Hilliard (fl. 19th century)
Discovery of Percy Shelley’s Body
Ink wash drawing, squared for transfer, mid-19th century
The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle
Discovery of Percy Shelley’s Body
Transcript below
NEIL GAIMAN: Not much is known about the little drawing that shows Mary Shelley rushing down to the Italian shore as the body of Percy Shelley emerges from the sea. We showed it to Dr. Doucet Fischer, editor of the Shelley and his Circle publication issued by Harvard University Press.
DOUCET FISCHER: [Laughs] Ah, my God. It’s very imaginative, but it has actually no factual reality at all. Mary Shelley never saw Percy Shelley’s body, nor did she attend the funeral ceremonies on the beach. She wasn’t there.
Ten days after the boat had disappeared, Shelley’s body washed up and was identified by his friend, Edward Trelawny, and then immediately buried in the sand, according to the quarantine rules of the time. And then Trelawny traveled on to break the news to Mary Shelley.
GAIMAN: After nearly a month, Percy Shelley’s body was dug up.
FISCHER: Trelawny presided over what was basically a kind of pagan funeral, where they built a huge fire, they had some kind of portable furnace, and Percy Shelley’s body was cremated over the course of some time.
According to Trelawny’s account, Shelley’s heart was snatched out of the fire. Also according to Trelawny, portions of the skull were rescued as well.
GAIMAN: The weeks leading up to her husband’s death were painful enough for Mary Shelley.
FISCHER: She was about three, three and a half months pregnant when she had an almost fatal miscarriage. And her life was really saved by Percy Shelley, who with great audacity plunged her into a bucket of ice to stop the nearly fatal hemorrhage.
Mary and Percy Shelley were suffering from some sort of estrangement at the time of his death, so her devastation afterwards, in my view, was complicated, as many people’s grief is, by her guilt. She said repeatedly that she just wished that her own life would end . . . but she had her one surviving child, who remained her very strong tie to life.
End of Transcript
In 2023, Dr. Fischer completed work on ‘Shelley and His Circle,’ a multivolume publication that began in 1961. The final volumes, XI and XII, are slated for release in 2024.
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