Byron and Slavery

Byron makes frequent references to slavery in his work. The word ‘slave’ occurs some 160 times in his verse and peppers his letters and journals. The aspect of slavery that most concerns twenty-first-century readers in Western democracies (the fifteenth- to nineteenth-century transatlantic trade in enslaved people between the west coast of Africa and the east coast of the Americas) accounts, however, for only a fraction of Byron’s subject-matter concerning this topic. In his hands this is a wide-ranging and complex subject, relating not only to historical and political matters in different geographical locations, but also to metaphorical, personal and emotional themes. This essay therefore begins by looking at Byron’s biography and writing to outline his own connections with transatlantic slavery and with people impacted by enslavement, and then moves on to make what can only be a very modest attempt to consider his writing about slaves and slavery more generally.