The Three-Year-Old Son the Shelleys Lost in a Roman Summer in 1819

William Shelley was born in London on 24 January 1816 — six months before his parents’ summer at the Villa Diodati, and approximately a year before his mother completed the manuscript of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley had been 18 when he was born; Percy Shelley was 23. William was their first surviving child (a daughter named Clara had been born prematurely in February 1815 and had died unnamed within weeks).

He lived three years and four months.

The Italian years

The Shelleys left England for Italy in March 1818, partly to evade the substantially severe English creditors who had been pursuing Percy through 1817, partly because Percy’s substantively poor health (probably a recurring respiratory infection) required a warmer climate, and partly because the substantively scandalous nature of the family’s domestic arrangements (Percy’s bigamy, Claire Clairmont’s child by Byron, the unconventional Godwinian intellectual circle) had made London socially substantively unviable.

The travelling household by spring 1818 included Percy, Mary, William (then 2), the new baby Clara (born September 1817), Claire Clairmont, Claire’s daughter Allegra (whom they were transporting to Byron in Venice), and a small staff. They arrived at Lake Como in April 1818 and travelled south progressively through the summer.

Clara Shelley died first. She had been a substantially fragile infant from birth and had been substantively further weakened by the substantial overland journey to Venice in late August 1818 (Mary had been against the journey but Percy had insisted on completing the Allegra transfer). She developed dysentery during the journey and died at Venice on 24 September 1818, aged 13 months. The death poisoned the Shelley marriage for the following year and produced recriminations between Percy and Mary that the surviving correspondence partly preserves.

William’s death

The surviving household — Percy, Mary, William, Claire — moved south through autumn and winter 1818, spent the winter at Naples, and arrived at Rome in March 1819. Mary was pregnant again (with the future Percy Florence, who would be the only Shelley child to reach adulthood) and was in fragile psychological condition following Clara’s death.

William contracted malaria — the Roman summer fever endemic to the undrained marshes of the Roman Campagna — in late May 1819. The standard 19th-century treatments (quinine had not yet been adopted as an effective antimalarial; the Italian medical practice still relied on bloodletting and dietary management) were substantively ineffective. He developed high fever, intermittent delirium, and dehydration over approximately ten days. He died on 7 June 1819, aged 3 years 4 months.

Mary collapsed. The subsequent four months were the worst depressive episode of her life. The unfinished manuscript of Matilda — a substantively autobiographical novella she wrote at Rome through July and August 1819 — documents the collapse and was substantively withheld from publication by her father William Godwin on the grounds of its substantively scandalous incest theme (the novella was eventually published posthumously in 1959).

The cemetery

William was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome — the walled enclosure at the southern edge of the city, at the foot of the pyramid of the Augustan-period Roman magistrate Gaius Cestius. The cemetery was the designated burial site for non-Catholic foreigners who died in Rome and housed the burials of English, German, and Russian visitors who died in the city through the 19th century.

The cemetery had been used by the English Romantic community in particular. John Keats would be buried at the Protestant Cemetery in February 1821, approximately twenty months after William; Percy Shelley’s own ashes would be interred at the cemetery in early 1823, six months after his July 1822 drowning at Lerici. The three graves are within approximately fifty metres of each other in the older section of the cemetery (the “Parte Antica”), and substantively form a small Romantic-literary cluster that the subsequent two centuries of English-speaking visitors have substantively continued to visit.

Mary Shelley never returned to Rome. The 1819 trauma substantively defined her relationship to the city for the remainder of her life. Her surviving son Percy Florence Shelley was born at Florence in November 1819 — five months after William’s death — and became the Shelley child who lived to inherit the Shelley baronetcy.

The Protestant Cemetery still operates. William Shelley’s small grave is marked with a plain marble slab carrying only his name, his date of death, and a line of Latin from Horace: Erit hic in luce locellus, ubi se condit chorus.