Lady Caroline Lamb's Heart-Break Notebook

"I will kneel & be torn from your feet before I will give you up…"

Feb 13, 2023

I’ve wanted to write about this particular notebook since I first saw it in 2010 at the National Library of Scotland. It’s just so shocking, so dramatic, so illicit! I figured, what better time to share a notebook that chronicles a disastrous romance than Valentine’s Day?

Here’s the context:

Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1827) was a socialite. Wealthy and beautiful, she courted celebrity. She also had the misfortune of falling in love with the period’s Lothario,

Lord Byron (1788-1824). In fact, Lamb was the one to name him “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Of course, Byron also had the misfortune of falling for Lady Caroline. By today’s standards, she definitely would have been arrested for stalking: Lady Caroline broke into Byron’s house and forged his signature to steal his property.

Their story is more dramatic than anything you’ve seen on Bridgerton. And, it all actually happened.

So, if you’re single and sad about it, just remember that it could always be worse: you could be entangled in a love affair with Lord Byron or Lady Caroline Lamb.

Also, be warned, this post has some NSFW (adult) content, but it is all delightfully Romantic.

The Affair

Lord Byron and Lady Caroline’s romance scandalized London. The two met in March of 1812 when Lamb wrote a fan-letter to congratulate Byron on his new poem, Child Harold.

He was 24; she was 26 years old—and, I should add, married to the man who would go on to be Queen Victoria’s prime minister.

Lady Caroline and Lord Byron obsessed over one another. Byron’s friends complained that he spent all his time writing letters to Caroline (they wrote daily, often multiple times a day). The two arranged to meet at the period’s extravagant parties. On one such occasion, Lamb “absolutely besieged” Byron, according to an onlooker who reports

I saw her, —yes, saw her,—talking to Byron, with half of her body thrust into the carriage which he had just entered.
5

This was just the beginning. Caroline would cross-dress as a page boy to visit Byron's apartments. Jealous of Byron’s other affairs, she had him go through a “mock-wedding ceremony.”

The affair escalated. In the beginning of their relationship, Lamb sent Byron a lock of her hair, clipped from her head when she was a child—common practice for lovers. Towards the end of their relationship, she sent him hair cut from a different part of her adult body—this was definitely not common practice. Even more shocking, she cut too close to the skin and drew blood. She sent her pubic hair along with the following letter in which she asks Byron to also send blood:

I askd you not to send blood but yet do—because if it means love I like to have it. I cut the hair too close & bled much more than you need—do not you the same & pray put not scizzors points near where quei capelli grow—sooner take it from the arm or wrist—pray be careful—

And then, she wonders why Byron has grown cold:

& Byron—tell me why a few conversations with the Queen mothers always change you. . . . I will kneel & be torn from your feet before I will give you up…
7

Alas, Lady Caroline would be forced to give up Byron. Their torrential love affair ended in August of 1812. To avoid further scandal, Lady Caroline's husband took her to Ireland. But, before they left, Lady Caroline bought a book bound in blue leather with gold embossed edges. She filled it with original writing and quotations. She intended to give it to Byron.

“This comes from one that suffers…”

After dating the first page, 1812, Lady Caroline writes:

This comes from one that suffers-
When you open this Book – you will be as far from me in distance as you are now in heart – yet I believe time which softens all resentment – will make you forget many of my faults and you will perhaps remember then – that I was affectionate and true to you – that however separated I have been yours and though men can forget Women do not…

This introductory letter continues for several pages and wavers between sad resignation and anger. “I think of you as one dead to me,” she writes. The letter ends with:

God Bless you Lord Byron be happy. Take care of yourself - I am while I continue alive to think it.
Y’r true friend and servant — Caro

Fair enough. But, in the following pages, Lady Caroline launches into allegorical stories and poems of abused animals, beginning with Biondetta.

Biondetta: “a small spaniel Bitch whom Lord Byron took a fancy for”

Biondetta was a pet name for Lady Caroline, taken from Jaques Cazotte’s 1772 novel, Le Diable Amoureux (the devil in love). In this story, Satan becomes enamored with a young nobleman, Alvaro. Hoping to seduce Alvaro, the devil takes the form of a young woman called Biondetta. At Alvaro's request, Biondetta transforms into a spaniel and then into a male page.

Lady Caroline also cross-dressed as a page boy and discussed Le Diable Amoureux with Byron. For example, on a sheet of paper that accompanied her gift of pubic hair, she told Byron to “remember Biondetta”:

Caroline    Byron August, 9th,

                                        1812,

next to Thyrza Dearest

& most faithful – God bless you

own love – ricordati di Biondetta

From your wild Antelope

The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Deposit Lovelace Byron 155, folio 79

Here is a portrait of Lady Caroline, dressed as a page boy along with a Spaniel (you can just make out the dog's tongue below Caroline's arm). As additional context, the devil first appeared to Faust in Marlowe’s play as a spaniel.

Lady Caroline dressed as a page boy, begun in 1812 and completed in 1813 by Thomas Phillips

In her heart-break notebook, Lady Caroline builds on this devilish theme and imagines herself as a sad dog named Biondetta. It begins, Byron “took a fancy” for “a small spaniel Bitch.” For a time, Biondetta was Byron’s favorite, but he soon tired of the dog and gave it back to its “former owner.” Pining for Byron, the little dog died with a “collar round its neck” that had been a gift from Byron. Once Biondetta died, Byron finally “acknowledged” it.

But Lady Caroline decided this ending was too kind and revised it on the following page. This time around, Byron refuses to see Biondetta as it lays dying. “It would but have licked his hand & gazed once more on his face as if to thank him” but Byron had moved on to “a prettier & finer animal.” He even called Biondetta a “vixen.”

“The Lamb…licks the hand just raised to shed his blood”

From Biondetta, the dog, Lady Caroline fashions herself as a little lamb (an obvious reference to her married name). She transcribes a quote from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man—here, an innocent lamb licks its executioner’s hand:

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.

Caroline sketches a lamb above Pope’s poem, The National Library of Scotland

Between the sketch and ciphers, Caroline writes in Italian: “I will be faithful to the lamb, I swear it.”

The delightful sketch at the top of the page (a lamb surrounded by a child and fairy) contrasts sharply with Pope’s lines. In the right margin, Lamb writes: “What you always repeated!” —presumably a reference to earlier conversations with Byron.

Then, she transcribes two quotes. The first, in French, comes from Madame de Staël’s Mirza. Lady Caroline underlined the final sentence:

Adieu Ximeo je ne te reverois jamais.
Goodbye Ximeo, I will never see you again.

The second quote comes from Dante’s Inferno,

Nessun maggior dolore

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

nella miseria—

                                    Oh lasso—

 quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio

menò costoro al doloroso passo!

There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery
Alas!
How many pleasant thoughts, how much desire,
Conducted these unto the dolorous pass!
10

On another page, Caroline copies more of Madame de Staël’s Mirza and includes yet another lamb on a leash, led (to its death?) by a sad Grecian figure.

Another lamb, The National Library of Scotland

“My days are spent in remembering what I once was to you”

Finally, Lady Caroline ends this notebook with another letter. This one strikes a more painful tone

…one only word you have raised me from despair to the joy we look for in Heaven

Lady Caroline then offers herself as a servant to Byron, her “master”:

Oh God can you give me up if I am dear. Take me with you take me my master my friend I will serve you...

In ending, she wishes she had never met Byron or that he had killed her.

Byron my days are spent in remembering what I once was to you — I wish you had never known me or that you had killed me before you went.

She signs the letter with her nickname,

Your Caro —

The book ends with the remains of several pages that Lamb presumably razored out.

It’s hard to imagine what Lady Caroline would have deemed more embarrassing, than the lines she had already written.

Lamb gave this book to Byron’s publisher, who opted not to pass it on to the poet. In 1815, Byron married Lady Caroline’s cousin-in-law, Annabella Milbank. Theirs was not a happy marriage, and they separated a year later: Byron was constantly in debt and constantly philandering. Supposedly, Byron had an affair (and a child) with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh.

When Lady Caroline returned to England in 1813, she tried to reunite with Byron. He was not interested. To demonstrate her distress, Lady Caroline cut her hand with a knife while at a party.

She burnt Byron in effigy. And then she published a tell-all novel, Glenarvon (1816). It was a commercial success because everyone knew it to be a loosely veiled account of their notorious affair. When, in 1819, Byron included the lines “Some play the devil—and then write a novel” in Don Juan, everyone knew he was referring to Lady Caroline. I also wonder if he was referencing Lamb’s affiliation with Biondetta from Le Diable Amoureux .

Lady Caroline never got the literary praise she probably desired—and, arguably, deserved. Over the past decade or so, scholars have begun to consider Lady Caroline as an important literary figure in her own right—apart from her entanglement with Byron. If you want to learn more about Lady Caroline, I encourage you to check out Antonia Fraser’s new biography—you’ll have to wait until May, but it promises to be an important re-consideration of Lady Caroline’s “rebellious nature” and literary talent.

In the spirit of Valentine’s day, let me know you enjoyed this post by hitting the 🖤 below!

Till Next Week,

Jillian