Expelled, Then Immortalised in Marble
A Poetry Tale about Percy Bysshe Shelley, told by Hello Doggo.
In March eighteen eleven, an eighteen-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley was thrown out of Oxford.
He’d rather asked for it. With his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, he’d produced an anonymous pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. Copies went on sale in an Oxford bookshop. The story goes that somebody noticed and burnt the lot, and that Shelley then posted copies to the heads of the colleges.
University College summoned the pair. Had they written it? They wouldn’t say.
The college records that they were to be “publicly expelled for contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to them”.
So, strictly speaking, Shelley wasn’t expelled for atheism. He was expelled for refusing to discuss it, and for refusing to disown it.
In eighteen twenty-two, aged twenty-nine, he drowned off the coast of Italy.
About seventy years later, his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Shelley, commissioned a marble monument for his grave in Rome: the drowned poet, naked, washed up on the shore. It turned out to be too big for the spot. So she offered it to, of all places, University College, and a room was built for it.
It was unveiled in eighteen ninety-three, and he’s still there. Generations of students have pranked him. They’ve splashed him with paint, and once flooded his room with water and goldfish. The gilded laurel wreath that used to crown his head was taken away in the nineteen-thirties, after one prank too many.
So Oxford threw him out in eighteen eleven, and took him back eighty-two years later. Naked, in marble. And still refusing to answer questions.
Sources
- The Necessity of Atheism (Worthing, 1811), by Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg.
- University College, Oxford, college register, 25 March 1811: the two were “publicly expelled for contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to them, and for also repeatedly declining to disavow a publication entitled The Necessity of Atheism.”
- Hogg’s account of the bookshop and the expulsion: T. J. Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858).
- The Shelley Memorial by Edward Onslow Ford, commissioned by Lady Jane Shelley, originally intended for the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, unveiled at University College in 1893; the college’s own published history of the memorial covers the pranks and the removal of the gilded wreath in the 1930s.
- Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (1974).
Notes
- The burning of the copies in the bookshop and the posting of the pamphlet to college heads are retold from Hogg and later biographers; the register entry is the one contemporary document.