Percy Bysshe Shelley

• 1. Introduction

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  Percy Bysshe Shelley was drowned in a storm off the Italian coast on the 8th of July 1822, age 29, before most of the world had ever read a word he wrote. His boat, the Don Juan, had been custom-built in Genoa, and his second wife Mary would later declare that it was never seaworthy. Whether the vessel was flawed or the crew simply unprepared, the storm took him quickly. Ten days later, his badly decomposed body washed ashore at Viareggio and was identified by his friend Edward Trelawny from the clothing and, in a jacket pocket, a copy of John Keats's Lamia. It was a fittingly literary clue for a man who had spent his entire adult life treating poetry as the most urgent form of political action imaginable.

  What questions does Shelley leave behind? How did a baronet's son from rural Sussex become one of the most radical voices in the English language? Why did he spend years under government surveillance, lose custody of his own children, and die in permanent exile? And why did the establishment newspaper The Courier greet his death by printing that now he would find out whether there was a God or not? The answers reach into every corner of his life: his volcanic years at Eton and Oxford, his two turbulent marriages, his years of productive desperation in Italy, and the long, slow rehabilitation of a reputation that the 19th century could barely contain.

• 2. A Dangerous Education

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  Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on the 4th of August 1792 at Field Place, Warnham, Sussex, to Sir Timothy Shelley, a Whig Member of Parliament, and his wife Elizabeth Pilfold. His early childhood was by most accounts sheltered and happy. He was particularly close to his sisters, and his mother encouraged him to hunt, fish, and ride. But when he left home for Syon House Academy in Brentford, Middlesex, in 1802, something sharper began to emerge.

  At Syon House, Shelley was bullied and miserable, and he responded at times with violent rage. He also began suffering from the nightmares, hallucinations, and sleepwalking that would return at intervals for the rest of his life. In between bouts of unhappiness, he developed a passion for science that fed directly into his voracious appetite for tales of mystery and the supernatural. During holidays at Field Place, he terrified his sisters with experiments involving gunpowder, acids, and electricity. Back at school, he blew up a paling fence with gunpowder.

  Eton, which he entered in 1804, was worse. Shelley's nonconformity and refusal to take part in the school's fagging system made him a target for a form of mob bullying his peers called "Shelley-baits". His violent rages earned him the nickname "Mad Shelley". Yet he continued to pursue science and the occult with the same intensity, reportedly giving an electric shock to a master and blowing up a tree stump with gunpowder. In his senior years, a part-time teacher named James Lind encouraged both his interest in the occult and his appetite for liberal and radical authors. Shelley left Eton with a reputation as a classical scholar, a tolerated eccentric, and the author of a published novel, Zastrozzi, which appeared in his final term.

  At Oxford, he attended few lectures. He set up a laboratory in his room, spent long hours reading, and befriended Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who pushed his political thinking in a sharply radical direction. In the winter of 1810-1811, together they published The Necessity of Atheism, which Shelley mailed to every bishop and head of college at Oxford. He was called before the college Dean, George Rowley, refused to answer questions about authorship, and was expelled on the 25th of March 1811. Hogg was expelled alongside him. When his father, Sir Timothy, demanded he return home and study under appointed tutors, Shelley refused, and the resulting estrangement from his family would shadow him for the rest of his life.

• 3. Radical in Flight

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  By late 1811, the expelled and estranged Shelley had thrown himself into a life of political agitation, communal living experiments, and near-constant movement. In late December 1810 he had met Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen-year-old pupil at the same boarding school as his sisters. Setting aside his philosophical objections to marriage, he eloped with her to Edinburgh, Scotland, and they married on the 28th of August 1811. Both families immediately cut off their allowances. Shelley and Harriet survived on borrowed money, travelling with Hogg to York and then to Keswick in the Lake District, collecting debts and government attention in roughly equal measure.

  During this period, Shelley was also conducting an intense epistolary friendship with Elizabeth Hitchener, a twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher who became his intellectual companion and confidante as he worked through his views on politics, religion, and free love. He proposed that she join a communal household where all property would be shared. He visited Robert Southey in Keswick, and Southey, despite vast political differences, predicted greatness for him. Southey also told him that William Godwin, the author of Political Justice, whom Shelley had long admired, was still alive. Shelley wrote to Godwin immediately, offering himself as a devoted disciple.

  In early 1812, Shelley travelled to Dublin and personally distributed two political tracts calling for Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Acts of Union. He also spoke at a meeting of Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Committee. Reports of his activities were forwarded to the Home Secretary, and he came under surveillance. Returning to Wales, then to Lynmouth in Devon, the household again attracted government attention for distributing subversive literature. When his fifteen-year-old Irish servant was arrested for handing out Shelley's Declaration of Rights and a ballad attacking the government called The Devil's Walk, Shelley fled.

  He settled briefly in Tremadog, Wales, where he worked on Queen Mab, a long utopian allegory advocating atheism, free love, republicanism, and vegetarianism. It was published in a private edition of two hundred and fifty copies in 1813, with few initially distributed due to the risk of prosecution. Another claimed attack at his home in February 1813 - possibly real, possibly a hallucination, possibly a staged escape from creditors and entanglements - sent him fleeing again, this time to Ireland and then London. On the 23rd of June 1813, Harriet gave birth to a daughter, Eliza Ianthe Shelley. His marriage was already fraying.

• 4. The Godwin Entanglement

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  By May 1814, Shelley had begun visiting his mentor William Godwin almost daily, and the visits changed everything. He fell in love with Godwin's sixteen-year-old daughter Mary, whose late mother was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Shelley and Mary declared their love for each other on the 26th of June at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church. Godwin, the man whose radical ideas had shaped Shelley's political philosophy, responded by forbidding Mary to see him and banishing Shelley from the house.

  Shelley and Mary eloped to Europe on the 28th of July 1814, taking Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont with them. Before leaving, Shelley had secured a loan of three thousand pounds but left most of the funds with Godwin and with Harriet, who was again pregnant. The trio made their way across war-ravaged France before returning to England in September without having secured funds or accommodation. Back in England, Harriet gave birth to Charles Bysshe Shelley in November, and in early January 1815, Shelley's grandfather, Sir Bysshe, died leaving an estate worth two hundred and twenty thousand pounds. The financial settlement between Shelley and his father was not concluded until April 1816.

  In the meantime, Mary gave premature birth in February 1815 to a girl who died ten days later. In August, Shelley and Mary moved to Bishopsgate, where he began work on Alastor, a long poem in blank verse based on the myth of Narcissus and Echo. Published in an edition of two hundred and fifty copies in early 1816, it sold poorly and received largely unfavourable reviews. On the 24th of January 1816, Mary gave birth to William Shelley.

  The connection to Godwin persisted in painful ways. Even after cutting off all personal contact with Shelley for conducting what he regarded as an adulterous relationship with his daughter, Godwin continued to make frequent requests for financial help from the man he refused to see. Shelley's generosity with money, combined with Godwin's demands and the presence of Claire and her complicated history, meant that domestic and financial stress rarely let up. The rumour that Godwin had in effect sold his daughters to Shelley circulated at the time and was never fully put to rest.

• 5. Byron, Tragedy, and Italy

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  Claire Clairmont had initiated a sexual relationship with Lord Byron in April 1816, and she then arranged for Byron to meet Shelley and Mary in Geneva. Shelley admired Byron's poetry and had already sent him Queen Mab. Shelley's party arrived in May and rented a house near Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. One night while Byron was reciting Coleridge's Christabel, Shelley suffered a severe panic attack with hallucinations. The previous night Mary had experienced a vision that would become the seed of Frankenstein.

  Shelley and Byron took a boating tour around Lake Geneva, which prompted Shelley to write his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty". He also wrote "Mont Blanc", which has been described as an atheistic response to Coleridge's own poem about that mountain. Shelley habitually signed guest books during this tour with declarations of atheism, which were seen by other British tourists and hardened opinion against him at home. Relations with Byron became strained when Byron learned that Claire was pregnant with his child. Shelley quietly made provision for Claire and the baby in his will.

  The departure for Italy on the 12th of March 1818 was framed as an escape from the "tyranny civil and religious" of England, and a doctor had separately advised the move for Shelley's chronic lung complaint. Clara, Mary's infant daughter, became seriously ill on the journey and died on the 24th of September in Venice. Shelley's three-year-old son William died in June 1819, probably of malaria. Mary fell into prolonged depression. Shelley, writing from Naples in a poem he titled "Stanzas written in Dejection," was ill, depressed, and by his own account nearly suicidal.

  Despite this devastation, the Italian years produced some of the most significant work of the Romantic period. In Rome, Shelley made substantial progress on Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, and The Cenci simultaneously. He completed The Cenci in September 1819; it became one of his most popular works and the only one to receive two authorised editions in his lifetime. Within two weeks of hearing about the Peterloo Massacre of peaceful protesters in Manchester, he had written The Mask of Anarchy and sent it to Leigh Hunt for publication. Hunt decided against publishing it for fear of prosecution for seditious libel. The poem did not appear officially until 1832.

• 6. A Philosophy of Dissent

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  Shelley's political radicalism was not a pose. He advocated Catholic emancipation, republicanism, parliamentary reform, an extension of the franchise, freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, and a more equal distribution of income and wealth. He drew on thinkers including Rousseau, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Leigh Hunt. His published views were often more moderate than his private positions, largely because he was trying to avoid prosecution for seditious libel.

  His advocacy of nonviolent resistance was rooted in his study of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, which led him to believe that violent protest would produce military despotism rather than liberation. His 1812 pamphlet An Address, to the Irish People put this plainly: "I do not wish to see things changed now, because it cannot be done without violence, and we may assure ourselves that none of us are fit for any change, however good, if we condescend to employ force in a cause we think right." His poem "The Mask of Anarchy" has since been called perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance, and it is possible that it reached Mahatma Gandhi through Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.

  Shelley's atheism was inseparable from this politics. He saw organised religion as structurally linked to social oppression, which made his atheism genuinely dangerous rather than merely philosophical. The Necessity of Atheism was withdrawn from sale after a complaint from a priest. Queen Mab was prosecuted twice by the Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1821. Other works were edited before publication to reduce the legal risk.

  His essay A Philosophical View of Reform, written in 1820, remained unpublished until 1920 and has been called one of the most advanced documents of political philosophy produced in the nineteenth century. His Defence of Poetry, completed in March 1821, also went unpublished in his lifetime; its famous final line, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", was not widely read until 1840. His vegetarianism, adopted in early March 1812 and sustained with occasional lapses for the rest of his life, drew on ancient authors but was shaped more directly by John Frank Newton's The Return to Nature, and his essays on the subject emphasised health, animal suffering, the inefficient use of agricultural land, and economic inequality in terms that a later century would find striking. His life and writing are credited with influencing the founding of the Vegetarian Society in England in 1847.

• 7. Reputation and Aftermath

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  At the time of his death, almost none of Shelley's work had found a mainstream audience. Most of his poetry and drama appeared in editions of two hundred and fifty copies that sold poorly. Only The Cenci received a second authorised edition while he was alive. By contrast, Byron's The Corsair, published in 1814, sold out a first edition of ten thousand copies in a single day. The initial reception from mainstream periodicals was almost uniformly unfavourable, with reviewers attacking Shelley's private life and political views even when they acknowledged the beauty of his imagery. William Hazlitt described his writing as "a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstraction."

  What audiences he did find were political. Queen Mab went through fourteen official and pirated editions by 1845 and was widely read in Owenist and Chartist circles. The Revolt of Islam influenced poets sympathetic to the workers' movement including Thomas Hood, Thomas Cooper, and William Morris. Editions of his poems published in 1824 and 1839, edited by Mary Shelley, were shaped to emphasise his lyrical gifts and soften his radicalism. Matthew Arnold famously called him "a beautiful and ineffectual angel."

  The rehabilitation of his literary reputation was slow and uneven. Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats all drew substantially on his work. Shelley-like characters appeared across nineteenth-century fiction, among them Scythrop in Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, Ladislaw in George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Angel Clare in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In the twentieth century, critics including T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Allen Tate, and W. H. Auden attacked his poetry for style, ideas, and intellectual immaturity. Then, from the 1960s onwards, a new critical generation re-examined his debt to Spenser and Milton, his mastery of genres and verse forms, and the philosophical complexity of his work, and his reputation rose steadily. The American critic Harold Bloom described him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."

  After the cremation on the beach at Viareggio on the 16th of August 1822, his heart resisted burning and was retrieved by Trelawny, who gave the scorched organ to Leigh Hunt. Hunt preserved it in spirits of wine and refused for years to hand it over to Mary. When he finally did, the heart was eventually buried either at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, or in Christchurch Priory. His ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome, and reburied in a different plot at the same cemetery in 1823. His grave bears the Latin inscription Cor Cordium, Heart of Hearts, and lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea change / Into something rich and strange." His long-lost Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, first published in 1811, was rediscovered in 2006 and subsequently made available online by the Bodleian Library in Oxford.