Original subtitles

I met a traveller from an antique land, who said, Two vast and trunkless legs of

stone stand in the desert.

Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and

wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those

passions read, which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things, the

hand that mocked them.

and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Nothing beside remains.

Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and

level sands stretch far away.

Here, at Field Place in 1792, was born Percy Bysshe Shelley, the writer of

Ozymandias.

The poem is clear, strong and imaginative, and it makes a great

impression on us.

But it represents only a small part of the complicated and extraordinary

personality who started life here at Field Place in Sussex.

The house of Fieldplay still stands at the centre of a fine estate.

The pillars are an addition since Shelley's time, but otherwise things are

much as they were.

As a building, it represents a stable, privileged, comfortable way of life.

It is interesting that a person born into these wealthy surroundings should

write so powerful a warning to man against putting his faith in power

and... great riches.

Shelley's grandfather, Sir Bysshe, was the founder of the family's fortunes.

Wild in his youth, he had secured himself financially by the simple

approach of marrying two rich heiresses in succession.

Sir Bysshe went on to build this extravagant house in Sussex, Castle

Goring, for £80,000, an enormous sum.

in those days.

He never lived in it, however, which might be thought a little eccentric.

His son Timothy was quite free of unusual traits.

He had been educated at University College, Oxford, and served for some

years as an MP.

He finally married, at the age of 40, an attractive and well-bred lady of 29,

Elizabeth Pilford.

and together they set out to lead a conventional married life.

Shelley was her first child, and in early life he appears to have been close

to her.

Close, too, were his sisters, all four of them.

Pictured here are Margaret and Helen.

They followed his lead and shared his rebellious delight in the tales of

horror which he read to them.

His taste for the macabre developed early and was never to leave him.

He drew these sprites in a notebook.

Gothic horror stories were very popular at this time, and Shelley's imagination

seems to have been caught by them.

Always unconventional, he was once found attempting to spend the night in the

churchyard at nearby Warham Church.

In daylight, Warren had other charms in its lake, where another of Shelley's

obsessions, this time with sailing, began.

Even at this early stage, there was a wildness in his character.

His rebelliousness was eventually to find a truer reflection in great

political and social events, taking place far away from here in France.

At the age of ten, Shelley was sent to Zion House School near London, which a

friend described as a perfect hell to him.

If Zion House was unhappy for him, then his first years at Eton, to which he was

sent at the age of twelve, were desperate.

Tall, thin, awkward, with large blue staring eyes and long hair, Shelley

was immediately seen as an outsider.

His refusal to become part of the accepted system where young boys were

protected from extreme bullying by older boys, for whom they performed menial

tasks, showed more courage than sense.

The tormenting and persecution he received at the hands of his privileged

peers was to mark him for life.

Finding Eaton's narrow curriculum of Latin and Greek translation boring,

since to him it was easy, Shelley pursued his love of chemistry, less as a

serious scientist than, as in the tales he read, as a lover of its half-magical,

half-demonic power.

Chemistry, electricity, astronomy fused easily with alchemy, fire worship,

balloon travel, explosives, and psychical explorations.

Amidst dreams of a world transformed by electricity and of Africa explored by

balloon, Shelley's disrespectful convention, together with the violent

outbursts with which he responded to the taunting that had become a regular

occurrence, resulting once in stabbing another boy with a fork, earned him the

title of Mad Shelley.

One of his contemporaries at Eton wrote, I have seen him surrounded.

Hootydad baited like a maddened bull, and at this distance of time I seemed to

hear ringing in my ears the cry which Shelley was wont to utter in his

paroxysms of revengeful anger.

Harbouring then a hatred for authority, a rebellious intellect, and an inquiring

mind, Shelley was ready to make his mark as an enemy of the establishment.

Oxford was just the place to do it.

He moved into rooms in university college, following in his father's

footsteps, but immediately took a dislike to the philistinism of

university life at the time, failing to attend lectures, meals, and even

religious meetings, which were compulsory.

Oxford rapidly took shape in his mind as a personal challenge, a fortress of

superstition and mediocrity, which required above all rousing from its

antiquated slumber.

It had to be outraged by sheer excess of behaviour and taken by a dazzling

intellectual storm.

He made friends with another undergraduate, Hogg, who helped to

direct his ideas further away from established patterns towards political

reform.

A major focus for their thoughts were the events that had reshaped Europe over

the last two decades.

In 1789, that is three years before Shelley was born, the French Revolution

began with the storming of the Bastille.

From the outset, opinion in England was divided between those who feared that

revolution might spread across the Channel and those who welcomed what they

saw as the beginning of the liberation of the people of Europe from the chains

of tyranny.

In 1792, a month after Shelley's birth, what became known as the September

Massacres took place in Paris.

The year that followed saw the execution of Louis XVI, King of France, and the

declaration of war by England on France, France being already at war with Austria

and Prussia.

The war was to last with only a short break until 1815.

by which time Shelley was 22.

England had had its revolution in the 17th century, establishing parliamentary

rule, but it was still a country ruled by the rich and served by the poor.

The Industrial Revolution had begun, taking workers from the country into

rapidly growing towns and creating terrible living and working conditions.

In the face of this, Tom Paine produced his The Rights of Man, a political

idealist's attempt to influence the course of events.

Godwin wrote his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice with the same end in

view, as did Mary Wollstonecraft with her Vindication of the Rights of Women.

The titles alone tell us much about the radical writers of this time.

These were all works which greatly influenced Shelley.

The government took them seriously enough.

Under the laws of seditious libel and blasphemous libel, prosecutions took

place which led at least one publisher to the stocks in an attempt to limit the

free speech that was seen as endangering the nation's stability.

Shelley's identification with the French Revolution, however, put him dangerously

at odds with the prevailing opinion.

His first practical rebellion concerned a challenge to religion.

Slatter and Mundy's Oxford Bookshop had been instructed by Timothy Shelley to

indulge his son's ambition to publish, and using this facility, Shelley

produced a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism.

He sent copies of it to everyone that mattered.

and it rocked the university.

He and Hogg were immediately expelled, and they went off to London.

They haunted, amongst other places, a girls' school at Clapham, where two of

Shelley's sisters were pupils, and Shelley was fairly quickly involved with

a pretty fifteen-year-old girl called Harriet Westbrook.

In no time they had eloped to Scotland, where they were married, and soon joined

by Hogg, and Harriet's sister, Eliza.

Scotland then saw the beginning of the new pattern of life for Shelley.

A family of friends, always with more than one girl, to replace the family at

Field Place with his four sisters, from which he was now an outcast.

Atheism and a runaway marriage were, of course, quite unacceptable to Timothy

Shelley.

A restless movement from place to place was the second pattern which

characterised Shelley's life.

It evolved almost immediately when the group moved to the Lake District after

an attempt by Hogg to seduce Harriet.

There they met Southey the poet.

He had once been a rebel but was now an accepted establishment figure.

A turnabout which Shelley found indigestible.

From Southey, Shelley heard that Godwin, his hero, and the writer of the Inquiry

on Political Justice, was alive and living in London.

A fateful piece of news for Shelley.

The party moved on, to Dublin this time.

Shelley hoped to help the persecuted Catholics.

In Dublin, he met real poverty and suffering at close hand for the first

time. He spoke at public meetings.

and distributed political pamphlets he had written.

He learned much about life's realities.

They left Dublin for a small coastal village called Linmouth on the Bristol

Channel.

Shelley's pamphlets had already marked him out in the eyes of the law, and he

was watched by government agents, which is not surprising, since Shelley even

went so far as to put pamphlets in bottles and set them afloat in the sea.

It could be said that Shelley's career as a poet began here at Linmouth, for it

was here he started work on Queen Mab.

It didn't get finished, for their servant Dan was arrested and jailed for

six months for distributing their pamphlets.

Shelley paid for his upkeep in jail.

Though in debt to the landlady, they left hurriedly, fearing arrest.

and settled at Tremaddock, the extraordinary model village, the work of

William Maddox MP, on the north-west coast of Wales.

The house was Tanya Alt.

Maddox needed money for his project, and generous-hearted Shelley and his party

set off for London to raise it.

Shelley was twenty.

Later, back at Tanya Alt, found Shelley trying to put into practice his ideas

for reform.

In a bizarre scene involving an attack by government agents and a shot which

went through his nightgown, this is his drawing of his attacker, the Shelley

party was driven away and Shelley decided that his best course of

influencing things was to be through poetry.

He finished Queen Mab and printed 250 copies.

at his own expense.

He got a meagre supply of money from his father who, by starving him of cash,

hoped to force his return.

No one seems to have made a good portrait of Shelley.

This one was done after his death and may be the best.

He was by this time almost a vegetarian, although he did not apparently stick to

any regular times for eating and lived mostly on nuts and honey.

He was certainly eccentric, but he seems to have gone on attracting people.

Hogg returned to join them.

Thomas Love Peacock, the novelist, became a close friend of Shelley's and

an admirer of Harriet.

She needed him because her relationship with Shelley was under strain.

She was an ordinary girl, unable to live out his ideas.

She refused to breastfeed her child, for example.

Peacock remained loyal to Harriet till her death.

It was 1814.

While Harriet went off to Wales with Eliza, her sister, and her newborn

daughter, Shelley paid a secret visit to Field Place to visit his mother and

sister.

It might have been the beginning of a reconciliation with his father. It was

not to be.

In London, he sought out Godwin in Skinner Street, Holborn.

Godwin's household was unusual, to say the least.

His first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, had died giving birth to a daughter.

Mary Wollstonecraft was quite famous enough as an advocate of women's rights

for any family.

But Godwin himself, though now living obscurely with a third wife and several

book-reading children, had an immense reputation and influence over his times.

Develop an equal society through the power of education was his war cry.

Shelley could not but respond.

Shelley met Mary Godwin, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Godwin and

his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Godwin had been brought up by people to whom ideas were everything, as

they were to Shelley.

And in this, she seemed vastly different and probably superior to Harriet.

At once, Shelley and Mary were attracted to each other.

In St. Pancras Churchyard, they declared their love.

They were standing by her mother's tomb.

Harriet was to declare that Shelley was attracted by the fact that Mary was Mary

Wollstonecraft's daughter, an idea that is difficult to refute.

They eloped from Dover to the continent, now open to the English, no longer at

war with France.

A last-minute invitation from Shelley meant that Jane Claremont, Mary's

stepsister, came along with them.

This was not, perhaps, a happy addition as far as Mary was concerned, but it

fitted in with the pattern of Shelley's existence.

Mary kept a journal of their travels, so we know a lot about where they went.

They had little or no money, but saw Paris and got as far as Switzerland.

Shelley wrote to the devastated Harriet, inviting her to come and join them.

About six weeks later, they were back in London.

Old Sabish died in January, and to make life easier, Shelley's father decided to

pay all his son's debts and settle £1,000 a year on him.

It made life easier in some respects for Shelley and his family.

Shelley began to write Alastor, his first poem of substance, where he was

not making direct political exhortation.

Meanwhile, stepsister Jane Claremont had changed her name to Clare, as if things

were not confused enough, and by the simple process of offering herself to

him, had become the mistress of no less a person than Byron.

introducing him to Mary and telling him of Shelley.

Byron set off for Geneva in April of 1816, leaving Clare pregnant, and

Clare persuaded Shelley and Mary to take her there.

At the Lake of Geneva, Shelley and Byron formed an immediate friendship.

They fully recognized each other's worth and enjoyed each other's company.

Byron couldn't take Shelley's atheism, and Shelley found Byron playing with

women rather than taking them as intellectual equals.

But otherwise, they shared a sailing boat and talked together endlessly.

They decided one evening all to write ghost stories, and out of this came Mary

Shelley's Frankenstein, perhaps the model of all horror stories.

Shelley was proud of her, and he readily encouraged her.

encouragement fully justified by the book's success.

She was only eighteen, and although she never seemed to do as well again, it was

a remarkable piece of work.

They returned to England, but Shelley was soon shattered by the news of

Harriet's death.

She had drowned herself in the serpentine in Hyde Park.

The moon made thy lips pale, beloved.

The wind made thy bosom chill.

The night did shed on thy dear head its frozen dew, and thou didst lie where the

bitter breath of the naked sky might visit thee at will.

On December 30, 1816, Shelley and Mary were married.

Shelley was of course greatly disturbed by Harriet's death and the ensuing

wrangle over the care of her children.

They lived for a time with Lee Hunt, a poet and literary magazine editor, with

whom he had become friends, and they enjoyed in particular musical parties

and visits to the theatre.

Mary records with special delight her first performance of Mozart's The

Marriage of Figaro.

In Marlow in Buckinghamshire, they thought they had found a house where

they could really settle.

They took a 21-year lease on Albion House and moved there in March 1817.

Marlow was in fact to be the place they stayed in longest.

Shelley found he could work there and produced the narrative poem The Revolt

of Islam, in which he attempts to push the ideas of reform and revolution

through the story of Liam and Sisma.

Marlow turned out to be damp in the winter, however.

and Shelley's health was seriously affected.

In spite of Shelley's involvement in the politics of the time, which were in a

troubled state, they decided to give up the Marlow lease and move to Italy,

where it was thought that the climate would be better for Shelley's health,

now 26 years old and about to produce his best work.

They soon began a familiar rhythm of shifting about from place to place.

Pisa first.

They had sent Allegra, Byron's daughter by Clare, to Venice to await Byron, and

at Pisa they heard of her safe arrival.

After staying first at the sea, near Leghorn, and then spending some time in

the hills at Bagni di Luca, it was decided that he and Clare should go off

together to visit Allegra at Venice.

There they met Byron.

And the two poets went off discussing the course of their lives and each

other's work, and as before, greatly enjoying each other's company.

Eventually Mary was sent for, and on the way Shelley's daughter Clara became ill.

On Mary's arrival at Venice, Clara was much worse, and after delays at the

customs, because Shelley had forgotten their passports, the child died.

While Mary began to show not unnaturally wifely tendencies to anger with Shelley,

whom she held partly responsible for Clara's death, jealousy because of his

behaviour with the free and easy Clare, the power of Venice and all his troubles

seemed to bring Shelley to writing some of his finest work.

The narrative poem Julian and Madelow grew directly out of his Venice visit

and his relationship with Byron.

By November they were off via Rome to Naples.

He was writing continuously, inspired no doubt by the sights they saw, and, as

usual, worked upon by the events of his life, the death of the child Clara, and

the mysterious birth of another baby registered as Shelley's, the mother of

whom may have been Shelley's housekeeper, or even Clare herself.

A testament, perhaps, to Shelley's belief in sexual freedom.

The child was immediately given to foster parents.

They left Naples in February.

In Rome, Shelley began to write again at his poem Prometheus Unbound.

Certainly he found inspiration in the amazing buildings of the city, and to

the Caracalla bars in particular he returned again and again to write.

This idealized picture of him at work there shows the degree to which he

became appreciated in the years after his death.

It has to be said that Shelley's own belief in renewal and the positive

values of life must have been great, for his own life was such an unending

struggle against heartache and misery.

In the few months they were in Rome, their family life was again decimated.

Their child William, dearly loved by all three adults, Shelley, Mary and Clare,

took ill on May 25th, and within two weeks was dead.

They were devastated.

Child death was, of course, much more common then than it is now, but they did

not feel their loss any the less.

They moved to Leghorn, and he began work on a play, The Chenchi.

perhaps one of his least effective works, though it was to have some

success during his lifetime.

More importantly, there came news from England of an uprising near Manchester

at a place called Peterloo, where, in an attack by the militia, nine people were

killed and hundreds injured.

Shelley produced in response his The Mask of Anarchy, in which he takes

directly to task the Prime Minister Castlereagh, and enjoins the suffering

people to passive resistance.

As I lay asleep in Italy, there came a voice from over the sea, and with great

power it forth led me to walk in the visions of poesy.

I met Murder on the way.

He had a mask like Castlereagh, very smooth he looked, yet grim.

Seven bloodhounds followed him. All were fat.

and well they might be in admirable plight, for one by one and two by two he

tossed them human hearts to chew, which from his white cloak he drew.

It was just the sort of story to outrage Shelley, and his poem was not the only

political work he produced that autumn.

However, in October they moved to Florence, and under its benign influence

he produced the Ode to the West Wind.

and finished Prometheus Unbound.

Back to Pisa they went, and as in all old Italian cities, there are vast stone

palaces, and on a floor in one of these Mary and Shelley settled again with some

of their own furniture this time, so they must have begun to feel a sort of

permanency.

They had made new friends in Edward Williams.

something of an artist and a one-time contemporary of Shelley at Eton, and his

wife Jane.

She soon began to occupy a place in Shelley's heart, particularly as his own

marriage was at a rather cool stage, and together the Williams began to play a

major part in the lives of the Shelleys.

As time went on, Shelley became more and more attached to Jane, and the poems he

wrote to her show both his feeling for her and admiration for the happiness she

and Edward Williams enjoyed together.

Byron was on the scene again, staying in a palazzo in Pisa, and the poet set

about having boats built.

It was a fateful operation.

In 1822 a move was made to a house on the sea,

Casa Magni, near Spezia.

It was quite inadequate for the Shelleys and Williams to cram into, but there

they settled.

In May, Shelley's boat, the Ariel, arrived, depicted in a drawing by a new

friend, Trelawney.

Byron also had his yacht, Bolivar.

Trelawney went sailing with him, leaving Shelley, who was an enthusiastic but

indifferent seaman, with only Williams to sail with him and two crewmen.

A first major expedition was to meet Lee Hunt, who had come out from London, at

Leghorn.

They arrived safely, and a great reunion was held in Byron's presence.

But Williams and Shelley were keen to return.

They set out in uncertain weather, and in a storm the aerial sank.

The bodies of the three men aboard were washed up ten days later on the beach

near Aregia.

Shelley was recognized only by the copy of Keats' poems in his jacket pocket.

This dramatic painting of the event shows the funeral pile of Shelley, with

both Byron and Lee Hunt present.

If we only judge by the love affairs and strong friendships that Shelley

engendered, we must conclude that he was an intensely attractive personality.

In his lifetime, his quality as a poet was hardly noticed, but the complexity

and strength of his work remains to amaze us today.

A man exalting in life and yet struggling to get at the heart of its

issues in a way perfectly recognisable in today's tortured times.