Lord Byron in popular culture from characterisations of Byron. The image of a vampire portrayed as an aristocrat was created by John William Polidori in "The Vampyre", during the summer of 1816 which he spent in the company of Byron. The titled Count Dracula is a reprise of this character. Tom Holland, in his 1995 novel "The Vampyre: Being the True Pilgrimage of George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron", romantically describes how Lord Byron became a vampire during his first visit to Greece — a fictional transformation that explains much of his subsequent behaviour towards family and friends, and finds support in quotes from Byron poems
Lord Byron Byron first welcomed fame, he later turned from it by going into voluntary exile from Britain. The burning of Byron's memoir in the offices of his publisher John Murray a month after his death, and the suppression of details of Byron's bisexuality by subsequent heads of the firm (which held the richest Byron archive), distorted biographies. As late as the 1950s, scholar Leslie Marchard was expressly forbidden by the Murray company to reveal details of Byron's same-sex passions. The re-founding of the Byron Society in 1971 reflected the fascination that many people had with Byron and his work. This society