Shelley Incinerated

Abstract

When Percy Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822, he had just spent several days with Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt in discussions about the content of The Liberal, the periodical to be edited by Hunt. The meetings and discussions about this project had been long anticipated and, for Shelley, were important in more than one way. Shelley had not seen his friend Hunt in over four years; and though negotiations during the days Shelley stayed at Byron’s villa were sometimes ominously prickly, Shelley set sail with Edward Williams on July 8 in an ebullient mood, having finally staged the coup of drawing Hunt to Italy and of assembling an arguably unprecedented group of contributors, including, besides himself, Byron, Hunt, Mary Shelley, and William Hazlitt. Put another way, Shelley’s death was less the culmination of a life¹ than a disastrous interruption, uprooting the lives of his dearest friends and derailing plans over a year in execution. The costs of that death are captured starkly in Mary Shelley’s letters and Journals, in the demise of The Liberal and dissolution of its circle, and in the sheer number of accounts of Shelley’s death narrated by its various members.

Cor Cordium

—Leigh Hunt, epitaph composed for Shelley’s tomb in Rome

Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer n sea-change Into something rich und strange.

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest; epitaph inscribed on Shelley’s tomb in Rome by Edward John Trelawny