The Funeral of Shelley (1889)
Louis Edouard Fournier
Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 213.4cm
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK

If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of
human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and the barbarity which
is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence
by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of
slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings
outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed,
than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.
A Vindication of Natural Diet, Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1827) attended Syon House Academy and Eton
and in 1810 he entered the Oxford University College. In 1811 Shelley was expelled
from the college for publishing The Necessity Of Atheism, which he wrote with
Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Shelley's father withdrew his inheritance in favor of a
small annuity, after he eloped with the 16-year old Harriet Westbrook, the daughter
of a London tavern owner. The pair spent the following two years traveling in England
and Ireland, distributing pamphlets and speaking against political injustice. In 1813
Shelley published his first important poem, the atheistic Queen Mab.

The poet's marriage to Harriet was a failure. In 1814 Shelley traveled abroad with
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of the philosopher and anarchist William
Godwin (1756-1836). Mary's young stepsister Claire Clairmont was also in the company.
After their return to London, Shelley came into an annual income under his grandfather's
will. Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in 1816. Shelley married Mary Wollstonecraft
and his favorite son William was born in 1816.

Shelley spent the summer of 1816 with Lord Byron at Lake Geneva, where Byron had
an affair with Claire. In 1818 the Shelleys moved to Italy, where Byron was residing. In
1819 they went to Rome and in 1820 to Pisa. The Mask Of Anarchy was a political
protest which was written after the Peterloo massacre. In 1822 the Shelley household
moved to the Bay of Lerici. To welcome his friend Leigh Hunt, he sailed to Leghorn. During
the stormy return voyage to Lerici, his small schooner the Ariel sank and Shelley drowned
with Edward Williams on July 8, 1822. The bodies were washed ashore at Viareggio,
where, in the presence of Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, they were burned on the beach.
Shelley was later buried in Rome.