Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned at sea in July 1822. His body was cremated on a beach at Viareggio three weeks later. According to Edward Trelawny — who organised the cremation — what survived the funeral pyre intact?
The heart-survival story is medically plausible (calcified tubercular hearts resist fire, and Shelley probably had one) but is told only by Trelawny, who spent the next 60 years embellishing his Shelley-Byron recollections. The 'Shelley heart' is preserved in the Shelley family papers at the Bodleian Library — its provenance from the August 1822 cremation is Trelawny-attested but not independently verified. Mary Shelley did not attend the cremation. Byron and Leigh Hunt did. The Keats volume *was* in Shelley's pocket when the body washed ashore, but it didn't survive the pyre.
Read the full story →Edward John Trelawny organised the August 1822 beach cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley's drowned body at Viareggio. He kept Shelley's heart (rescued from the funeral pyre, supposedly) and spent the next sixty years substantially writing and substantially fabricating the canonical English version of the Shelley-Byron Italian Romantic decade.
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