GLIMPSES OF THE PAST

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
(1792-1822)

By Sue Overton

Though Horsham claims him as its famous son, the poet Shelley, actually spent his childhood in Warnham.  Born on 4th August 1792 at Field Place on the southern border of Warnham parish, Percy Bysshe, was the eldest child of Sir Timothy Shelley and his wife Elizabeth Pilfold. 

Field Place, originally a hall house with a Horsham stone slab roof, dates back to the fifteenth century and maybe earlier.  It was lived in by the Michell family from the sixteenth century and its connection with the Shelleys came about by a complicated route of deaths and remarriages during the seventeenth century.  It was during this period that the classical addition was made to the house.  After the death of Timothy Shelley, great-great-great grandfather of the poet, his second wife Mary, now widowed, married John Michell of Field Place in 1687.  Her son Edward Shelley bought the house from his step-father some time around 1700 and being childless left it to his great nephew John Shelley.  He too was childless and the estate passed to his brother, Bysshe Shelley, grandfather of the poet.

At the end of the 18th century Bysshe (later Sir Bysshe) was widowed for a second time and moved to Arun House at the bottom of Denne Road.  He was a wealthy man, having married and buried two heiresses, but lived a rough and rumbustious life and was something of a trial to his more conventional son Timothy who was left to bring up his family in the tranquillity of Field Place.  The old man liked to hold court at The Swan in West Street and meetings with his son were rare and stormy.  Shelley told his friend, Hogg, 'Whenever I have gone with my father to visit Sir Bysshe, he always received him with a tremendous oath, and continued to heap curses upon his head so long as he remained in the room.'  It would appear that the old man had some affection for his unconventional grandson and used to entertain the boy from time to time surrounded by yokels in one of the Horsham taverns.  On these occasions he would criticise loudly the more gentlemanly life of his son, to whom he had given Field Place, and make disparaging remarks about young Percy Bysshe's education.

Shelley's early life at Field Place was a happy one with the freedom to roam and explore the fields and woods around his home in the company of his younger sisters.  His early education was at a small day school run by the Curate (later Vicar) at Warnham, the Rev Evan Edwards, who admired the talents of this boy whom he said had a prodigious memory.  Here he was schooled in the three Rs and was acquainted with Latin and Greek.  These early days were a halcyon time for young Shelley.  He was the favourite of his younger sisters and they played together in the lovely countryside around the house and spent much time creating theatricals in the attic.  They ventured to Warnham Lake and to see their friends at Strood Park and Hills Place.  He found the trips to the village, on foot or by pony, very enjoyable travelling along the leafy lane which led from Field Place to the Vicarage.  He tied up his pony in the churchyard and spent an agreeable hour or two with the Curate.  It was a sad day for them both when young Shelley at the age of ten was sent off to boarding school at Syon House.  The shock of leaving the nest and entering such a disagreeable environment took its toll on the boy.  It was for him a dreadful experience and most likely coloured the rest of his life.

Life at Syon House was harsh and very unpleasant for this inexperienced and innocent boy where he was frequently bullied and constantly homesick.  Only the presence there of his cousin, Thomas Medwin, enabled him to cope with the misery of it all.  It was even worse at Eton which in the first half of the 19th century was an anarchic institution where bullying was cruel and rife.  Things improved at the end of the century and 1875 was described by Edward Lyttelton, a later headmaster, as the moment when 'open barbarism gave place to something like decorum'.  The sensitive, literary and aesthetic Shelley was not readily accepted into this philistine society with its great emphasis on sport and toughness with a little Latin, under the supervision of the notorious Dr Keate, thrown in for good measure.  He had to keep his poetic and literary writings and his love of reading completely secret, so too his surprising interest in scientific experiments in electricity, astronomy and explosives.

But sadly, despite his fame as a literary genius and poet, Percy Bysshe is more often remembered for his atheism, scandalous life-style and radical politics.  In 1810 he matriculated to University College, Oxford but was sent down at the end of the first year for publishing his work "The Necessity of Atheism".  This disgrace led to a bitter quarrel with his father and led him to begin a wandering life.  That same year he eloped to Edinburgh with 16 year old Harriet Westbrook, where they were married.  They had a son and a daughter but separated three years later.  He then eloped with Mary, daughter of writer William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical feminist writer, and following Harriet's suicide, he married Mary and moved to Italy.  On 7th July 1822 a month before his thirtieth birthday, he was drowned when his yacht was swamped by a storm in the Gulf of Spezia off the coast of Italy.

However, despite the traumatic experiences of his schooldays and the turmoil of his early twenties, it seems that Shelley did not completely wipe out the memories of his childhood.  Much later, when far away in Italy, he wrote several pieces of poetry which hinted at the pleasures, and indeed serenity, of his early youth in Sussex.  He left England at an early age but some of his later poetry does show the influence of impressions gained in those early days.  Among these:

A schoolboy lay near a pond in a copse
Blackberries just were out of bloom
And the golden bloom of the sunny broom,
The pine-cones they fell like thunder-drops
When the lazy noon breathed so hard in its trance
That it wakened the sleeping fir-tree tops.
Under a branch all leafless and bare
He was watching the motes in their mimic dance
Rolling like worlds through the dewy air,
And he closed his eyes at last to see
The network of darkness woven inside
Till the fire-tailed stars of the night of his brain
Like birds round a pond did flutter and glide –
And then he would open them wide again.

and this sad little piece which may have been a memory of Warnham Mill:

A widow-bird sate mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below.
There was no leaf upon the forest bare,
No flower upon the ground,
And little motion in the air
Except the mill-wheel's sound.

To think the unthinkable for the son of a middle class gentleman in the 19th century, supposing this brilliant and sensitive boy, with a great love of the Sussex countryside and a close affectionate family, had been allowed to complete his education under the Vicar of Warnham.  Maybe life would have been quite different for him and he would not now be remembered mainly for his controversial and unconventional writing with his interest in atheism, science and the occult.