MAYFAIRTIMES.CO.UK 21
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
(1792-1822)
“I always go on until I am stopped. And
I am never stopped.” Ode to the West
Wind.
At Eton, Shelley was known as
mad Shelley and, mercilessly bullied,
became a savage fighter like Keats.
At Oxford, he was sent down for
writing The Necessity of Atheism. As
an advocate of free love, his Queen
Mab was infamous.
Shelley lived a passionate and often
tragic life. He ran away with Harriet
Westbrook when she was 16 and they
had two children.
Later, he fell madly in love
with, and married, Mary Godwin,
daughter of William Godwin and
Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
(1788-1824)
Celebrating the bicentenary of the publication of
Byron’s masterwork Don Juan, Josephine Hart’s
selection from the Cantos tells of the adolescent
Juan’s slow seduction of Julia, 23, married to
Alfonso, 50...
Byron, born with a club foot, to Catherine
Gordon and “mad” Jack Byron, had a beloved
half-sister Augusta. Aged 10, he inherited the
gothic Newstead Abbey.
At 16, he said, “I will cut a swathe through the
world or perish in the attempt.”
At 24, he said, “I found myself famous” – this
on the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
A great seducer with many adoring fans, he
married brilliant mathematician Lady Annabelle
Millbank. During his infamous affair with Lady
Caroline Lamb, she declared him “mad, bad and
dangerous to know”. Her later accusation against
him of homosexuality, a serious criminal offence
at the time, forced him to f lee England.
Byron died in 1824, aged 36, from a fever at
Missolonghi during an heroic attempt to free
Greece from Turkish rule. He was mourned all
over Europe.
However, because of his scandalous past, he
was refused burial at Westminster Abbey and St
Paul’s. He was finally laid to rest in the family
vault at Newstead Abbey and thousands thronged
the streets to see his funeral procession.While staying with Shelley at Byron’s
Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Mary
Shelley famously wrote the gothic
masterpiece, Frankenstein.
Having achieved fame with, among
others, his great verses Adonais, The
Mask of Anarchy and Ozymandias,
Shelley was in the midst of writing
The Triumph of Life when he joined
his boat, the Don Juan, named in
honour of Byron. It went down in a
storm in the Bay of Lerici in 1822. He
was just 29 years old.
When his body was recovered he
was cremated on the sands but his
heart wouldn’t burn. He’s buried
beside Keats in Rome, where his
gravestone bears the words Cor
Cordium (“heart of hearts”).