* Oster confirms that Fritz's only baptismal name was Friedrich. Der Einzige! "This name has been luck-bringing to my house. Hopefully this baby is as fortunate/happy as his ancestors."
Oster: Well, Fritz won't be *happy*, exactly...
Me: :-(
* So remember when we discussed how Wilhelmine resented her first two brothers (named Fritz) and our Fritz was the first one she showed affection to? And cahn, the only one of us with parental experience ;), says that 2 1/2 years is about right for a kid to start thinking babies are cute?
Well, Oster reports the following:
1707, November 23, 1707: Bb!Fritz1 born. Barely six months later: Bb!Fritz1 dies. The internet gives me May 13, 1708. 1709, July 3: Wilhelmine born. 1710, August 16: Bb!Fritz2 born. 1711, July 31: Bb!Fritz2 dies. 1712, January 24: Bb!Fritz3 born. 1712, February 8: Grandpa F1 writes in a letter, "sie ihre zwei ersten Brüder nicht leiden konnte"--she couldn't stand her first two brothers.
What's wrong with this picture?
The first of the two brothers in question died before she was born!
What's up with that, F1? I can believe that she didn't like the one that was born when she was one and died when she was two, especially since he got all the attention that she didn't, but she's being falsely accused of things that happened before she was born!
I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.
* The bit about FW being impressed by Dutch burgher values, like cleanliness and orderliness, is relevant to why the servant book I read is specifically about servants in *France* during the period. The author makes the point that French upper class values were about conspicuous consumption, so servants did a lot of standing around in livery looking handsome and making you look wealthy, and very little attention in "how to run your household" manuals was devoted to things like making sure servants dusted and kept the fire going. So there was gold and marble and filth everywhere, and the living space was uncomfortable to live in but very eye-catching. French travelers who went to England or the Netherlands were amazed at how clean and comfortable the houses were, and the servants were actually supposed to take scrubbing the floors and such seriously.
* Heinrich Rüdiger von Ilgen: I'm recognizing more and more obscure names! This is the father of Baroness von Knyphausen, Ariane's mother, who receives that box from Fritz in the opening scene of "Lovers lying two and two."
Knyphausen, the minister who's pro-English marriage and eventually loses his job over it, is, as I said in the Wilhelmine memoir write-up recently, Ariane's father.
* Google wasn't able to translate "Knirps", as in "König Knirps", Wilhelmine and Fritz's not-so-respectful nickname for Dad, but when I put it in the browser, I got "midget, squirt, little fellow." Lol! The little fellow and his long fellows.
* Loved Oster pointing out what I had noticed when rereading the memoirs: evil governess Leti's introduction was all about how she was Italian, from no family to speak of, and had an unprestigious job correcting newspaper prints, whereas wonderful Sonsine's introduction is all about how noble her family was and how her ancestors distinguished themselves with all the services they performed. !!!
Lehndorff, who's not exactly not a snob himself: This Wilhelmine is a bit hung up on class.
This is why I put in two of the things that selenak noticed in "With You, There's a Heaven": Wilhelmine not seeing Fredersdorf as a person but as an extension of her brother, and Fritz being afraid to admit that he's falling in love with a commoner. I threw in the line about Fritz remembering Wilhelmine accusing "even a von Katte" of not knowing his place, with the intention of conveying that this isn't her real (or at least her biggest) objection, but it's one she can admit to, unlike "But what about meeeee?!", and that Wilhelmine (along with SD, and society in general), was a formative influence on Fritz and his own classism.
Also, the servants book has a good section on the tension between servants and families that resulted in the cycle of abuse: badly treated servants were more likely to treat their masters' children badly. Including: total neglect, meaning wealthy kids were sometimes half-starved; sexual abuse: the older men in the house molest the maidservants, who molest the boys, who grow up with a fucked up attitude toward sex and proceed to molest their own servants.
As the century went on and middle-class family-and-home values started to percolate upwards in France, the thrust of moralizing works directed at servants charged with caring for children went in a little over a hundred years from "You are responsible before God for every child who dies as a result of your action or inaction," to, "It's probably not healthy to give kids everything they want all the time. Tell them no once in a while?"
* Oster doesn't think FW's kids went hungry, because Seckendorff didn't report inadequate portions. He thinks FW's tastes in food weren't to the liking of SD, who taught her kids to despise it. While I'm absolutely sure this happened, I'm not convinced the kids never went hungry, or that they didn't learn to associate it with their father.
Fritz's weight at Dresden, combined with his height, tell me he wasn't underweight at 16. But even if FW was starving the kids every chance he got (and I suspect it was more like small portion sizes than actual starvation), SD was apparently smuggling them food (I think this was in Lavisse?) *and* FW was away a lot. So it's quite possible that FW was frugal in terms of portion sizes and the kids got compensation later.
But that's not evidence that he *was*, just that he could have been.
The two additional pieces of evidence I have beyond Wilhelmine's memoirs are these:
Fritz writing a letter to Grumbkow (?) at Küstrin, saying he preferred to starve there than at Potsdam. Now, this is not when he's being his most fair to FW, and could be part of the SD "this is not acceptable food" rhetoric, but...
Ziebura says *AW* later said he and the other kids were often half-starved as kids. If Wilhelmine, Fritz, *and* AW all agree on something about FW...maybe they're not making it up. Now, I haven't seen the context, or even a direct quote, for that claim, but I'm keeping it as supporting evidence until I do.
What's up with that, F1? I can believe that she didn't like the one that was born when she was one and died when she was two, especially since he got all the attention that she didn't, but she's being falsely accused of things that happened before she was born!
I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.
It probably was a memory lapse. My other guess would be projection, but projection of what? The baby Sophie Charlotte had before FW, one Friedrich August, died before FW was born, and she never had any more children. As for F1's own childhood, he was son no.3 himself, with two brothers ahead of him, one of whom died before F1 was born. (The other - Karl Emil! - was one of those he later suspected his stepmother of killing, along with his younger brother Ludwig. Two more (fullL) siblings died as babies. Then came stepmom and all the Schwedt half siblings.
"Knirps" is a bit old fashioned but still in use today, though mostly used for little children.
Wilhelmine the snob: oh, absolutely. Mind you, I suspect this tendency in her was strengthened via the awareness the Hohenzollern were considered as upstarts (what with the very recent kingly title) by the rest of Europe, and of course SD had it drummed into her that she was meant for higher things and FW was completely undignified and no one was to follow his example from the get go. I could also see child Wilhelmine extra internalizing class bias precisely because of Leti, i.e. this woman had been given power over her and abused her, and she clung to her self confidence by telling herself "I'm still better than you, Italian lowlife!"
Which, btw, leads into what you say about servants and the chains of abuse and neglect. Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes. Presumably Leti had had her own experiences, too. (And as Oster points out at the very least must have been well educated, because she did give Wilhelmine a first class education in terms of knowledge, see also the difference between child Wilhemine's letters to child AW's letters to FW in style and maturity.)
I'm also reminded that Byron (the poet) was sexually abused by a nurse when he was ten or eleven. She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.
Yeah, since F1 isn't exactly taking care of tiny babies, he probably remembers that Wilhelmine didn't like Bb!Fritz2, and of course the number 2 was burned into his brain, as in the number of prospective heirs that have died, and he conflated the two.
I'm just impressed that within the space of about a page, Oster manages to report all these dates and quote this letter and never notice the contradiction!
Wilhelmine the snob: oh, absolutely. Mind you, I suspect this tendency in her was strengthened via the awareness the Hohenzollern were considered as upstarts
Yep. I forget which biographer said FW's attitude toward all things German vs. French smacks of an inferiority complex, but it makes perfect sense.
I could also see child Wilhelmine extra internalizing class bias precisely because of Leti, i.e. this woman had been given power over her and abused her, and she clung to her self confidence by telling herself "I'm still better than you, Italian lowlife!"
Also makes perfect sense!
Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes.
Yep, I was thinking of the Brontes. Even today, my wife talks about the class tensions of being middle to upper middle class and being raised largely by poor nannies in Brazil, where labor is still that cheap. When you tell the kids what to do and can punish them, but they're still considered inherently superior to you, and their parents control your life...it can get complicated.
I'm glad Sonsine worked out.
Though after reading the memoirs, I had forgotten just how pro-English marriage Wilhelmine depicts her as being, to the point of scolding Wilhelmine for finally giving in and agreeing to marry into Bayreuth. :/
She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.
Mind you, the flipside of that is what a relation of one of Charlotte's charges said to Mrs. Gaskell: My cousin Benson Sidgwick, now vicar of Ashby Parva, certainly on one occasion threw a Bible at Miss Bronte! and all that another cousin can recollect of her is that if she was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited, she imagined she was excluded from the family circle.
Sonsine being pro English marriage: well, to be fair, of all the matches available at that time, it was definitely the toppermost of the poppermost. The only comparable match would have been to Louis XV. of France, and good old Stanislav Lescynsky got there first. (P)RussianPete was still HolsteinPete in blissful ignorance of his future and also years younger, even Ulrike's future husband was still HolsteinAdolf and not yet Crown Prince of Sweden, and since the Polish crown wasn't inheritable but went by vote, there was no guarantee August the Strong's son - who'd have matched Wilhelmine's age far better than August - would have succeeded him as King of Poland as well as Elector of Saxony. If you were a Princess of Wilhelmine's age and generation, the future King of England (not that he'd ever be, but no one knew that) was the big marital price to be had. Especially if your own father was only the second king of his line and his tiny kingdom brandnew.
...whereas all the Margraves FW considered as matches for his daughters meant they were marrying down. Within FW's life time, Charlotte did best with a duke (of Braunschweig), lending some strength to the argument that among the daughters, she was his fave, but Wilhelmine, Friederike and Sophie really were not making good matches in terms of rank, power and splendor.
Sonsine being pro English marriage: well, to be fair, of all the matches available at that time, it was definitely the toppermost of the poppermost.
Oh, no question! And advocating for this as the marriage Wilhelmine should make is one thing. But after she's already agreed to marry into Bayreuth through the application of force majeure by the absolute monarch, scolding her that she did a bad thing tells you something about Sonsine's priorities. That's the part that came as a surprise to me.
Yeeeeah. We had a couple of nannies for the kids when we needed childcare but they were too young to go to preschool, and it was... interesting, because of this tension. The whole experience taught me, looking back on it, that for a weird job like this where you're all but living with the family, personality fit (and maybe even more specifically, communication style??) with parents is way more important a component than one might realize (or at least than I realized), and a nanny can be great with the kids and yet both adult parties can be unhappy through no fault (or at least, not much fault) of the individual parties.
Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes.
Huh, I hadn't thought to make that connection, but having just read Dark Quartet, ...yeah.
I'm also reminded that Byron (the poet) was sexually abused by a nurse when he was ten or eleven. She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.
*blinks* My Brit Lit teacher didn't tell us that part! That's really... something. Definitely not surprising he didn't care much for religion, wow.
Re: Byron, here's the evidence, re the nurse May Grey. (Btw, google tells me that an entry on Byron by a Scottish tourist website - since Byron spent his early childhood in Aberdeen- calls her "Agnes Grey", which, speak of the Brontes. But really, it was May.) John Hanson had already been the lawyer of Byron's mother, and later was Byron's lawyer. Since Byron died at age 36, he survived him.
After Byron's death, the lawyer, John Hanson, informed Byron's friend John Cam Hobhouse, of the lustful attentions of his (Byron's) nurse. Hobhouse writes later:
When nine years old at his mother's house a free Scotch girl used to come to bed to him and play tricks with his person.
And Byron himself writes in Detached Thoughts (a serious of diary-like notes published years after his death under that title): in 1821: My passions were developed very early - so early, that few would believe me, if I were to state the period, and the facts which accompanied it.
John Hanson informed Byron's mother of May Gray's unacceptable conduct towards the young lord in a letter dated 1st September 1799, suppressing his knowledge of the sexual play:
... her conduct towards your son while at Nottingham was shocking, and I was persuaded you needed but a hint of it to dismiss her... My honourable little companion (Byron) ... told me that she was perpetually beating him, and that his bones sometimes ached from it; that she brought all sorts of Company of the very lowest Description into his apartments; that she was out late at nights, and he was frequently left to put himself to bed; that she would take the Chaise-boys into the Chaise with her, and stopped at every little Ale-house to drink with them. But, Madam, this is not all, she has even --- traduced yourself. (Prothero, Rowland E (ed), The Works of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol I, p 17)
The two parter about Byron in which Johnny Lee Miller played Lord B. used this story - Byron tells it to his sister and lover Augusta (they were half siblings who didn't grow up together and only got to know each other as teenagers) in this excerpt (at 1.45) - at what is probably his most vulnerable moment in the two parter.
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Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - young Wilhelmine
Date: 2020-09-26 06:52 pm (UTC)Oster: Well, Fritz won't be *happy*, exactly...
Me: :-(
* So remember when we discussed how Wilhelmine resented her first two brothers (named Fritz) and our Fritz was the first one she showed affection to? And
Well, Oster reports the following:
1707, November 23, 1707: Bb!Fritz1 born.
Barely six months later: Bb!Fritz1 dies. The internet gives me May 13, 1708.
1709, July 3: Wilhelmine born.
1710, August 16: Bb!Fritz2 born.
1711, July 31: Bb!Fritz2 dies.
1712, January 24: Bb!Fritz3 born.
1712, February 8: Grandpa F1 writes in a letter, "sie ihre zwei ersten Brüder nicht leiden konnte"--she couldn't stand her first two brothers.
What's wrong with this picture?
The first of the two brothers in question died before she was born!
What's up with that, F1? I can believe that she didn't like the one that was born when she was one and died when she was two, especially since he got all the attention that she didn't, but she's being falsely accused of things that happened before she was born!
I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.
* The bit about FW being impressed by Dutch burgher values, like cleanliness and orderliness, is relevant to why the servant book I read is specifically about servants in *France* during the period. The author makes the point that French upper class values were about conspicuous consumption, so servants did a lot of standing around in livery looking handsome and making you look wealthy, and very little attention in "how to run your household" manuals was devoted to things like making sure servants dusted and kept the fire going. So there was gold and marble and filth everywhere, and the living space was uncomfortable to live in but very eye-catching. French travelers who went to England or the Netherlands were amazed at how clean and comfortable the houses were, and the servants were actually supposed to take scrubbing the floors and such seriously.
* Heinrich Rüdiger von Ilgen: I'm recognizing more and more obscure names! This is the father of Baroness von Knyphausen, Ariane's mother, who receives that box from Fritz in the opening scene of "Lovers lying two and two."
Knyphausen, the minister who's pro-English marriage and eventually loses his job over it, is, as I said in the Wilhelmine memoir write-up recently, Ariane's father.
* Google wasn't able to translate "Knirps", as in "König Knirps", Wilhelmine and Fritz's not-so-respectful nickname for Dad, but when I put it in the browser, I got "midget, squirt, little fellow." Lol! The little fellow and his long fellows.
* Loved Oster pointing out what I had noticed when rereading the memoirs: evil governess Leti's introduction was all about how she was Italian, from no family to speak of, and had an unprestigious job correcting newspaper prints, whereas wonderful Sonsine's introduction is all about how noble her family was and how her ancestors distinguished themselves with all the services they performed. !!!
Lehndorff, who's not exactly not a snob himself: This Wilhelmine is a bit hung up on class.
This is why I put in two of the things that
Also, the servants book has a good section on the tension between servants and families that resulted in the cycle of abuse: badly treated servants were more likely to treat their masters' children badly. Including: total neglect, meaning wealthy kids were sometimes half-starved; sexual abuse: the older men in the house molest the maidservants, who molest the boys, who grow up with a fucked up attitude toward sex and proceed to molest their own servants.
As the century went on and middle-class family-and-home values started to percolate upwards in France, the thrust of moralizing works directed at servants charged with caring for children went in a little over a hundred years from "You are responsible before God for every child who dies as a result of your action or inaction," to, "It's probably not healthy to give kids everything they want all the time. Tell them no once in a while?"
* Oster doesn't think FW's kids went hungry, because Seckendorff didn't report inadequate portions. He thinks FW's tastes in food weren't to the liking of SD, who taught her kids to despise it. While I'm absolutely sure this happened, I'm not convinced the kids never went hungry, or that they didn't learn to associate it with their father.
Fritz's weight at Dresden, combined with his height, tell me he wasn't underweight at 16. But even if FW was starving the kids every chance he got (and I suspect it was more like small portion sizes than actual starvation), SD was apparently smuggling them food (I think this was in Lavisse?) *and* FW was away a lot. So it's quite possible that FW was frugal in terms of portion sizes and the kids got compensation later.
But that's not evidence that he *was*, just that he could have been.
The two additional pieces of evidence I have beyond Wilhelmine's memoirs are these:
Fritz writing a letter to Grumbkow (?) at Küstrin, saying he preferred to starve there than at Potsdam. Now, this is not when he's being his most fair to FW, and could be part of the SD "this is not acceptable food" rhetoric, but...
Ziebura says *AW* later said he and the other kids were often half-starved as kids. If Wilhelmine, Fritz, *and* AW all agree on something about FW...maybe they're not making it up. Now, I haven't seen the context, or even a direct quote, for that claim, but I'm keeping it as supporting evidence until I do.
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - young Wilhelmine
Date: 2020-09-27 04:58 am (UTC)I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.
It probably was a memory lapse. My other guess would be projection, but projection of what? The baby Sophie Charlotte had before FW, one Friedrich August, died before FW was born, and she never had any more children. As for F1's own childhood, he was son no.3 himself, with two brothers ahead of him, one of whom died before F1 was born. (The other - Karl Emil! - was one of those he later suspected his stepmother of killing, along with his younger brother Ludwig. Two more (fullL) siblings died as babies. Then came stepmom and all the Schwedt half siblings.
"Knirps" is a bit old fashioned but still in use today, though mostly used for little children.
Wilhelmine the snob: oh, absolutely. Mind you, I suspect this tendency in her was strengthened via the awareness the Hohenzollern were considered as upstarts (what with the very recent kingly title) by the rest of Europe, and of course SD had it drummed into her that she was meant for higher things and FW was completely undignified and no one was to follow his example from the get go. I could also see child Wilhelmine extra internalizing class bias precisely because of Leti, i.e. this woman had been given power over her and abused her, and she clung to her self confidence by telling herself "I'm still better than you, Italian lowlife!"
Which, btw, leads into what you say about servants and the chains of abuse and neglect. Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes. Presumably Leti had had her own experiences, too. (And as Oster points out at the very least must have been well educated, because she did give Wilhelmine a first class education in terms of knowledge, see also the difference between child Wilhemine's letters to child AW's letters to FW in style and maturity.)
I'm also reminded that Byron (the poet) was sexually abused by a nurse when he was ten or eleven. She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.
Food question: I'm with you there.
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - young Wilhelmine
Date: 2020-09-27 04:10 pm (UTC)Yeah, since F1 isn't exactly taking care of tiny babies, he probably remembers that Wilhelmine didn't like Bb!Fritz2, and of course the number 2 was burned into his brain, as in the number of prospective heirs that have died, and he conflated the two.
I'm just impressed that within the space of about a page, Oster manages to report all these dates and quote this letter and never notice the contradiction!
Wilhelmine the snob: oh, absolutely. Mind you, I suspect this tendency in her was strengthened via the awareness the Hohenzollern were considered as upstarts
Yep. I forget which biographer said FW's attitude toward all things German vs. French smacks of an inferiority complex, but it makes perfect sense.
I could also see child Wilhelmine extra internalizing class bias precisely because of Leti, i.e. this woman had been given power over her and abused her, and she clung to her self confidence by telling herself "I'm still better than you, Italian lowlife!"
Also makes perfect sense!
Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes.
Yep, I was thinking of the Brontes. Even today, my wife talks about the class tensions of being middle to upper middle class and being raised largely by poor nannies in Brazil, where labor is still that cheap. When you tell the kids what to do and can punish them, but they're still considered inherently superior to you, and their parents control your life...it can get complicated.
I'm glad Sonsine worked out.
Though after reading the memoirs, I had forgotten just how pro-English marriage Wilhelmine depicts her as being, to the point of scolding Wilhelmine for finally giving in and agreeing to marry into Bayreuth. :/
She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.
Indeed. Also, *facepalm*.
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - young Wilhelmine
Date: 2020-09-28 01:30 pm (UTC)Mind you, the flipside of that is what a relation of one of Charlotte's charges said to Mrs. Gaskell: My cousin Benson Sidgwick, now vicar of Ashby Parva, certainly on one occasion threw a Bible at Miss Bronte! and all that another cousin can recollect of her is that if she was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited, she imagined she was excluded from the family circle.
Sonsine being pro English marriage: well, to be fair, of all the matches available at that time, it was definitely the toppermost of the poppermost. The only comparable match would have been to Louis XV. of France, and good old Stanislav Lescynsky got there first. (P)RussianPete was still HolsteinPete in blissful ignorance of his future and also years younger, even Ulrike's future husband was still HolsteinAdolf and not yet Crown Prince of Sweden, and since the Polish crown wasn't inheritable but went by vote, there was no guarantee August the Strong's son - who'd have matched Wilhelmine's age far better than August - would have succeeded him as King of Poland as well as Elector of Saxony. If you were a Princess of Wilhelmine's age and generation, the future King of England (not that he'd ever be, but no one knew that) was the big marital price to be had. Especially if your own father was only the second king of his line and his tiny kingdom brandnew.
...whereas all the Margraves FW considered as matches for his daughters meant they were marrying down. Within FW's life time, Charlotte did best with a duke (of Braunschweig), lending some strength to the argument that among the daughters, she was his fave, but Wilhelmine, Friederike and Sophie really were not making good matches in terms of rank, power and splendor.
Byron: see my reply to Cahn below.
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - young Wilhelmine
Date: 2020-09-28 11:50 pm (UTC)Oh, no question! And advocating for this as the marriage Wilhelmine should make is one thing. But after she's already agreed to marry into Bayreuth through the application of force majeure by the absolute monarch, scolding her that she did a bad thing tells you something about Sonsine's priorities. That's the part that came as a surprise to me.
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - young Wilhelmine
Date: 2020-10-01 04:08 pm (UTC)Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - young Wilhelmine
Date: 2020-09-28 05:16 am (UTC)Huh, I hadn't thought to make that connection, but having just read Dark Quartet, ...yeah.
I'm also reminded that Byron (the poet) was sexually abused by a nurse when he was ten or eleven. She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.
*blinks* My Brit Lit teacher didn't tell us that part! That's really... something. Definitely not surprising he didn't care much for religion, wow.
Byron
Date: 2020-09-28 01:09 pm (UTC)After Byron's death, the lawyer, John Hanson, informed Byron's friend John Cam Hobhouse, of the lustful attentions of his (Byron's) nurse. Hobhouse writes later:
When nine years old at his mother's house a free Scotch girl used to come to bed to him and play tricks with his person.
And Byron himself writes in Detached Thoughts (a serious of diary-like notes published years after his death under that title): in 1821:
My passions were developed very early - so early, that few would believe me, if I were to state the period, and the facts which accompanied it.
John Hanson informed Byron's mother of May Gray's unacceptable conduct towards the young lord in a letter dated 1st September 1799, suppressing his knowledge of the sexual play:
... her conduct towards your son while at Nottingham was shocking, and I was persuaded you needed but a hint of it to dismiss her... My honourable little companion (Byron) ... told me that she was perpetually beating him, and that his bones sometimes ached from it; that she brought all sorts of Company of the very lowest Description into his apartments; that she was out late at nights, and he was frequently left to put himself to bed; that she would take the Chaise-boys into the Chaise with her, and stopped at every little Ale-house to drink with them. But, Madam, this is not all, she has even --- traduced yourself. (Prothero, Rowland E (ed), The Works of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol I, p 17)
The two parter about Byron in which Johnny Lee Miller played Lord B. used this story - Byron tells it to his sister and lover Augusta (they were half siblings who didn't grow up together and only got to know each other as teenagers) in this excerpt (at 1.45) - at what is probably his most vulnerable moment in the two parter.
Re: Byron
Date: 2020-10-01 05:34 am (UTC)My passions were developed very early - so early, that few would believe me, if I were to state the period, and the facts which accompanied it.
Yeah, that... is something. I can see how that would shape someone, a lot.