more stoical Doctor Johnson suggested "Fiction durst not have driven upon a few months such a conflux of misery", and Foul-Weather Jack was held in Francophone Canada to have become a sort of Flying Dutchman as punishment for his burning of villages in a 1760 conflict. Meaning that by the end, the Poe resonances of the title don't seem entirely unfair – even if there is a certain sleight of hand at work. Because after the poet, himself more an implicit figure here than someone followed in any great detail (there are, after all, plenty of other biographies for that), the title would survive, and pass to another of the more respectable-ish Byrons, after the model of John – another seafaring hero, George Anson Byron. About whom I can only ever picture Byron himself bitterly singing the Undertones' 'My Perfect Cousin'.

(Netgalley ARC)