Shelley's Ghost

Shelley and Oxford

Percy Bysshe Shelley entered the University of Oxford in 1810. His undergraduate career lasted less than two terms: in March 1811 he and a friend, T .J. Hogg, were expelled from University College following the publication of their pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. Shortly afterwards Shelley wrote to his father, ‘I hope it will alleviate your sorrow to know that for myself I am perfectly indifferent to the late tyrannical proceedings at Oxford.’
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The Shelley Sanctum

The reverence, even idolatry, with which Shelley was regarded by members of his family and by his more fervent admirers extended to objects that once belonged to, or were associated with him. Lady Shelley’s great creation at the family home, Boscombe Manor, was the Shelley Sanctum, a small room with a domed ceiling painted with stars, and lit by a red lamp. Here the precious Shelley relics were displayed, many of which are included in the exhibition. Over the mantelpiece hung the picture of Mary Shelley by Rothwell (now in the National Portrait Gallery). One visitor remembered an urn in which, Lady Shelley whispered, was kept the remains of Shelley’s heart. At the end of the sanctum stood a scale replica of the memorial Lady Shelley had commissioned from Henry Weekes, and installed in Christchurch Priory. Derived from Michelangelo's Pietá, it depicts Mary cradling the drowned Shelley in her arms.
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The Poet's Son and Daughter-in-law

After Mary Shelley’s death in 1851, the family archives passed to her son Percy Florence and his wife Jane. Percy’s principal interests were sailing, bicycling and amateur dramatics. He took little interest in the literary remains of ‘me old father', but looked after them dutifully. His wife, who had befriended and supported Mary Shelley during her final years, took a much keener interest.
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Mary Shelley, Editor

Mary Shelley gathered together all the manuscripts of Shelley she could find. She was determined that the poet’s name should be better known, and in 1824 published his Posthumous Poems. She intended to follow this with an edition of his prose, but Sir Timothy Shelley threatened to withdraw her allowance if she did so. He wanted an end to the notoriety his son had attached to the family name, and demanded that no further editions, nor any account of Shelley’s life, be published.
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William Godwin and Mary Shelley

William Godwin lived for another forty years after the death of Mary Wollstonecraft. When his popularity as a philosopher waned, he and his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, established a business writing and selling children’s books; but he was in debt for much of the last part of his life. His relationship with his daughter during her years with Shelley was never easy; but after the poet’s death he and Mary became much closer.
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Mary Shelley in England

In the months after Shelley’s death Mary brooded in solitude, confiding her most private thoughts to a ‘Journal of Sorrow’. ‘How long do you think I shall live?' she asked a friend, 'As long as my mother? Then eleven long years must intervene.' Her one wish was to live quietly in Italy with her surviving son, Percy Florence. Lack of money, however, forced her to return to England, where she raised her son on a meagre allowance from Shelley's father, Sir Timothy. Like her parents, Mary earned what she could from her pen. Though she never equalled the popular success of Frankenstein she developed her own distinctive literary voice and built up an impressive body of work, from journalism and travel writing to biography and five more novels.
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Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin

Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin were notable figures in the English Enlightenment. She was famous as the author of the radical and ground-breaking work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. He was the most celebrated philosopher of the day. Their relationship was brief and intense. When they married in 1797 they had been lovers for about a year. Five months after the marriage their daughter Mary was born. It was a difficult birth, and Mary Wollstonecraft died just a few days later.
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The Young Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a member of the English gentry. His grandfather Sir Bysshe was a wealthy baronet, his father Timothy a Sussex landowner. He was educated at Eton, and when not at school lived in the sheltered confines of the family home, Field Place, surrounded by adoring sisters. When Shelley matriculated at Oxford in 1810 he gave his status as ‘gentleman’s son’.
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Shelley and Mary

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a member of the English gentry. His grandfather Sir Bysshe was a wealthy baronet, his father Timothy a Sussex landowner. He was educated at Eton, and when not at school lived in the sheltered confines of the family home, Field Place, surrounded by adoring sisters. When Shelley matriculated at Oxford in 1810 he gave his status as ‘gentleman’s son’.
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Frankenstein

Few works of Romantic literature have captured the public imagination as readily as Mary Shelley’s first novel, which she began when she was just eighteen. It owes a lot of its popularity to the various adaptations written for stage and screen, from the early plays of the 1820s, to the 1931 film starring Boris Karloff as the Creature; and to its numerous successors on film and television – many of them bearing little, if any resemblance to Mary Shelley’s original.
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Shelley's Notebooks

Shelley’s correspondence, with all its emotional upheavals, is a record of his eventful and controversial life. His notebooks, by contrast, show him at work, and their richness and variety reveal both a wide-ranging intellect and exceptional literary gifts. They show him disciplining and shaping his thoughts to create highly crafted poetry and prose.
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Shelley's Last Days

The Shelleys’ last home was the Villa Magni, a house right by the sea in a remote village near Lerici. They shared it with Claire Clairmont and their friends Edward and Jane Williams. At night Shelley was troubled, Mary remembered, by ‘nervous sensations and visions’. During the day he drafted his final, enigmatic poem, ‘The Triumph of Life', and went sailing with Edward Williams in his boat, the Don Juan. In July 1822, while Shelley and Williams were sailing back to the Villa Magni, a sudden storm blew up and they were drowned. Their bodies were washed ashore some days later.
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Shelley's Guitar

Jane Williams had an attractive singing voice and was an accomplished musician. Shelley tried to procure her a harp – her favourite instrument – from his friend Horace Smith in Paris, and when this proved too expensive gave her this Pisan-made guitar. ‘I have contrived to get my musical coals at Newcastle itself’, he told Smith. Jane Williams kept the guitar for the rest of her life, and left it to her daughter, Mrs Prudentia Lonsdale. Mrs Lonsdale’s nephew (Jane's grandson), John Wheeler Williams, purchased the guitar after her death, and sold it to a Shelley devotee, Captain E.A. Silsbee, on the understanding that it was presented to a British institution. It was received by the Bodleian at a formal ceremony on 21 June 1898. It was still in fine condition, as if little used – according to Richard Garnett, it had not been played since Shelley's death.
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