Summer Shorts 49: Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Double Commemoration Year.

Another start to my quick blog musing for the lazy, hazy days of summer, subject matter featuring historical and whimsical icons of longevity.

Something about the year 1792 – with its monumental stories, and a cast and crew of memorable characters – sits in the back of my mind. The year begins a month after the death of Mozart and three years after the French revolution, ten years of the French Revolutionary Wars started to engulf Europe at a time remarkably named as the Romantic Era.

In an odd twist of fate, 230 years ago, the birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley on August 4th 1792 eventually linked him to the author of a landmark book of that same year – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1816 her daughter Mary, author of Frankenstein, married Percy, and as legend would have it he proposed to elope with young Mary while standing over Wollstonecraft’s grave in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church in London.

What makes 2022 a double commemoration of Shelley is that he died two hundred years ago on July 8, 1822, drowning while sailing through a storm at sea about 24 kilometres from the beach at Viareggio, Italy on the schooner called Don Juan; how aptly named for a romantic poet to sadly meet his end. He was just shy of turning 30 that August. While in Italy he did live quite the life accompanied by the likes of Byron, who wrote his famous epic poem Don Juan. Hmm. Him again.

One of the books on Shelley that I recommend will immerse you in his mystique – Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself by Ann Wroe (2007).

Not a typical biography,I found it to be a slow and deep sweep story of his life as the poet when I read it all those years ago; and now that I ponder on the twists of fateful lives that grew from 1792, I think it’s time for a second read.

While I’m on about those dead romantics (one of my favourite topics), if you want to get a fuller appreciation of Percy and Mary Shelley, and their life with Byron and the many more marvelous cast of characters, with their interesting and woeful tales, read Daisy Hay’s Young Romantics:The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives(2010).