Byron’s Week in Middleton

In the autumn of 1811, Byron stayed at Hopwood Hall in Middleton near Rochdale for a week. Byron biographers have largely overlooked this, his only outing to Lancashire. My account reviews evidence about the visit both from contemporary letters and journals, Byron’s and others’, and from Victorian and modern biographies and histories. It establishes the Hopwood Hall week as a Regency haut ton gathering where a guest recorded a detailed impression of Byron before his years of fame. It also considers evidence that Byron’s poetic output at the Hall may have gone beyond editing Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage for publication.