Abstract
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, born August 4, 1792, near Horsham, Sussex, was the eldest child of Timothy Shelley, Member of Parliament, and the grandson of Bysshe Shelley, who in 1806 was to be made Sir Bysshe Shelley, Baronet. Grandfather Bysshe (pronounced “Bish”) had been born at Newark, New Jersey; but his father, another Timothy—apparently a merchant—had returned to England, inheriting the family estate of Fen Place, Sussex, when one of his elder brothers died and the other was declared insane in 1743. On the death of an uncle in 1748, Timothy inherited Field Place. Bysshe Shelley came into very little of his father’s modest property until 1790, when his elder brother John died without issue; and by that time Bysshe had established his own fortune with two successful marriages (both elopements) that made him one of the wealthiest men in Sussex.
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Notes and References
General authorities for Shelley’s family background and early life are: Newman I. White, Shelley (New York, 1940),
Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley (New York, 1950);
Roger Ingpen, Shelley in England (London, 1917);
The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford, 1964).
See Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley and his Circle (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), I, 35–38.
See Kenneth Neill Cameron, “Shelley vs. Southey: New Light on an Old Quarrel,” Publications of the Modern Language Association LVII (June 1942), 489–512.
Denis Florence MacCarthy, Shelley’s Early Life (London, 1872), pp. 240–43.
Harry Buxton Forman, The Shelley Library (London, 1886), pp. 35–58.
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© 1969 Twayne Publishers, Inc.
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Reiman, D.H. (1969). A World to Reform. In: Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Griffin Authors Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02954-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02954-9_1
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