Shelley’s premature death at 29 in a boating accident (or was it an accident?) spawned conspiracy theories and romantic (probably inflated) stories. While some surround the nature of his death (was he assassinated?), others begin after his death, focusing on the curious afterlife of his remains.
The Funeral of Shelley, by Louis Edouard Fournier. Painted in 1889, Fournier’s depiction takes quite a bit of poetic license. But we can think of it as part of the Victorian cult following surrounding Shelley. We’ll come back to this when we read the Pre-Raphaelite poets.
Most famously, Shelley’s heart was said to have been snatched from his funeral pyre by his friend, Edward Trelawny. (It might have been his liver.) Shelley’s wife Mary was said to have kept the heart in a silk bag in her desk for decades, until her own death.
Closer to home, supposed fragments of Shelley’s skull (also snatched from the funeral pyre) are currently housed in the New York Public Library! That’s right: if you walk a few blocks from campus (and call ahead), you can view the charred bits of one of England’s greatest poets.
A Brief Article on Shelley’s Skull
More on the NYPL collection of Shelley materials
The memorial to Shelley at Oxford (from which Shelley was expelled) also depicts him as a beautiful corpse. (In reality, Shelley’s body washed ashore after ten days and was largely unrecognizable.)
