Scrope Berdmore Davies
English dandy and friend of Lord Byron
Scrope Berdmore Davies (1782–1852), often given incorrectly as Scrope Beardmore Davies, was an English dandy of the Regency period. He is known as a friend of Lord Byron, the dedicatee of Byron's poem Parisina. He is the subject of a 1981 biography.
Early life
He was born in 1782 in Horsley, Gloucestershire, the second son in a family of six sons and four daughters—or four sons and three daughters, according to William Prideaux Courtney—of the Rev. Richard Davies (1747–1825), and his wife Margaretta Berdmore, daughter of Scrope Berdmore. He was educated at Eton College, and was admitted to King's College, Cambridge in 1802, graduating B.A. in 1806, and M.A. in 1809. He became a Fellow of King's in 1805, and remained one for the rest of his life.
Associations to 1820
Davies was a noted Georgian and Regency period wit: his recorded witticisms include put-downs of Charles Augustus Tulk and Frederick Goulburn. Byron put one of his jokes, made against Beau Brummell's efforts to learn French, into Beppo.
In London Davies became one of the group of close literary friends around Byron that comprised also John Hookham Frere, John Cam Hobhouse, and Douglas Kinnaird.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scrope Berdmore Davies” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.