Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard—I saw them not —
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming, —
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!
— “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” Percy Shelley, 1816
SINCE HIS YOUTH, Percy Bysshe Shelley had been fascinated with the supernatural. As a boy, he collected “blue books,” cheap editions of Gothic novels about haunted castles, murders, ghosts, pirates, magicians, and bandits. One of his favorites was The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man, about a race of flying people, the “glumms” and “glowries,” and Wilkins, their Prometheus, who brought them the arts and civilization. Shelley fantasized about having a winged wife who would give birth to little flying cherubs.
He felt that there were mysteries hidden beneath the veneer of everyday reality and that, somehow, he could discover them. Secret societies such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati held great interest for him, and he recalled perusing “ancient books of Chemistry and Magic . . . with an enthusiasm and wonder, almost amounting to belief.”
One of Shelley’s scientific interests was astronomy, and he often speculated on the possibility that people would one day travel to the planets. His cousin Thomas Medwin wrote that Shelley hoped that, in the same way schoolboys were promoted from one grade to another, humans “should rise to a progressive state from planet to planet, till we become Gods.”
Fantasizing about all these marvels and horrors often gave Percy vivid and terrifying dreams, and he was a lifelong sleepwalker. Like Mary Godwin, he had “waking dreams” as well, though his were virtually hallucinations. Medwin recalled that “a sort of lethargy and abstraction” would come over Percy, after which “his eyes flashed, his lips quivered, his voice was tremulous with emotion, a sort of ecstasy came over him, and he talked more like a spirit or an angel than a human being.”
Shelley often saw himself as a solitary genius or a wandering poet, but though he would roam, he also liked to be the center—and leader—of a group. Indeed, his life and career were devoted to bringing others along with him toward his envisioned, more perfect, existence. His large blue eyes and high-pitched, hypnotic voice invited others to join in the visions he saw clearly. From his youth, when he had four younger, adoring sisters to enlist in the fantasies he concocted, he was able to persuade others to share his dreams. Eccentric and rebellious, Shelley was forever to be a visionary looking for a harem.
The Shelleys were part of a minor branch of an old aristocratic family in Sussex, south of London. Percy’s great-grandfather had gone to America to seek his fortune, and his grandfather Bysshe had been born in Newark, New Jersey. Through the deaths of his father’s elder brothers, Bysshe came to inherit the estate of his branch of the Shelley family, which included a property called Field Place. He came to England and increased the family fortunes by eloping with two wealthy heiresses. The first one was only sixteen, the same age of the two women his grandson would fall in love with. Bysshe’s first wife bore him a son and heir, the poet’s father, Timothy.
Bysshe was an eccentric and a dreamer who spent much of his time building a castle which he called his “Folly.” It was never completed, nor did anyone ever want to live in it. Through political connections, Bysshe became a baronet but he took the title with a grain of salt. His son Timothy, on the other hand, proved to be a pompous snob, lived the life of a country squire at Field Place, and also served in Parliament. The elder Bysshe showed a talent for versifying when he joked of his son:
It’s not my wish
To be Sir Bysshe,
But it’s my son’s whim
To be Sir Tim.
Timothy Shelley married Elizabeth Pilfold, a beautiful woman of high birth. On August 4, 1792, their first child was born and christened Percy Bysshe, though the family always called him Bysshe. His birth was followed by those of five little sisters—one died in infancy—and a brother who was born after Percy was a teenager. Timothy and Elizabeth did not seem close to any of their children, and Percy always displayed a virulent hatred for his father, who in turn forbade anyone to use his son’s name in his presence for years after Percy’s death. Timothy had hoped for a political career for his first-born son and disapproved of his literary efforts. He gave his younger son this advice: “Never read a book, Johnnie, and you will be a rich man.” Percy later wrote, “The habits of thinking of my father and myself never coincided. Passive obedience was inculcated and enforced in my childhood. I was required to love, because it was my duty to love.”
Percy’s mother was a beautiful woman and she has been described as clever but lacking imagination—not a perfect fit for her son. Edward Dowden, an authorized biographer of the poet who talked to Shelley’s siblings, wrote that Elizabeth’s “temper was violent and domineering,” and that she felt her elder son had inadequate enthusiasm for hunting and fishing. She had been brought up in a sporting household and wanted her son to conform. Sometimes she would force Percy to go out with the gamekeeper to hunt. As soon as they were out of sight, Percy would curl up under a tree with a book while the gamekeeper proceeded to shoot enough rabbits and squirrels to satisfy Elizabeth.
But in some ways, growing up at Field Place was Edenic for Percy. He could romp in the gardens with his adoring sisters. He invented fabulous stories about fantastic creatures who lived there, such as the Great Old Snake that lurked in the gardens. Sometimes he dressed as an alchemist, casting spells, while his sisters would don costumes to impersonate spirits that Percy would summon up. Percy had little contact with boys his own age, and he became accustomed to having a circle of young females around him to entertain and play games with. He enjoyed nature and often rode on his pony through the woods; his sister Hellen recalled that he loved to sneak out and look at the stars at night. The estate also had a pond where young Percy sailed toy boats. Throughout his life he would love being near water, though he never learned to swim.
Percy learned to read quite early and started to devour books with what would be a lifelong gusto. He learned Latin from the local clergyman; even at this time it was clear that the young boy had a wonderful memory and his sisters remembered him reciting Latin verses. He soon started to compose his own poetry. The earliest surviving effort, written when he was eight, is “Verses on a Cat.” The second stanza shows that a strain of melancholy was already part of his personality:
You would not easily guess
All the modes of distress
Which torture the tenants of earth;
And the various evils
Which like so many devils,
Attend the poor souls from their birth.
Shelley received a shock in 1802, when he was sent to the Syon House Academy, a boys’ school in Brentford. Here there were no adoring sisters to obey his instructions—instead, only boys who felt he was not “one of them.” His classmates, used to rough play, thought Percy was girlish because he didn’t want to take part in their sports or games. Shelley, recalled his cousin Thomas Medwin, who was also a student there, was mocked because he did not know how to play marbles, leapfrog, hopscotch, or cricket. Another schoolmate remembered him as “like a girl in boy’s clothes, fighting with open hands and rolling on the floor when flogged, not from the pain, but from a sense of indignity.” Yet another reported that because Shelley talked about “spirits, fairies, fighting, volcanoes, etc.” he was considered “almost on the borders of insanity.”
In such a situation a lesser person would try to change, to adapt, become more like others. That was not Shelley, who claimed that it was at Syon House that it became clear to
him that he must change the world. Years later he wrote about this experience in the introduction to “The Revolt of Islam.”
Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass
I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit’s sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was,
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes —
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and foes.
The one good thing Shelley acquired at Syon House was a love of science, acquired from attending the talks given by Dr. Adam Walker, a traveling lecturer who was a friend of the chemist Joseph Priestley. Walker introduced Percy to electricity, magnetism, and telescopes. Among the facts that fascinated the boy was that, as Benjamin Franklin and others had shown, electricity could be collected, stored in a device called a Leyden jar (an early type of storage battery), and used to perform experiments. On holidays and school vacations, Shelley returned to Field Place to introduce surreptitiously the world of scientific inquiry to his sisters, who were distressed as gunpowder, fire balloons, and “electrical kites” appeared in Shelley’s repertoire of practical jokes. When he offered to cure one sister’s chilblains by “electrifying” her, she turned traitor, informed their mother, and the scientific experiments were reined in.
After two years at Syon House, Shelley went to Eton, where he spent the next six years, the longest time he was ever to remain in one place during his entire life. Shelley, still stubbornly averse to games and “manly” activities, once more found school a hostile environment. The headmaster, a Dr. Keate, was generally known as “Flogger,” and the school authorities tolerated the “fagging” system by which the younger boys had to get protection from bullies by performing menial tasks for the older students. Here, the harassing of Shelley became so commonplace that it received a name: the “Shelley bait.” A classmate recalled hearing cries of “Shelley! Shelley! Shelley!” thundering through the hallways as groups chased him down, surrounded him, knocked his books from under his arm, pulled at him, and tore his clothes. “The result was . . . a paroxysm of anger which made his eyes flash like a tiger’s, his cheeks grow pale as death, his limbs quiver, and his hair stand on end.” Such demonstrations of rage only prompted the crowd to taunt him some more. He soon picked up the nickname “Mad Shelley.”
During his later years at Eton, things improved. Many of the younger students liked him because he refused to abuse the fagging system. Shelley developed a crush on a boy during these years. “Every night when we parted to go to bed, I remember we kissed each other,” Shelley wrote in some autobiographical notes he made years later. A strong bisexual component to his personality would always be with him.
A classmate recalled him as
a thin, slight lad, with remarkably lustrous eyes, fine hair, and a very peculiar shrill voice and laugh. . . . At his tutor, Bethell’s, where he lodged, he attempted many mechanical and scientific experiments. By the aid of a common tinker, he contrived to make something like a steam-engine, which, unfortunately, one day suddenly exploded, to the great consternation of the neighbourhood and to the imminent danger of a severe flogging from Dr. Goodall.
But his scientific pursuits did not overshadow his fascination with the supernatural. One time during the Eton years, he spent the night in a charnel house at Warnham Church, waiting nervously for the spirits of the dead to appear. Indeed, the invisible world, whether explained by science or spirits, was to him a tangible reality.
An elderly teacher at Eton, Dr. James Lind, took a keen interest in Shelley and encouraged his scientific pursuits. Lind had been one of King George III’s doctors and was a member of the Lunar Society, whose members included such pioneers of science as Joseph Priestley, James Watt, and Erasmus Darwin. (The group took its name from the fact that its meetings were held on the night of the full moon so that the members could get home safely.) Lind had traveled to China and was interested in many phases of knowledge and new ideas. He introduced Shelley to the study of French and German, which were not stressed in Eton’s curriculum of classical learning. Under Lind’s guidance, Shelley began to read seriously the writings of such thinkers as Lucretius, Pliny, Franklin, and Condorcet. Most important, Lind put a copy of William Godwin’s Political Justice in Shelley’s hands. Godwin’s opposition to government and all other large societal institutions, as well as his optimism that free inquiry would lead to a happy anarchy, appealed enormously to Shelley. The future envisioned by Godwin meshed with Shelley’s emerging ideas about the importance of small self-sustaining groups with which he could pursue intellectual inquiry.
During his last year at Eton, Shelley wrote what was to be his first published work: Zastrozzi, a Gothic story of passion, betrayal, and vengeance. It was similar to the popular books that he had devoured since his years at Syon House. He took the name of the female protagonist, Matilda (along with many other “borrowed” elements), from the evil heroine in Matthew Lewis’s notorious 1796 novel, The Monk. (Lewis’s work was a favorite of both Percy and Mary, and Percy would meet Lewis at Lord Byron’s chateau during the memorable summer of 1816.) Shelley’s novel made its appearance in 1810; he modestly claimed authorship as “P.B.S.” The title page, significantly, contained an epigraph taken from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a passage in which Beelzebub declares his intention to take revenge on God by attacking the creatures most dear to him. A few years later, Mary would employ a similar epigraph, and the same plot device, for Frankenstein.
In October 1810, Shelley traveled with his father to Oxford to enroll in the university. His father had studied there and wanted to give his son a good start by establishing him in comfortable surroundings. The Oxford that Shelley attended was not the great institution of today. The pace was leisurely and gentlemen often did little scholarly work at all. The Bodleian Library went almost unused.
Within the first few days, Shelley met Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a son of a Yorkshire barrister, and an intimate, lifelong friendship sprang up. We learn about Shelley at this time through Hogg’s biography of his friend: a tall, thin, stooped young man with a high-pitched voice who walked briskly around Oxford always with a book in his hand, nearly covering his face. Though clumsy looking, he never seemed to trip over others’ outstretched feet while reading and walking. “His features, his whole face, and particularly his head, were, in fact, unusually small; yet the last appeared of a remarkable bulk, for his hair was long and bushy and . . . he often rubbed it fiercely with his hands . . . so that it was singularly wild and rough.” The nickname he had picked up at Eton was now flaunted; to Hogg and others, Shelley admitted that he and his behavior were odd, explaining merely, “I myself am often mad.”
Hogg left a memorable description of Shelley in his room at New College:
Books, boots, papers, shoes, philosophical instruments, clothes, pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition, and phials innumerable, with money, stockings, prints, crucibles, bags, and boxes, were scattered on the floor and in every place; as if the young chemist, in order to analyse the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to reconstruct the primeval chaos. The tables, and especially the carpet, were already stained with large spots of various hues, which frequently proclaimed the agency of fire. An electrical machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass jars and receivers, were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter. Upon the table by his side were some books lying open, several letters, a bundle of new pens, and a bottle of japan ink, that served as an inkstand . . . and a handsome razor that had been used as a knife. There were bottles of soda water, sugar, pieces of lemon, and the traces of an effervescent beverage. Two piles of books supported the tongs, and those upheld a small glass retort above an argand lamp. I had not been seated many minutes before the liquor in th
e vessel boiled over, adding fresh stains to the table, and rising in fumes with a most disagreeable odour. Shelley snatched the glass quickly, and dashing it in pieces among the ashes under the grate, increased the unpleasant and penetrating effluvium.
He then proceeded, with much eagerness and enthusiasm, to show me the various instruments, especially the electrical apparatus; turning the handle very rapidly, so that the fierce, crackling sparks flew forth; and presently standing upon the stool with glass feet, he begged me to work the machine until he was filled with the [electrical] fluid, so that his long, wild locks bristled and stood on end. Afterwards he charged a powerful battery of several jars; labouring with vast energy, and discoursing with increasing vehemence of the marvellous powers of electricity, of thunder and lightning; describing an electrical kite that he had made at home, and projecting another and an enormous one, or rather a combination of many kites, that would draw down from the sky an immense volume of electricity, the whole ammunition of a mighty thunderstorm; and this being directed to some point would there produce the most stupendous results.
It was, in so many ways, the image of the mad scientist that would be re-created on the Universal Studios backlot 122 years later.
Hogg noted Shelley’s hypochondria and his charming effect on women. After traveling with a fat lady in a coach Shelley feared that he was catching elephantiasis and that others might be infected as well. So at a country dance, using the excuse of medical inspection, Shelley placed “his eyes close to [the women’s] necks and bosoms” and “felt their breasts and their bare arms” until the hostess told him to stop.
Seldom did any woman tell him to stop. Hogg somewhat enviously noted, “The moment he entered a house, he inspired the most lively interest into every woman in the family; not only the mistress of the house, her daughters, and other lady relatives, but even the housekeeper and the humblest females in the establishment were animated alike by an active desire to promote and secure his well-being, in every way and to the utmost in their power.”
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