boy you goin' down!

oh, shelley!

his first gothic novel was published in the year he matriculated to Oxford, where he attended precisely one lecture (on minerology - which he walked out of dejectedly before the end, complaining that all they were talking about was rocks, rocks, rocks!). he proceeded to follow his passion for chemistry and metaphysics -- experimenting in one discipline by burning gaping acid holes through the carpet in his college rooms, and experimenting in the other by writing an inflammatory pamphlet "On the necessity of atheism", which was Dawkins-like in the strength of its assertions that people follow religion out of intellectual laziness. he sides instead with the British empiricists, who follow reasoning deriving from sensory experience alone. unlike the politely academic metaphysicists before him, it was probably his social commentary on humanity's remembered fear of church power moguls, that got him in trouble... or perhaps the assertion that the clergy pretend knowledge of the divine (ouch!). he and his coauthor were sent down (read: kicked out), for the offense.

if you want to read the absurdly strongly-worded pamphlet, the 1811 version is online via the University of Maryland's Shelley Resource Page, or the 1813 version via the Secular Web.

alternatively, if you are more interested in the poet's coach-driver hair, squeaky voice, shambolic delight in dueling pistols, or natural propensity for the human steeplechase, it's all in the published recollections of his pamphlet co-author, and oxford sidekick du-jour, thomas jefferson hogg, whose 1832-3 account, Shelley at Oxford, has been digitized by Project Guttenberg.

finally there's kate beaton's delicious take on shelley's prophecy of his own death over at Hark A Vagrant, where the toussle-haired shelley and byron are some of my favourite melodramatic historic reinventions.