Byron was born in 1788 and died in 1824: as arbitrary a pair of dates as those relating to any other human life. But in his case they cover, with curious precision, a period of pronounced change in Britain and in Europe.

In 1788, Britain was governed by a monarch (George III) who had been on the throne for twenty-eight years, and by a class (the aristocracy) whose rise to power during the eighteenth century seemed irreversible. By 1824, the monarch’s role in the governance of the state was showing clear evidence of decline, and a set of forces were in motion that would lead to the democratic Reform Bill of 1832.

In 1788, Europe was made up of a group of nation states in which representative institutions of the kind established in Britain were almost unknown, and which had passed through a long history of violent rivalry for power and territory. By 1824, a republican revolution had been carried out and temporarily reversed in France, a twenty-two-year-long series of continental wars had been fought to a conclusion, and the European powers had organized themselves into a new set of relations which underwrote peace in central Europe until 1914.