From the dust jacket

From the dust jacket: Scrope Berdmore Davies, descendant of generations of sober English clergymen, was a dashing nineteenth-century dandy of epic proportion. King’s Scholar at Eton, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, imbiber, duelist, crack tennis player, accomplished swimmer and boxer, womanizer, ornament at aristocratic house parties, witty conversationalist, and close friend of Lord Byron and his circle, Davies was also a compulsive gambler - which proved fortunate for posterity.
In 1820, after years of high living, Scrope’s luck ran out and he fled to the Continent a broken man, leaving behind one trunk stashed in the vault of Barclay’s, his London bankers. It survived there intact, unclaimed and unopened, until 1975.
When Barclay’s opened it with care and curiosity, they found a literary and cultural gold mine: previously unknown Byron and Shelley manuscripts, letters from Byron and friends, paid and unpaid bills, odds and ends — even a recipe for gooseberry wine — that portray an extraordinary man in an extraordinary period of English history.