In late 2014, a lock of Lord Byron's hair came up for sale on eBay. The asking price was 3500 pounds – a telling sign, if any were needed, that enchantment still surrounds the English poet today, as indeed it did in his own time. A Byronic spirit visited 1820s Europe, and everywhere there arose an interest in George Gordon Byron (1788‑1824). His rebellious, revolutionary personality appealed to the imagination, as did his personal history, one marked by scandal and restiveness, culminating in his self-imposed exile and illustrious end at Missolonghi on 19 April 1824, during the Greek War of Independence.

Internationally, it is often suggested that Byron is history's first true literary celebrity. In the words of Fred Inglis: ‘Perhaps we can say […] that it is during Byron's brief lifetime […] that charm and its distorted and magnified echo, glamour, become public values, and what is more, values looked for as attributes of celebrity’. Leo Braudy considers Byron to be the first author to fall victim to ‘the new machinery of celebrity’, and Tom Mole sees in him the emergence of a new type of celebrity. Some eighteenth-century authors may have been widely known during their own lifetimes, such as Laurence Sterne, author of A Sentimental Journey (1768), but as they lived in the pre-industrial age, they cannot be termed celebrities, according to Mole: ‘It required the growth of a modern industry of production, promotion and distribution, and a modern audience – massive, anonymous, socially diverse and geographically distributed – before these elements combined to form a celebrity culture in the modern sense’.

The fact that Byron did become a celebrity is heavily invested in his successful creation of a personal ‘branded identity’: he developed into a brand that brought all sorts of associations to mind. His influence was undoubtedly far-reaching. Throughout Europe poets began to imitate his style, dress, and attitude toward life. As Fiona MacCarthy put it: ‘Almost immediately after his death the phenomenon of “being Byron” began to manifest itself’. Richard Holmes worded it thus: