Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

Author:Robert Elliott Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472963895
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2019-06-26T23:00:00+00:00

Ironically, after Mary’s death Godwin married his neighbour Mary Jane Clairmont and adopted her two children Charles and Claire. Claire Clairmont and Godwin’s surviving daughter Mary (later Mary Shelley) were step-sisters and ran away from home together to lead a life of free love and philosophy with Mary’s soon-to-be husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the course of their European wanderings Claire met and fell in love with the celebrated poet and politician Lord Byron. Their brief affair resulted in an illegitimate child, Allegra, who Byron initially ignored, before later adopting her and giving her up for care in a Capuchin Convent in Italy where she died aged five of a fever.

This was far from the only unconventionality in Byron’s life, and it’s instructive to consider his legacy in contrast to that of Mary Wollstonecraft. Like Wollstonecraft, Byron adventured in war-torn Europe and Turkey, racked up huge debts, had illegitimate children, had affairs (in Byron’s case, with both men and women) and espoused radically progressive political and social ideas. Byron’s sexual excesses were common knowledge throughout his life, including rumours of one with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, with whom he is said to have fathered a child. Like Wollstonecraft he defied the conventions of the day, in fact far more so, but unlike her, he wasn’t vilified for it, at least not to such an extent that he was discarded to the scrap heap of history as an outlier or error to be ignored. Instead, he is considered the first modern-day celebrity, the inspiration for the literary Byronic hero, feted in over forty operas and countless self-promotional portraits. Byron’s wife (who he abandoned with child) coined the term ‘Byromania’ to describe the commotion around him, and Friedrich Nietzsche drew influences from him. Unlike Wollstonecraft, Byron was a game-changing personality who challenged conventions and social mores and opened the door to a new Romantic Age. At least for men.

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