50 Fun Facts About Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley was born at Field Place near Horsham in which English county?

Sussex. He grew up heir to the family estates and, from 1806, a baronetcy, but his father outlived him by more than twenty years, so he never inherited either.

Shelley drowned after welcoming which friend?

Leigh Hunt. He had come out with his family to edit The Liberal, a journal Shelley had planned with Byron, and Shelley was lost in a storm on the voyage back from greeting him.

Shelley's second wife wrote which famous novel?

Frankenstein. Mary Shelley began it at 18, when Byron challenged his house guests to write a ghost story each during a summer of incessant rain.

Shelley wrote Ozymandias in a friendly sonnet contest with which friend, a stockbroker and poet?

Horace Smith. His rival sonnet ran in The Examiner three weeks after Shelley's and ends with a hunter of the future puzzling over the ruins of a vanished London.

Ozymandias is the Greek name for which Egyptian pharaoh?

Ramesses II. The Greeks turned his throne name, Usermaatre, into Ozymandias; far from vanishing, he reigned 66 years and left Egypt temples such as Abu Simbel.

Which bird does Shelley greet with the words 'Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!'?

A skylark. Shelley and Mary heard one carolling on a summer evening walk in the lanes near Livorno in 1820; his poem then tells it 'Bird thou never wert'.

Which title does Shelley's Ozymandias claim on his pedestal?

King of Kings. Shelley took the boast from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, whose version dares any rival to surpass the king's works; the poem turns that dare into despair.

The colossal head said to have inspired Ozymandias, the Younger Memnon, is displayed in which museum?

The British Museum. Giovanni Belzoni, a former circus strongman, got the seven-ton bust to the Nile in 1816 by having a large gang of workmen drag it on wooden rollers.

From which university was Shelley expelled in 1811?

Oxford. University College expelled him after less than a year for refusing to say whether he had written an anonymous pamphlet, and his refusal to back down afterwards cost him his father's support.

What was the title of the pamphlet that got Shelley expelled?

The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley posted the anonymous pamphlet to bishops and college heads, a move that looked designed to provoke them, and it did.

Which university friend was expelled alongside Shelley in 1811?

Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Within months, by her account, he tried to seduce Shelley's young wife while the poet was away, yet Shelley forgave him and the friendship lasted for life.

At which school did Shelley spend six years from the age of 12, often bullied?

Eton. His forbidden science experiments there once gave his tutor a severe electric shock from a charged Leyden jar.

What nickname did Shelley's schoolmates give him?

Mad Shelley. His violent rages under provocation earned it; biographers put the bullying itself down in part to his refusal to fag, the custom that made younger boys the servants of older ones.

What was the name of Shelley's first wife, whom he eloped with to Scotland in 1811?

Harriet Westbrook. A schoolfriend of his sisters, she was 16, and Shelley saw the elopement as rescuing her from her school; his father answered by cutting off his allowance.

Rather than Gretna Green, which Scottish city did Shelley and his 16-year-old bride elope to in 1811?

Edinburgh. They married there in August 1811 and went through a second ceremony in London in March 1814, only months before Shelley left her for Mary Godwin.

Shelley's father sat in Parliament for which party?

Whig. Sir Timothy sat for Shoreham as a follower of the Duke of Norfolk, the magnate who later worked to reconcile father and son and helped get the poet's allowance restored.

Who was the mother of Shelley's second wife?

Mary Wollstonecraft. The author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman died days after giving birth to her, and within months Godwin published a memoir that told the world of her love affairs.

Where did Shelley and Mary Godwin declare their love for each other in June 1814?

At her mother's grave. St Pancras churchyard was where the pair met in secret, and when Godwin learned of the affair he banned Shelley from his house; within weeks they had eloped.

Which stepsister of Mary Godwin joined her and Shelley when they eloped to Europe in 1814?

Claire Clairmont. Two years later she began an affair with Byron, and it was her pursuit of him that first brought the two poets together.

Shelley's radical mentor, whose daughter he ran off with, wrote which work?

Political Justice. William Godwin's book attacked marriage as an institution, yet he refused to see Shelley and Mary until they wed, while still pressing Shelley for money.

Beside which lake did Shelley and Byron spend the famous summer of 1816?

Lake Geneva. On a boat tour that June a storm nearly sank the two poets; Shelley, who could not swim, sat with his arms crossed, dreading only that Byron would risk his life to save him.

What was Byron reciting when Shelley suffered a panic attack with hallucinations at Villa Diodati?

Christabel. As Byron reached Coleridge's lines on the lady's breast, Shelley shrieked and ran from the room; he said he had pictured a woman with eyes where her nipples should be.

Which mountain gave its name to a Shelley poem written in the Alps in 1816?

Mont Blanc. Shelley wrote that its summits filled him with a wonder 'not unallied to madness', and he and Mary made the poem the closing piece of the travel book they published in 1817.

How did Shelley's first wife die in 1816?

She drowned herself in the Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park. Within three weeks of her body being found Shelley had married Mary Godwin, and a long legal fight over his two children followed.

Which legal body denied Shelley custody of his children by his first wife?

Court of Chancery. Lord Eldon ruled that Shelley's principles, and his conduct in acting on them, made him unfit, so the two children were placed with a guardian at his expense.

What was Shelley's 1813 utopian poem, later a 'bible' for the Chartists?

Queen Mab. Its attacks on monarchy, marriage and the church were later quoted in a custody case as proof that Shelley was unfit to raise his own children.

Fearing prosecution, what did Shelley do with his 1813 poem's first edition?

Gave copies away. Only 250 were printed, and when a pirate bookseller put the poem on public sale in 1821, Shelley wrote to a newspaper disowning it.

Which TV drama titled a 2013 episode Ozymandias and had its star recite Shelley's sonnet in a trailer?

Breaking Bad. Bryan Cranston read the whole sonnet over shots of the New Mexico desert, and the episode named for it shows Walter White's drug empire collapsing around him.

Which event prompted Shelley to write The Mask of Anarchy?

The Peterloo Massacre. In 1819 cavalry rode into a peaceful Manchester crowd of some 60,000 who had gathered to demand the vote; the news reached Shelley in Italy, and he answered with this poem.

Shelley's Mask of Anarchy finally appeared in the year of which law?

Great Reform Act. The editor Shelley sent his protest poem to in 1819 sat on it, and it came out in 1832, with that editor's preface, only as Parliament began to widen the vote.

With which line does Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy end?

Ye are many, they are few. The closing stanza opens 'Rise like Lions after slumber', yet the poem tells the crowd not to fight: they are to meet the soldiers 'with folded arms and steady eyes'.

In the opening line of Ode to the West Wind, Shelley hails the wind as the breath of which season?

Autumn. The wind drives the dead leaves away and carries seeds to their winter beds, which is why the ode can end in hope: 'If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?'

Ode to the West Wind is written in which rhyme scheme?

Terza rima. Shelley took the chained three-line rhyme of Dante's Divine Comedy and closed each of the ode's five sections with a couplet, so that every section runs to fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet.

Which Greek dramatist's lost play inspired Shelley's Prometheus Unbound?

Aeschylus. In the lost Greek play the Titan made his peace with Zeus; Shelley refused that ending, calling it too feeble to reconcile 'the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind'.

In Prometheus Unbound, who drags Jupiter from his throne?

Demogorgon. Asked who he is, he gives his name as Eternity and pulls Jupiter down into the abyss, leaving Hercules only the job of unchaining Prometheus.

In Prometheus Unbound, which Oceanid is Prometheus's beloved?

Asia. While Prometheus hangs chained she makes the drama's great journey, going down into the depths to question the power that will topple Jupiter, and her descent sets his release in motion.

Which work by Shelley dramatises a real Renaissance case of a Roman daughter killing her abusive father?

The Cenci. A London theatre manager found the subject too objectionable even to show his leading actress, yet it proved one of Shelley's most popular works and went into a second edition in his lifetime.

Adonais is Shelley's elegy on the death of which poet?

John Keats. Shelley's preface claimed that a savage magazine review had brought on the burst blood vessel that killed him; in fact Keats died of tuberculosis.

Adonais is written in what stanza form?

Spenserian stanzas. Shelley chose the demanding nine-line form on purpose: he called the elegy 'a highly wrought piece of art' and the least imperfect thing he had written.

Which friend cared for the dying poet in Rome and was thanked by Shelley in the preface to Adonais?

Joseph Severn. The young painter nursed his friend for three months until he died, and when Severn himself died in Rome 58 years later he was buried beside him.

Which prose essay by Shelley closes on the phrase 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world'?

A Defence of Poetry. Shelley wrote it to answer an essay by his friend Thomas Love Peacock, then put it aside unfinished; it was not printed until 1840, eighteen years after his death.

What was the name of the boat in which Shelley drowned in July 1822?

Don Juan. She was also known as the Ariel; built for Shelley at Genoa that spring, she proved fast, but Mary insisted afterwards that a flaw in the design meant she was never seaworthy.

Which poem was Shelley still at work on when he set out on his final voyage?

The Triumph of Life. For all its title the fragment is a dark vision, and it breaks off just as the poet cries out to ask what life is; Mary published it two years later.

Why was Shelley's body burned on the beach where the sea had cast it up?

Quarantine laws required it. Anything the sea cast ashore had to be burned for fear of plague, and it took an embassy's help before his friends were allowed even to keep the ashes.

Which organ, said to have resisted the flames of Shelley's cremation, did Trelawny snatch from the pyre?

His heart. Trelawny burned his hand badly pulling the relic from the furnace, and the friend he gave it to handed it over to Mary only after an unseemly quarrel.

What Latin inscription appears on Shelley's grave in Rome?

Cor Cordium. A friend composed the Latin epitaph; Trelawny added three lines from The Tempest and bought the plot alongside, where his own ashes were buried almost sixty years later.

Which Victorian critic dismissed Shelley as a 'beautiful and ineffectual angel'?

Matthew Arnold. His full phrase has the angel 'beating in the void his luminous wings in vain', yet the supposedly ineffectual poet went on to shape Browning, Hardy, Yeats and Bernard Shaw.

Shelley's 1813 essay A Vindication of Natural Diet argues for which way of eating?

Vegetarianism. Shelley gave up meat in 1812, arguing that rearing animals wasted land that could feed far more people, and his example later made a vegetarian of George Bernard Shaw.

Which lyrical drama by Shelley celebrates the 1821 uprising against Ottoman rule?

Hellas. Shelley dashed it off in a burst of enthusiasm after a Greek prince he knew in Pisa brought news of the rising, and its preface declares 'We are all Greeks'.

Which of Shelley's children by Mary was the only one to live to adulthood?

Percy Florence. Named for the city of his birth, he was born five months after his brother William died, and in 1844 he inherited the baronetcy his father never lived to hold.