ABSTRACT
Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), only daughter of Frederick Ponsonby, 3rd Earl of Bessborough, and Lady Henrietta Frances Spencer, had a troubled and unsettled childhood, neglected by her parents. At the age of three she was sent to Italy for six years with a servant, returning at nine to be cared for by her aunt at Devonshire House. She was married to the Hon. William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, in 1805, but quickly became infatuated with Byron. It was she who famously described Byron as 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know', breaking up with him in 1813, and portraying him in her novel Glenarvon (1816). Her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography describes her as 'excitable to the verge of insanity' (vol. XI, p. 422). Her childhood reminiscences are in Lady Morgan's Memoirs (1862), first as recorded by Lady Morgan herself in her journal, and then in an undated letter from Lady Caroline to Lady Morgan.
