Allegra Byron - Early Life

Early Life

Allegra was the product of a short-lived affair between the Romantic poet and her starstruck teenage mother, who was living in reduced circumstances in the household of her stepsister and brother-in-law. Claire wrote to Byron during the pregnancy begging him to write back and promise to take care of her and the baby. Byron ignored her. After her birth, she was initially taken into the household of Leigh Hunt as the child of a cousin. A few months later the Shelleys and Claire took the baby back as an "adopted" child. Claire bonded with her baby daughter and wrote in her journal with delight about her close, physical connection with little Allegra, but she was also dealing with emotional and financial pressures from the Shelleys that made it difficult for her to keep the baby with her. The Shelleys were fond of Allegra, but Mary Shelley feared that neighbors would believe Percy Bysshe Shelley fathered her as the truth about her relationship to Claire leaked out. William Godwin, Mary's father and Claire's stepfather, had immediately leaped to that conclusion when he learned of Allegra's birth. In an October 1817 letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley remarked that their toddler son William disliked Allegra, but was fond of his baby sister Clara. She saw her son's reaction to Allegra, who was no blood relation to him, as "an argument in favor of those who advocate instinctive natural affection. The Shelleys were constantly in debt. Mary Shelley wanted the baby to be sent to Byron and wanted her difficult and temperamental stepsister, who had too close a relationship with her husband, to leave her house.

After the child's birth, Shelley wrote to Byron "of the exquisite symmetry" and beauty of "a little being whom we ... call Alba, or the Dawn." He asked Byron what his plans were for the child. Later, Shelley acknowledged the child's presence was becoming something of an embarrassment. Byron asked his half-sister Augusta Leigh to take Allegra into her household, but Augusta refused. Hostile to Claire and initially skeptical that he had fathered her daughter, Byron agreed to take custody of Allegra under the condition that her mother have only limited contact with her. Shelley warned Claire that this might not, after all, be the best plan for Allegra, but Claire hoped that her daughter would be more financially comfortable and would have a better chance at a good life if she lived with her father. "I have sent you my child because I love her too well to keep her," she wrote to Byron.

Byron requested that her name be changed from Alba, which also related to "Albé," Claire Clairmont's nickname for Byron, to Allegra, an Italian name meaning "cheerful, brisk" and relating to the musical term "allegro." During the journey to turn the child over to Byron, Claire wrote in her journal that she had bathed her daughter in Dover, but then crossed the passage out, as if afraid to mention the baby's name. The child was baptized with the name Clara Allegra before her mother relinquished her to Byron. Byron discussed spelling Allegra's surname as "Biron" instead of as "Byron" to further distinguish her from his legitimate daughter, Augusta Ada Byron. Byron offered to pay Shelley for the expense of Allegra's upkeep during her first months of life, but Shelley indignantly refused and said the cost was a trifle.