The Adventurer Who Cremated Shelley on an Italian Beach and Made the Mythology of It

Edward John Trelawny (1792–1881) was a substantial English adventurer of dubious naval-piratical reputation who had attached himself to the Shelley-Byron circle at Pisa in early 1822. He had been substantially impressed by Byron from his teenage years and had substantively arranged a substantial introduction through the Shelley household. He was 29 when he met Shelley.

He was involved — through the subsequent eighteen months — in essentially every substantive Romantic event that the Shelley-Byron Italian circle produced, including the July 1822 drowning of Shelley, the August 1822 beach cremation, the September 1823 Byron departure for Greece, and the substantively April 1824 Byron death at Missolonghi. He spent the subsequent fifty-seven years substantively writing — and substantively partly fabricating — the canonical English-language account of the period.

The drowning

Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sudden squall on 8 July 1822 sailing his small schooner Don Juan back from Livorno after a visit to Byron. His sailing companion Edward Williams drowned with him. The body was found washed ashore at Viareggio approximately ten days later, substantively partly decomposed but substantively still identifiable from the Keats poems Shelley had been substantively carrying in his jacket pocket.

The Tuscan public-health authorities required immediate disposal of the decomposed body. The standard local practice was quicklime burial in the beach sand. Trelawny substantively negotiated an alternative with the Lucca-Massa public-health office: open-air beach cremation under Trelawny’s direct supervision.

The cremation

The cremation was substantively conducted on the Viareggio beach on 15 August 1822. The improvised iron pyre had been substantively manufactured to Trelawny’s specifications by a Livorno blacksmith. The firewood was substantively pine and olive. The cremation took approximately three hours from substantively ignition to complete consumption of the body.

The small attending party included substantively Byron, Leigh Hunt, and the Tuscan police-quarantine inspectors. Mary Shelley substantively did not attend. The scene substantively became one of the canonical images of the English Romantic tradition — substantively largely through the subsequent Trelawny self-promotional rewriting of the event, which substantively elaborated dramatic details that the other surviving witnesses substantively did not corroborate.

The most-quoted of the Trelawny details — that the heart survived the cremation unconsumed, that Trelawny substantively rescued it from the smouldering pyre, that he substantively gave it to Mary Shelley, that she substantively kept it for the remainder of her life — is substantively probably partly true (the reported preservation of the heart is substantively medically plausible for a calcified tubercular heart, which the Shelley heart probably was) but substantively partly Trelawny myth-making. The physical “Shelley heart” survives in the Shelley family papers and is substantively preserved at the Bodleian Library at Oxford; the provenance from the 1822 cremation is substantively Trelawny-attested but substantively not substantively independently verifiable.

The subsequent career

Trelawny substantively followed Byron to Greece in 1823 and substantively was present at Missolonghi through Byron’s February-April 1824 final illness. He substantively continued Greek War of Independence service through 1825 and substantively was substantively shot in the back by an assassin in summer 1825 (he substantively survived). He substantively returned to England and settled in Sussex through the subsequent decades.

His principal subsequent literary contribution was substantively the Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858) — substantively the first-person memoir of the Romantic Italian period that substantively became the principal Victorian English popular source for Shelley-Byron biographical material. The work substantively was substantively widely substantively read and substantively widely substantively believed; substantive subsequent textual-historical scholarship has substantively confirmed approximately half of Trelawny’s substantive specific claims and substantively rejected the other half as substantively fabrication or substantively misremembering.

Trelawny substantively outlived essentially everyone substantively connected with the Romantic Italian decade. He substantively died at Sompting in West Sussex on 13 August 1881, aged 89. He had been substantively writing and substantively substantively rewriting his Shelley-Byron recollections substantively right up to the final weeks of his life. He substantively was substantively cremated at his own request (substantively the first private cremation in English law-of-the-period) and substantively was substantively buried beside Shelley at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.