Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is esteemed by some scholars the finest lyric poet in the English language. He is perhaps most widely famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy; but his major works were long visionary poems such as Adonais and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism made him a notorious and much denigrated figure in his own life, but he became the idol of the following two or three generations of poets (including the major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats.) He was also famous for his association with contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, and, like them, for his untimely death at a young age. He was married to the equally famous novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. He was interested in the concept of free love and often went to great and sometimes dubious lengths to promote the idea (once, for instance, sleeping with his wife's step-sister after his wife had miscarried).

Life

Shelley was born in 1792, son of Sir Timothy Shelley, later the 2nd baronet of Castle Goring, and his wife Elizabeth Pilfold. He grew up in Sussex, and received his early education at home, tutored by Reverend Thomas Edwards of Horsham. In 1802, he entered the Sion House Academy of Brentford. In 1804, Shelley entered Eton College, and on April 10, 1810 he went to the University of Oxford (University College). In 1811, Shelley published a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which resulted in his expulsion from Oxford on March 25, 1811, along with Hogg. Four months after being expelled, 19-year-old Shelley eloped to Scotland with 16-year-old schoolgirl Harriet Westbrook, daughter of John Westbrook, a coffee-house keeper in London. After their marriage on August 28, 1811, Shelley invited his college friend Hogg to share their household – and also his wife, according to the ideals of free love. When Harriet objected, Shelley abandoned this first attempt at open marriage and brought Harriet instead to England's Lake District, intending to write. He then visited Ireland to engage in radical pamphleteering.

In London, he met and fell in love with Mary, the intelligent and well-educated daughter of William Godwin and famed feminist educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died at Mary's birth. He became enamored when Mary made fun of his "sissyfied" name (Percy) and he quickly grew fond of his, as he referred to Mary, "sassy wench." In July 1814, Shelley abandoned his wife and children and eloped for the second time with a 16-year-old: in fact two 16-year-olds, as he ran away with Mary and invited her step-sister Jane (later Claire) Clairmont along for company. The threesome sailed to Europe, crossed France and settled in Switzerland. After six weeks, homesick and destitute, the three young people returned to England. There they found Godwin, the one-time champion and practitioner of free love, refused to speak to Mary or Shelley. In the summer of 1816 Shelley and Mary, living now as a married couple, made a second trip to Switzerland. They were prompted to do so by Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had commenced a liaison with Lord Byron the previous April. Byron had lost interest in Claire, and she used the opportunity of meeting the Shelleys to get him to Geneva. The Shelleys and Byron rented neighboring houses on the shores of Lake Geneva. A boating tour inspired Shelley to write the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, his first significant production since Alastor. A tour of Chamonix in the French Alps inspired "Mont Blanc". Shelley, in turn, influenced Byron's poetry. That summer, Mary had been inspired to begin writing Frankenstein. At the end of summer, the Shelleys and Claire returned to England.

The return to England was marred by tragedy. Fanny Imlay, Mary Godwin's half-sister and a member of Godwin's household, killed herself in the late autumn. In December 1816 Shelley's estranged and pregnant wife Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. On December 30, 1816, a few weeks after Harriet's body was recovered, Shelley and Mary Godwin were married. The marriage was intended to help secure Shelley's custody of his children by Harriet, but the children were handed over to foster parents by the courts. The Shelleys took up residence in the village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Shelley took part in the literary circle that surrounded Leigh Hunt, and during this period met John Keats. Early in 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left England in order to take Claire's daughter, Allegra, to her father, Byron, who had taken up residence in Venice. In the latter part of the year he wrote Julian and Maddalo, a lightly disguised rendering of his boat trips and conversations with Byron in Venice, finishing with a visit to a madhouse. This poem marked the appearance of Shelley's "urbane style." He then began the long verse drama Prometheus Unbound. In 1818 and 1819, his son Will died of fever in Rome, and his infant daughter died during another move.

The Shelleys moved through various Italian cities during these years. Shelley completed Prometheus Unbound in Rome, and spent the summer of 1819 writing a tragedy, The Cenci, in Livorno. In this year, he wrote his best-known political poems, The Masque of Anarchy, Men of England and The Witch of Atlas, and the essay The Philosophical View of Reform, his most thorough exposition of his political views. On July 8, 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, the Don Juan. Shelley's body washed ashore and was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. His heart was snatched, unconsumed, from the funeral pyre by Edward Trelawny, and kept by Mary Shelley until her dying day, while his ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome under a tower in the city walls. A reclining statue of the drowned Shelley washed up on the shore, by the sculptor Edward Onslow Ford, can be found in University College, Oxford. Both Shelleys were strong advocates of vegetarianism. He wrote several essays advocating a vegetarian diet.

Shelley was a seventeenth generation descedant of Richard Fitzalan, 10th Earl of Arundel through his son John Fitzalan, Marshall of England (d. 1379). John was married to Baroness Eleanor Maltravers (1345 – January 10, 1404/1405. Their eldest son succeeded them as John FitzAlan, 2nd Baron Arundel (1365–1391). He was himself married to Elizabeth le Despenser (d. April 1/ April 10, 1408).

Elizabeth was a great-granddaughter of Hugh the younger Despenser by his second son Edward Despenser of Buckland (d. September 30, 1342). Her parents were Sir Edward Despenser, 1st Lord Despenser (March 24, 1336 – November 11, 1375) and Elizabeth Burghersh (d. July 26, 1409).

The eldest son of Elizabeth by Baron Maltravers was John Fitzalan, 13th Earl of Arundel. Their third son was Sir Thomas Fitzalan of Beechwood. His own daughter Eleanor Fitzalan was married to Sir Thomas Browne of Beechworth Castle. They had four sons and a daughter. Said daughter Katherine Browne was married in 1471 to Humphrey Sackville of Buckhurst (1426 – January 24, 1488).

Their oldest son Richard Sackville of Buckhurst (1472 – July 18, 1524) was married in 1492 to Isabel Dyggs. Their oldest son Sir John Sackville of Buckhurst (1492 – October 5, 1557) was married to Margaret Boleyn. Margaret was a sister to Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire. His younger brother Richard Sackville had a less prominent marriage which resulted in the birth of Anne Sackville. Anne herself was later married to Henry Shelley.

Henry became father to a younger Henry Shelley. This younger Henry had at least three sons. The youngest of them Richard Shelley was later married to Joan Fuste, daughter of John Fuste from Ichingfield. Their grandson John Shelley of Fen Place was married himself to Helen Bysshe, daughter of Roger Bysshe. Their son Timothy Shelley of Fen Place (born c. 1700) married widow Johanna Plum from New York City. Timothy and Johanna were the great-grandparents of Percy.

Percy was born to Sir Timothy Shelley (September 7, 1753 – April 24, 1844) and his wife Elizabeth Pilfold following their marriage in October, 1791. His father was son and heir to Sir Bysshe Shelley, 1st Baronet of Castle Goring (June 21, 1731 – January 6, 1815) by his wife Mary Catherine Michell (d. November 7, 1760). His mother was daughter of Charles Pilfold of Effingham. Through his paternal grandmother Percy was great-grandson to Reverend Theobald Michell of Horsham.

He was the eldest of six children. His younger siblings included:

John Shelley of Avington House (March 15, 1806 – November 11, 1866. He was married on March 24, 1827 to Elizabeth Bowen (d. November 28, 1889).
Mary Shelley.
Elizabeth Shelley (d. 1831).
Hellen Shelley (d. May 10, 1885).
Margaret Shelley (d. July 9, 1887).

Three children survived Shelley: Ianthe and Charles, his daughter and son by Harriet; and Percy Florence, his son by Mary. Charles died of tuberculosis in 1826. Percy Florence, who eventually inherited the baronetcy in 1844, died without children. The only lineal descendants of the poet are therefore the children of Ianthe.

Ianthe Eliza Shelley was married in 1837 to Edward Jeffries Esdaile. The marriage resulted in the birth of two sons and a daughter. Ianthe died in 1876.

Career

Shelley's first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), in which he gave vent to his atheistic worldview through the villain Zastrozzi. In the same year, Shelley together with his sister Elizabeth published Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. After going up to Oxford, he issued a collection of (ostensibly burlesque but actually subversive) verse, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. A fellow collegian, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, may have been his collaborator. Over the next two years, Shelley wrote and published Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. The poem shows the influence of English philosopher William Godwin, and much of Godwin's freethinking radical philosophy is voiced in it.

In the autumn of 1815, while living close to London with Mary and avoiding creditors, Shelley produced the verse allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. It attracted little attention at the time, but has come to be recognized as his first major poem. In 1822 Shelley arranged for James Henry Leigh Hunt, the British poet and editor who had been one of his chief supporters in England, to come to Italy with his family; to create a journal, to be called The Liberal, with Hunt as editor, which would disseminate their controversial writings and act as a counter-blast to conservative periodicals such as Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review.

Shelley's mainstream following did not develop until a generation after his passing; this contrasted with Lord Byron, who was popular amongst the upper classes during his lifetime, despite his radical views. For decades after his death Shelley was mainly appreciated by the major Victorian poets, such as Tennyson and Browning, by the pre-Raphaelites, and by socialists and the labour movement – Karl Marx and Bernard Shaw were among his admirers. Only in the latter part of the 19th century did Shelley's work, or rather his more innocuous work, become respectable – popularised by, among others, Henry Salt, whose acclaimed biography Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Pioneer was first published in 1896. In the period between World War I and the mid-twentieth century, dominated as it was by the critical ideas of T. S. Eliot, Shelley's verse was treated with contempt by the critical establishment – due in large part to Eliot's reaction against the poet's militant atheism. In the late 1950s, encouraged by scholars such as Harold Bloom, Shelley began to resume his reputation. Aspects of Shelley's poetry and poetics have also been attractive for postmodernist critics, who value Shelley's scepticism and highly metaphorical constructions.