Byron's friends tore up and burned his memoirs in his publisher's fireplace four weeks after he died

Byron wrote his memoirs and gave the manuscript to his friend the poet Thomas Moore, to be published after his death. Moore sold it to the publisher John Murray II^†. Byron died of fever at Missolonghi while supporting the Greek revolt^†. On 17 May 1824 a group met at Murray's offices at 50 Albemarle Street, London: Murray, Moore, Byron's friend John Cam Hobhouse, and people acting for Byron's widow and his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Accounts differ on who represented the two women. Moore wanted the manuscript kept. Hobhouse wanted it destroyed. One reported motive is that Hobhouse, now a respectable MP, feared association with a libertine; he called the text fit only for a brothel. Byron's biographer Leslie Marchand said Hobhouse had never read it. Moore gave way. The two volumes were torn up and burned in Murray's fireplace, and the copy Moore had made was burned with them. What the memoirs said survives only in inconsistent accounts by people who had read them. In 2026 no copy is known. The John Murray archive, with papers of the people in the room, is held by the National Library of Scotland.