The Three-Year-Old Buried at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome Whose Father Wrote Frankenstein's Other Half

William Shelley was born in London on 24 January 1816, the second surviving child of the substantial unconventional household formed by the 23-year-old radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. He was conceived approximately three months before the year-without-summer Geneva summer that would produce Frankenstein and The Vampyre. His older half-sister Allegra (Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont’s daughter by Byron) was born in January 1817. His younger sister Clara was born in 1817 and died of dysentery at Venice in September 1818.

William was the fifth or sixth living person in the Shelley household by the time the family travelled to Italy in spring 1818, and he became the centre of Mary’s emotional life through the following year. She substantially adored him.

He died at Rome on 7 June 1819, aged three years and four months. The cause was probably malaria — the standard Roman summer fever — possibly compounded by typhoid. The illness ran approximately six days from first symptoms to death. The family had been in Rome for several months specifically so that Percy could complete the verse drama Prometheus Unbound; they left almost immediately after the burial.

The cemetery

William is buried at the Cimitero Acattolico — the Protestant (officially ‘Non-Catholic’) Cemetery — in the Testaccio district of Rome. The cemetery had been opened in approximately 1716 as the burial site for the non-Catholic population of papal Rome (Protestant English residents, Russian Orthodox merchants, the occasional Sephardic Jewish trader); by the early 19th century it was the standard burial site for the English Romantic-period Italian-traveller community.

John Keats was buried in the same cemetery on 24 February 1821 — twenty months after William, of tuberculosis, having arrived at Rome the previous September in a failed attempt to escape the English climate. His grave is approximately 30 metres from William’s; the famous inscription on Keats’s stone (‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’) was composed approximately seven months before the burial.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ashes were interred in the same cemetery on 21 January 1823 — eighteen months after Percy had drowned in the bay of La Spezia in July 1822 when his small sailing boat had been overtaken by a Tyrrhenian summer storm. His body had been burned on the beach at Viareggio in August 1822; the ashes had been carried to Rome for the burial.

The cemetery contains the densest concentration of English Romantic-period burials anywhere in the world.

What it did to Mary

Mary Shelley was shattered by William’s death. The emotional collapse of summer 1819 produced approximately a year of inability to write. The subsequent restoration produced the novel The Last Man in 1826 — a extended literary meditation on isolation, loss, and the end of the human community. The novel’s central image — the last surviving man wandering through empty European cities at the end of the 21st century — derives from the Roman year of 1819.

She also lost Allegra Clairmont (her Italian stepsister-niece, age 5, of typhus at the Capuchin convent at Bagnacavallo in April 1822), Percy himself in July 1822, and her close friend John Polidori in August 1821 of prussic acid. The five years between 1818 and 1822 killed almost the entire Diodati summer circle of 1816.

Mary Shelley outlived almost all of them by 29 years. She died in London in 1851, aged 53. She had been carrying a small wrapped lock of William’s hair in her purse for the entire period.