8 July 1822: Percy Bysshe Shelley dies

Percy Bysshe Shelley had a violent temper, especially when crossed – as a school boy he was known as ‘Mad Shelley’ and once impaled another child’s hand to a desk, though it’s worth noting this was in response to a perceived injustice: Shelley’s political radicalism started very early. [1]

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets. He drowned on 8 July 1822 when his small boat overturned in a squall. He was just 29 years old.

In 1818 Shelley, his second wife, Mary Shelley (Godwin), and Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont left England and travelled for some months through France and into Italy, where they remained for the rest of his life. The Italian adventure was blighted for Percy and Mary by the deaths of their two surviving children, Clara, in September 1818 in Venice, and William, in June 1819 in Rome.

In April 1822 they moved to a rented house in Lerici with Claire and their friends Edward and Jane Williams. It was just across the river from Villa Lanfranchi where Lord Byron was staying. The Shelleys’ had lost three of their children in infancy and as often happened when he was under stress, Shelley’s mental strain began to show itself in violent nightmares. There was great stress in the full household and Mary, who was again pregnant, alternated between angry outbursts and cold indifference. In June she suffered a severe miscarriage that almost killed her.

After a meeting on 8 July, Shelley, Williams and their boat boy launched Shelley’s new custom-built boat the ‘Don Juan’ at Livorno to return to Lerici by sail. A few hours later, the vessel was overturned during a storm and its inexperienced crew were lost. It was ten days before the badly decomposed bodies were found, and by then Shelley was identifiable only by the clothes he wore, and the book of Keats’ poems he had in his pocket.

To satisfy Italian quarantine regulations the bodies were buried in the sand near Viareggio where they were found. A month later, on 16 August, Shelley’s body was dug up and burned on a pyre on the beach. Shelley’s ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

A radical in his political and social views, Percy Bysshe Shelley did not achieve fame during his short life but is now regarded as one of the greatest of all poets.