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Elective English–I

Notes son Will died of fever in Rome, and his infant daughter Clara Everina died during yet another
household move.
A baby girl, Elena Adelaide Shelley, was born on 27 December 1818 in Naples, Italy and
registered there as the daughter of Shelley and a woman named “Marina Padurin”. However,
the identity of the mother is an unsolved mystery. Some scholars speculate that her true
mother was actually Claire Clairmont or Elise Foggi, a nursemaid for the Shelley family. Other
scholars postulate that she was a foundling Shelley adopted in hopes of distracting Mary after

the deaths of William and Clara. Shelley referred to Elena in letters as his “Neapolitan ward”.
However, Elena was placed with foster parents a few days after her birth and the Shelley
family moved on to yet another Italian city, leaving her behind. Elena died 17 months later,
on 10 June 1820.

The Shelleys moved around various Italian cities during these years; in later 1818 they were
living in a pensione on the Via Valfonde. This street now runs alongside Florence’s railway
station and the building now on the site, the original having been destroyed in World War II,
carries a plaque recording the poet’s stay. Here they received two visitors, a Miss Sophia
Stacey and her much older travelling companion, Miss Corbet Parry-Jones (to be described by
Mary as “an ignorant little Welshwoman”). Sophia had for three years in her youth been ward
of the poet’s aunt and uncle. The pair moved into the same pensione and stayed for about two
months. During this period Mary gave birth to another son; Sophia is credited with suggesting
that he be named after the city of his birth, so he became Percy Florence Shelley, later Sir
Percy. Shelley also wrote his “Ode to Sophia Stacey” during this time. They then moved to
Pisa, largely at the suggestion of its resident Margaret King, who, as a former pupil of Mary
Wollstonecraft, took a maternal interest in the younger Mary and her companions. This “no
nonsense grande dame” and her common-law husband George William Tighe inspired the poet
with “a new-found sense of radicalism”. Tighe was an agricultural theorist, and provided the
younger man with a great deal of material on chemistry, biology and statistics.
Shelley completed Prometheus Unbound in Rome, and he spent mid-1819 writing a tragedy, The
Cenci, in Leghorn (Livorno). In this year, prompted among other causes by the Peterloo massacre,
he wrote his best-known political poems: The Masque of Anarchy and Men of England. These
were probably his best-remembered works during the 19th century. Around this time period,
he wrote the essay The Philosophical View of Reform, which was his most thorough exposition
of his political views to that date.
In 1820, hearing of John Keats’ illness from a friend, Shelley wrote him a letter inviting him
to join him at his residence at Pisa. Keats replied with hopes of seeing him, but instead,
arrangements were made for Keats to travel to Rome with the artist Joseph Severn. Inspired
by the death of Keats, in 1821 Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais.
In 1821, Shelley met Edward Ellerker Williams, a British naval officer, and his wife Jane
Williams. Shelley developed a very strong affection towards Jane and addressed a number of
poems to her. In the poems addressed to Jane, such as With a Guitar, To Jane and One Word
is Too Often Profaned, he elevates her to an exalted position worthy of worship.

In 1822, Shelley arranged for Leigh Hunt, the British poet and editor who had been one of his
chief supporters in England, to come to Italy with his family. He meant for the three of them—
himself, Byron and Hunt—to create a journal, which would be called The Liberal. With Hunt
as editor, their controversial writings would be disseminated, and the journal would act as a
counter-blast to conservative periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine and The Quarterly Review.
Leigh Hunt’s son, the editor Thornton Leigh Hunt, when later asked whether he preferred
Shelley or Byron as a man, replied:

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