A description of Shelley’s radicalism then must take account of all the circumstances that tended to make him dissatisfied with existing institutions. Some of these circumstances may seem trifling, but then it must be remembered that events which appear insignificant sometimes have far-reaching effects. Pascal remarked once that the whole aspect of the world would be different if Cleopatra’s nose had been a little shorter. The history of Shelley’s life is a series of incidents which tended to make him radical. He never had a chance to be anything else. No sooner would he be brought in contact with conservative influences than something would happen to push him again on the high road of revolt. Even were he temperamentally conservative (and Hogg says that “his feelings and behavior were in many respects highly aristocratical”), the experiences that he underwent were of such a nature as to inevitably lead him into radicalism.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, in the county of Sussex, on Saturday, the 4th of August, 1792. His family was an ancient and honorable one whose history extends back to the days of the Crusades. His grandfather, Bysshe Shelley, born in America, accumulated a large fortune, married two heiresses, and in 1806 received a baronetcy. In his old age he became whimsical, greedy, and sullen. He was a skeptic hoping for nothing better than annihilation at the end of life.[8] With regard to the poet’s father, it is very difficult to form a just estimate. There is no doubt that Shelley enthusiasts decried the father too much in their efforts to canonize the son. It would indeed be strange to find any father at that time who would be capable of giving our poet that guidance and training which his nature demanded. It was a time when might was right, when the rod held a large place in the formation of a boy’s character. We must not be too severe then on the father if he was unacquainted with the proper way of dealing with his erratic son. No one who has read Jeafferson’s life of the poet will say that Bysshe treated his son too harshly. It was his judgment rather than his heart that was at fault. Medwin remarks that all he brought back from Europe was a smattering of French and a bad picture of an eruption of Vesuvius.
It is to his mother that Shelley owes his beauty and his good nature. He said that she was mild and tolerant, but narrow-minded. Very few references to the home of his boyhood are made in his poetry; and this leads us to believe that neither his father nor his mother had much influence over him.
In his childhood he seems to have had the day dreams and reveries that Wordsworth had. “Let us recollect our sensations as children,” Shelley writes, in the Essay on Life, “What a distinct and intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves!... We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed, as it were, to constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being.” In Book II of the Prelude Wordsworth gives expression to a similar experience:
Oft in these moments such a holy calm
Would overspread my soul that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself—a dream
A prospect in the mind.
Shelley from the very beginning delighted in giving free scope to his imagination. In the garret of the house at Field Place he imagined there was an alchemist old and grey pondering over magic tomes. The “Great Old Snake” and the “Great Tortoise” were other wondrous creatures of his imagination that lived out of doors. He used to entertain his sisters with weird stories about hobgoblins and ghosts; and even got them to dress themselves so as to represent fiends and spirits. In the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty he writes:
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts and sped
Thro’ many a listening chamber, cave and ruin
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing,
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
He was attached to the occult sciences and sometimes watched whole nights for ghosts. Once he described minutely a visit which he said he had paid to some neighbors, and it was discovered soon afterwards that the whole story was a fabrication.
At ten years of age he was sent to Sion House Academy, Isleworth, where he met his cousin and future biographer, Thomas Medwin. The other boys, Medwin tells us, considered him strange and unsocial. It was at this school that Shelley first became acquainted with the romantic novels of Anne Radcliffe and the other novelists of the School of Terror. Here too he became greatly interested in chemistry and astronomy. The idea of a plurality of worlds, through which we “should make the grand tour,” enchanted him. Thus we see that he began very early to live in the unreal and the wonderful.
In 1804 he went to Eton, and there he was known as “Mad Shelley” and “Shelley the Atheist.” The word “atheist” here does not mean one who denies the existence of God. According to Hogg, it was a term given to those who distinguished themselves for their opposition to the authorities of the school. The title must have fallen into disuse shortly after Shelley’s time, as Professor Dowdon failed to find at Eton any trace of this peculiar usage of the word. Here he became interested in physical experiments and carried them on at unseasonable hours. For this he was frequently reprimanded by his superiors, but he proved to be very untractable.