Byron was the son of Captain John Byron, who died when he was a child, and a Scotswoman, Catherine Gordon of Gight. He was born with a club foot, a disability which is believed to have had an immense impact on his life and writings. He grew up relatively impoverished until, through the death of two intermediate heirs, he inherited his title. He then moved south, where he continued his schooling first at prestigious Harrow and then Cambridge. He became notorious for leading the riotous and debauched life open to a wealthy gentleman. He published his first volume of poems in 1807 and replied to an attack on them in the Edinburgh Review with his satiric English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. He began travelling abroad in Europe for prolonged periods in 1809, when he began to write Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The publication of the first two cantos of this poem made him a great success in the London literary scene where his love affairs (including with his half-sister Augusta, who in 1814 gave birth to a child supposed to be his) caused considerable scandal. He married Annabella Milbanke in 181. They had a daughter that same year but soon separated. Byron's debts and the scandal over his relationship with Augusta caused most of his acquaintance to shun him; he left England in 1816 and remained in Europe, and largely southern Europe, for the rest of his life. He spent considerable time on the continent with the Shelleys and in other romantic liaisons, including one with Mary Shelley's half-sister Claire Clairmont, who bore a daughter by him. He also continued to write and publish prolifically. He published the first two Cantos of Don Juan in 1819, and was attacked by Blackwood's but admired by Goethe. He embraced both Italian and Greek nationalism, and in 1824 set out to assist the Greeks in their struggle for liberation from Turkish domination. He died of fever in Greece soon after his arrival. Despite frequent critical attacks, Byron's poetry was immensely popular in England, on the continent, and in North America.