Byron's+Europe,+1788-1824

=Europe, 1788-1824= Lord Byron was born into a European continent in the throes of massive, violent change. The Industrial revolution had begun, even before his birth. In fact, large parts of Byron's early life were the result of being born into the aristocracy at a time when the aristocracy was at the beginning of a long decline in relevancy and class distinctions were becoming less and less meaningful.

Added to the cultural and economic revolution already occurring, the beginnings of a long string of political revolutions were just starting, with the French revolution taking place two years before Byron's birth. The initial, idealistic promise of the French revolution and its eventual disappointments and compromises would be one of the most important ideological and political issues for Byron and his contemporaries.

It was a period of rising and falling empires, with French and Ottoman empires ascendant and the old orders of the Hapsburgs decaying on the continent. The lines of nationhood were far more fluid in Europe than anything we have experience in our lifetimes, and there was no shortage of wars, large and small, or revolutions against one power or another. Byron, himself, would become involved in the Italian rebellion against Austria and the Greek rebellion against Ottoman rule.

=State of the arts: Romanticism= In the face of these tumultuous changes, a new movement in the arts had taken hold, in the latter half of the 18th century. Characterized by both its position against the aristocratic society and its resistance to the materialist philosophy of scientific consideration of the natural world, the "Romantic" movement emphasized human emotion and a renewed interest in pure aesthetic. Byron and his contemporaries were part of the second wave of Romantic artists. The popular founders of the movement had come some decades before Byron's birth and, in fact, Byron spent much time and ink relaying his disappointment and derision towards poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge who had, in his opinion, "sold out" and taken mundane positions collecting taxes, praising the monarch or writing for newspapers.