London News: Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns
8th July 1822
The Allan Cunningham Project has included the romantic poets in with Allan Cunningham’s story and his Time Line Journal, to show his life in context with the intellectual life evolving during his lifetime and giving a perspective on segments of The British Enlightenment that may have touched our intrepid Botanist Explorer. Although he was on the other side of the world, in the Colony of New South Wales, he and the population of Sydney were reading the works of the romantic poets and reading the newspaper accounts of their life, scandals, publications and death, be it several months after the events having occurred.
On this day, 8th July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Leghorn (Livorno) to Lerici in his schooner, Don Juan. 1
Shelley was only a year younger than Allan Cunningham.
Interestingly, Shelley was associated with some very famous names: he was husband of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), son-in-law of Mary Godwin nee Wollstonecraft, close friend of Lord Byron and many other literary people.