Sotheby’s plans to auction a series of letters written by Lord Byron to his friend, Francis Hodgson, a Victorian clergyman. The letters, purchased in 1885 by a former British prime minister, the Earl of Rosebery, uphold the poet’s candid and sometimes ribald reputation, yet are imbued with intimacy between Byron and his friend, said Sotheby’s specialist Gabriel Heaton. “Byron clearly enjoyed writing slightly outrageous things to a clergyman, but you do also get a very strong sense of the depth of friendship they had.” The letters, the most important series to come to market in more than thirty years, recount details from Byron’s life, such as an affair with a serving girl and his dismissal of her after hearing that she’s unfaithful; his time in Albania in the court of Ali Pasha, a “fine portly person with two hundred women and as many boys, many of the last I saw and very pretty creatures they were”; and a flip reference to his literary rival, Wordworth, as “Turdsworth.”