Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, Percy Bysshe ( 1792 – 1822 ).The eldest son of the MP for Horsham (and later baronet), he was born at Field Place, Sussex, and destined for a parliamentary career. Active, mischievous, and highly imaginative as a child, he was conventionally educated at Syon House Academy, Eton, and University College, Oxford; an upbringing that made him deeply unhappy and rebellious. At school he was mocked and bullied as ‘Mad Shelley’ and the ‘Eton Atheist’; at home he was worshipped by a tribe of younger sisters; a pattern that recurs throughout his life.
Early encouraged in his ‘printing freaks’, he privately published a series of Gothic-horror novelettes and verses in his teens: Zastrozzi ( 1810 ); Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire ( 1810 , with his beloved sister Elizabeth); and St Irvyne or The Rosicrucian ( 1811 ). At Oxford he read radical authors— Godwin , Paine ,...
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