Although Byron left Harrow in 1805, he continued to visit the school regularly, staying with Henry Drury, his former tutor, with whom Claridge boarded. Over a dozen letters from Claridge to Byron survive in the John Murray Archive and cover a period from 1808 to 1811. In them there are strong hints that the poet exerted a powerful attraction on the youth who expresses his love for Byron in unequivocal terms. Claridge stayed at Newstead over Easter 1809 and he was present when the poet and his friends John Hobhouse, Scrope Berdmore Davies, Charles Skinner Matthews and James Wedderburn Webster dressed up as monks, drank from a skull and consorted with ‘Paphian girls’ (more accurately, female servants).
Letters to Byron in the John Murray archive contain evidence of a previously unremarked if short-lived romantic relationship with a younger boy at Harrow, John Thomas Claridge:
"Ah! Sure some stronger impulse vibrates here,
Which whispers friendship will be doubly dear
To one, who thus for kindred hearts must roam,
And seek abroad, the love denied at home."
Byron, on his return from Greece in 1811, renewed the friendship, but after a month of Claridge’s company, became rapidly bored. This is what he wrote in September that year: "...Jn Claridge is here, improved in person a good deal, & amiable, but not amusing, now here is a good man, a handsome man, an honourable man, a most inoffensive man, a well informed man, and a dull man, & this last damned epithet undoes all the rest; ... my old friend with the soul of honour & the zeal of friendship & a vast variety of insipid virtues, can’t keep me or himself awake."
In letters to Hobhouse that Autumn, he execrates Claridge’s dullness, fending off a claim of an ‘attachment’ to the youth and eventually dismisses him with ‘Claridge is gone’. So the friendship ended suddenly. Claridge’s letters stop and Byron never referred to him again in his thousands of letters or occasional journals.