Hard though it is today to interpret the Byrons’ secretive marriage, it presented an equally inscrutable façade to their contemporaries. George Ticknor’s record of his week in London offers a good example.
George Ticknor was a New Englander whose father had set up Boston’s first free primary schools, a parent enlightened enough to allow his son to exchange a legal career for the study of languages and literature. Arriving in London in the summer of 1815, en route to the University of Göttingen, young Ticknor requested an interview with Byron, one of his literary heroes.
The American visitor proved personable, well-read and in complete agreement with his host in his dislike of the boarding-school system that Lord Byron had experienced at Harrow. Paying his first visit to Piccadilly Terrace on 20 June (just after Augusta and little ‘Georgy’ Leigh had returned to Cambridgeshire), Ticknor caught no more than a glimpse of Annabella as she set off for a drive. Seeing her again three days later, he was impressed by Lady Byron’s eloquent face and intelligent conversation.
She is diffident – she is very young, not more, I think, than nineteen – but is obviously possessed of talent, and did not talk at all for display. For the quarter of an hour during which I was with her, she talked upon a considerable variety of subjects – America, of which she seemed to know considerable; of France, and Greece, with something of her husband’s visit there – and spoke of all with a justness and light good humour.
Byron, with whom the young American subsequently spent a full hour discussing contemporary literature, was much taken by his visitor. Bidden to return on 26 June, Ticknor noticed on that occasion how affectionately his host saw Lady Byron to her carriage, walking her to the door and shaking her hand as warmly ‘as if he were not to see her for a month’. On 27 June, Ticknor went to watch a historical drama, Charles the Bold, from Byron’s Drury Lane box. The only other guests that night were Annabella’s parents, of whom Ticknor greatly preferred Sir Ralph to his ‘fashionable’ wife. Lady Byron, in comparison, was ‘more interesting than I have yet seen her’, while Byron himself was praised for his kindness, gentle manners and unaffected ways. The poet, Ticknor noted with faint regret, was not in the least like the gloomy heroes of his romances.
Ticknor was a rare witness to the fact that the Byrons’ marriage could have a happy side. Annabella was, so her husband declared when he was feeling sentimental, ‘a good kind thing’; ‘the best little wife in the world’. Writing several months later to Tom Moore (in March 1816), Byron rhetorically demanded to be told whether ‘there ever was a better or even brighter, a kinder or a more amiable & agreeable being than Lady B’. Sleeping together regularly and seemingly with pleasure, the young couple employed tender nicknames: ‘Duck’ for him, ‘Pippin’ (from her round and rosy cheeks) for her.
Their affectionate diminutives were already in regular use by 7 July when, shortly after George Ticknor’s week of visits, Annabella’s father offered to loan the couple his own recently vacated Durham home, ordering Seaham to be cleaned and whitewashed in preparation for their visit. Lady Noel, hearing that the Byrons planned to retreat there only for the December lying-in, grew anxious. ‘Annabella I am sure requires country air,’ she urged her son-in-law in August, a month when most Londoners who could afford it left town; ‘her looks shew it, and it will do you both good’. Byron did not take kindly to instructions. Unusually for their social class, the couple remained in residence at their London home throughout the parched height of summer and on into the autumn.
Annabella, writing to Augusta early in August to express her approval of Byron’s drawing up a new will (one that provided support for the improvident Leighs), admitted that this protracted London sojourn was not ideal. Confiding her longing to be out of ‘this horrid town’ to her ‘Dearest Lei’, she dwelt upon the dwindling prospect of Seaham where, she was sure, her spirits and her looks ‘(if I was ever blest with any)’ would soon be restored. Was it to console her, she wondered, that Byron had unexpectedly invited Lady Noel to visit Seaham for the lying-in, or was it a thoughtful Augusta who had proved quietly persuasive? ‘I always feel,’ Annabella wrote with interesting ambivalence, ‘as if I had more reasons to love you than I can exactly know’.
Annabella’s gratitude to a loving sister-in-law was put to the test in early September. Byron had been in unusually savage spirits at the end of August, due in part to the increasing pressure of his debts. The Leighs, during this same period, were seeking to preserve Colonel Leigh’s right to a relative’s bequest, defending it from an unexpected challenge. Augusta, afraid that her husband’s habitual inertia would cause them to lose out, summoned her brother to their aid.
Byron left for Cambridgeshire on 31 August, accompanied by his valet, the faithful William Fletcher. Requesting ‘Dearest Pip’ to send his forgotten medical drops, Byron tactlessly announced an instant and marvellous improvement in his temper. (A coded ‘Not frac.’ signified ‘not fractious’.) Writing back to her ‘Darling Duck’ later the same day, Annabella adopted a characteristically optimistic tone.
I feel as if B— loved himself,
