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As a child he was known simply as George Noel Gordon. Born with a clubfoot, he was taken by his mother, Catherine Gordon, to Aberdeen, Scotland, where they lived in lodgings on a meager income. He attended the grammar school there. He was extremely sensitive of his lameness; its effect upon his character was obvious enough . It was rumored that his nurse, May Gray, made physical advances to him when he was only nine. This experience and his idealized love for his distant cousins Mary Duff and Margaret Parker shaped his paradoxical attitudes toward women. At the age of 10, George inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle, the wicked Lord Byron. His mother proudly took him to England. The boy fell in love with the ghostly halls and spacious grounds of Newstead Abbey, which had been presented to the Byron family by the infamous King Henry VIII, and he and his mother lived in its ruins for a while. He was privately tutored in Nottingham and his clubfoot was doctored by a quack named Lavender. John Hanson, Mrs. Byron's attorney, rescued him from the pernicious influence of May Gray, the tortures of Lavender, and the increasingly uneven temper of his mother. He took him to London, where a reputable doctor prescribed a special brace, and in the autumn of 1799 Hanson sent him to a school in Dulwich. In 1801 Byron went to Harrow, where his friendships with younger boys fostered a romantic attachment to the school. It is possible that these friendships gave the first impetus to his sexual ambivalence, which became more pronounced at Cambridge and later in Greece. He spent the summer of 1803 with his mother at Southwell, near Nottingham, but soon escaped to Newstead and stayed with his tenant, Lord Grey, and courted his distant cousin Mary Chaworth. When she grew tired of that lame boy, he indulged his grief by writing melancholy poetry and Mary became the symbol of idealized and unattainable love. Later, when he had achieved fame and become the darling of London society, she came to regret her rejection. After a term at Trinity College, Byron indulged in dissipation and undue generosity in London that put him deeply into debt. He returned in the summer of 1806 to Southwell, where he gathered his early poems in a volume privately printed in November with the title Fugitive Pieces. The following June his first published poems, Hours of Idleness, appeared. When he returned to Trinity he formed a close friendship with John Cam Hobhouse, who stirred his interest in liberal Whiggism. At the beginning of 1808, he entered into an abyss of sensuality in London that threatened to undermine his health. On reaching his majority in January 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords, published an anonymous satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and embarked with Hobhouse on a grand tour.

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John Nichol (8 September 1833 - 11 October 1894), was a Scottish literary academic, and the first Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. Born in Montrose, Scotland, Nichol was the son of John Pringle Nichol, Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. John Jr. studied first at Glasgow (1848-55) and then Balliol College, Oxford (1855-9) as a Snell Exhibitioner, graduating with a First-Class degree in Classics, Philosophy and Mathematics. After graduating, Nicholl remained at Oxford as a coach. With Albert Venn Dicey, Thomas Hill Green, Swinburne and others, he formed the Old Mortality Society for discussions on literary matters.

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