4th August: Percy Shelley

On this date in 1792, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born. 10 things you might not know about him.

1. His father was an MP.
2. He was bullied at school. He disliked sports and the fagging system at Eton, and because of this was taunted by mobs of older boys almost every day. The other boys called him "Mad Shelley".
3. However, he wasn't always a hapless victim. He used his talent for science to electrically charge the door knob of his room and once used gunpowder to blow up a tree.
4. It is said that at Oxford University, he only ever went to one lecture, but he would read for sixteen hours a day.
5. His first publication was a Gothic novel called Zastrozzi in 1810. He used the villain of this story to express his own views of the world.
6. He was expelled from university, not for skipping lectures but for writing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism.
7. His love life was colourful, to say the least. Having had his heart broken by his cousin, Harriet Grove, he eloped with another Harriet, Harriet Westbrook, who had been threatening to commit suicide. Shelley had been forbidden to see her, but wanted to rescue her and make her his beneficiary as he was under the impression at the time that he was dying. The elopement resulted in Shelley being cut out of his father's will. The marriage only lasted three years. He abandoned Harriet, who was pregnant, and their daughter to run away with Mary Godwin and her stepsister to Switzerland. Another sister, Fanny, was in love with him as well, but was left behind.
8. He was a vegetarian and wrote several pamphlets on the subject.
9. He died at the age of 29, drowned during a storm in the Gulf of Spezia while returning from Leghorn in his sailing boat, the Don Juan. The exact circumstances are not known. It may have been an accident caused by his ineptness at navigation; or suicide, as Shelley had been suffering from depression at the time; some say he was attacked by pirates or murdered for political reasons. An Italian fisherman is said to have confessed on his deathbed to ramming the boat in order to rob Shelley, but the boat sank too quickly for the raid to be successful.
10. His grave bears the Latin inscription, Cor Cordium ("Heart of Hearts"), and, in reference to his death at sea, a few lines of "Ariel's Song" from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange."