A Romantic Rebel: Shelley’s Etonian Schooldays

Abstract

Shelley was a boy at Eton between 1804 and 1810, arriving as a new boy, as Mary Shelley would have it ‘like a spirit from another sphere’ at the age of nearly twelve, and leaving just before his eighteenth birthday. At that time, the School consisted of about thirty Scholars or ‘Collegers’ who lived together in squalor in the old College building, and about 350 Oppidans who lived in boarding houses scattered about the town. Shelley was an Oppidan. He was going to spend a fifth of his life at Eton, and he was never going to be resident, for even half that amount of time, in one place ever again. His schooldays coincided with a period of great national and international turmoil and about the time the Duke of Wellington was alleged to have said that the battle of Waterloo had been won on the Playing Fields of Eton. Shelley was in Upper School when the Head Master broke the news of Nelson’s death to his Etonian nephew in 1805. It would be difficult to imagine a time or a school more geared to an ethos of machismo and violence and more un-woke in every respect. Shelley’s schooldays are often characterized by a sense of deep persecution and cruelty, which led a future Headmaster to conclude, ‘what Shelley received at Eton made him a perfect devil’. He has been seen as spending his time in eccentric experimentation and bizarre behaviour, which earned him the schoolboy soubriquets of ‘Mad Shelley’ and ‘Shelley the Atheist’. But I would contend that his experience at Eton was more mainstream than is usually imagined, and certainly happier, and that he was far from being particularly singled out, as his contemporaries underwent similar persecutions, escapades and adventures, as he did, in this dangerous and lawless environment. As Newman Ivey White suggests in his fine biography, ‘Shelley was never quite as abnormal at Eton as he later became in the memories of those who had known him there’. Indeed, one could argue that his main eccentricity was in the extent of his intellectual exploration and academic achievement, in a school of desperate ineptitude and intellectual ossification, where true education was as dead as the languages that formed its entire curriculum. It is quite certain that as a young boy at Eton, Shelley was systematically and ferociously bullied, both physically and psychologically. His clothes were ripped apart,