Percy the tortoise, much-loved pet of University College, is aptly named after their greatest and most radical student, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The romantic poet whose frequently quoted verse has echoed through the generations, led a life that was not as aesthetic as his poetry might suggest. Eldest son of parliamentary Whig, Timothy Shelley, Percy whiled away his childhood in aristocratic tranquillity, fishing, hunting and being home-schooled. This sheltered upbringing clearly failed to prepare him for his teenage years at Eton where Percy was bullied by ‘Shelley-baits’ who reduced him each day to a high-pitched, screaming wreck.
At Oxford, Shelley only managed to attend one lecture since his time was taken up by sixteen hours of reading a day. He was later expelled for a radical pamphlet which he refused to recant, called ‘The Necessity of Atheism’. By this time, he had matured into a fiercely liberal poet whose radical views included public support for the poor and a non-exclusive model of love and marriage.
Shelley’s expulsion was followed swiftly by his passionate affair with Harriet Westbrook. They eloped to Scotland to rescue her from boarding school and from her suicidal depression. But this infatuation did not last long, Shelley began to suspect that she had married him for his money and he grew tired of her lack of intellectualism.
His craving for intellectual female companionship culminated in his falling in love with Mary Godwin. The pair met secretly at the grave of Mary’s famous feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. In Mary, Shelley found the intellectual and artistic companion he had longed for.
Faced with the hostility of Mary’s father and the pregnancy of Harriet, Shelley and Mary ran away to Switzerland together, taking Mary’s younger sister Claire with them because of her French abilities. The trio travelled across Europe reciting aloud the works of literary greats and enjoying a bohemian lifestyle of creative indulgence and appreciation. They repeated a similar trip a few years later when they met the celebrated Byron, with whom Shelly formed an intense poetic friendship and by whom Claire fell pregnant.
But this lifestyle was not without its misfortune. Shelley’s insistence on following the desires of his heart broke the hearts of others. Within two months of each other both Harriet and Mary’s younger sister Fanny committed suicide, after being abandoned by the poet’s artistic trio. Shelley quickly married Mary in the hope of securing the guardianship of his children by Harriet, but was unsuccessful.
Shelley, Mary and their poetic acquaintances continued their bohemian life in Europe until 1822, when a boating accident sent him to a watery grave. At Shelley’s funeral his friend Trelawney, moved deeply by the poet’s death, snatched his heart from the depths of the funeral pyre, unable to bear the thought of such a great heart being reduced to common ashes.
