Percy Bysshe Shelley, born 1792, was the eldest child of a rich Whig MP. He was bullied at Eton – ‘Shelley-baiting’, as it was known – and expelled from Oxford – for atheism. At nineteen he eloped with Harriet Westbrook – the first of two unhappy marriages. A few years later he met Mary Godwin, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, and together they eloped to the continent. Harriet committed suicide in 1816. A month later Shelley and Mary were married. The couple left England for Italy in 1818, where Shelley produced the best of his poetry and prose – prose philosophical and political. Unheralded in his own lifetime, he was taken up as the angel of the pre-Raphaelites and the free-loving comrade of the twentieth and twenty-first-century left. He drowned in the Bay of Spezia in 1822 – aged 29.