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Statue of Byron
Lord Byron was admitted to Trinity in October 1805 as a Nobleman, which gave him privileges beyond those of the ordinary undergraduate. In his first year he was most unimpressed by the College: "This place is wretched enough - a villainous chaos of din and drunkenness, nothing but hazard and burgundy, hunting, mathematics and Newmarket, riot and racing." He resolved not to return after the long vacation but discovered that after the publication of his first poems he had become something of a celebrity and stayed on for a further year, when he was able to develop the tastes that he so abhorred in his first. It is from this period that the story of his keeping a bear in Cambridge emanates.
After his death, the poet's friends commissioned a statue by the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen which they proposed should be set up in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. Mindful of Byron's reputation, the Abbey refused and for some years the statue was homeless before finding a place in Trinity. However, the first proposal to site the statue in the Chapel was also rejected until in 1845 it was placed in its present position in the Wren Library.
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