Oxford expelled the baronet’s son for atheism
Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792–8 July 1822) died at twenty-nine in a boating accident, still obscure to most readers. Fame came later—for “Ozymandias,” Prometheus Unbound, and a sceptical lyric craft Harold Bloom called unmatched—after Eton bullying, an atheism pamphlet, and exile from polite England.
Eldest son of Whig MP Sir Timothy Shelley and Elizabeth Pilfold, he was born at Field Place, Warnham, Sussex, amid four sisters and a younger brother. A gifted day-school linguist, he suffered bullying and nightmares at Syon House Academy, then worse “Shelley-baits” at Eton (from 1804), earning the nickname Mad Shelley for rages, gunpowder tricks, and occult dabbling. Part-time teacher James Lind fed him radical books and Plato. Before Oxford he had already issued the novel Zastrozzi, poems with sister Elizabeth, and the gothic St. Irvine (published 1811).
At University College he skipped lectures for a private lab and befriended Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Winter 1810–11 brought anonymous tracts including The Necessity of Atheism, mailed to bishops and college heads. Refusing to answer authorship questions, he and Hogg were expelled on 25 March 1811; his father demanded tutors and submission, Shelley refused, and the breach opened. That August he eloped with sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook to Edinburgh (married 28 August 1811), both families cutting funds. A tangled household with Hogg and Harriet’s sister Eliza, a platonic intensity with schoolteacher Elizabeth Hitchener, and counsel from Robert Southey followed in the Lakes.
Southey pointed him to the still-living William Godwin, whose Political Justice Shelley revered; Godwin urged scholarship over Irish agitation. Shelley went anyway early in 1812, distributing Address to the Irish People and speaking for Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Union while warning against violence—reports reached the Home Secretary. Permanent Italian self-exile would come in 1818; Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was his second wife. Recognition that escaped his lifetime later drew Marx, Gandhi, and Shaw.
Source: Percy Bysshe Shelley
