Yesterday in 1822

Below is an excerpt from yesterday's entry in the e-zine, Pip Wilson's Book of Days, which I get by email everyday. Pip is rather more broad-minded than me, but his snippets of daily historical information are often interesting. History is fun and eye-opening!! I also really like the "Wilson Family Motto", way at the bottom of the page!

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From the Book of Days for July 8......... This entry below about Percy Bysshe Shelley and his cohorts is head-shakingly similar to some of the news we read and hear about modern-day celebrities:

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1822 One of the greatest English-language poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley (b. 1792), drowned on this day, aged only 29. Shelley was the eldest son of a British member of parliament and grandson of a baronet; he was sent to Eton for his education, where he was mocked and bullied as 'Mad Shelley', and later to Oxford University from which he was 'sent down' – expelled – for circulating a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism.
After eloping to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook he became interested in the ideas of the anarchist philosopher William Godwin ('The First Anarchist' as he is sometimes known). He began to visit Godwin's house and fell in love with Mary Godwin, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Godwin by his first wife, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who had written A Vindication of the Rights of Women and had died eight days after Mary's birth in 1797.
Smitten by Godwin's daughter, his marriage with Harriet in tatters, Shelley eloped to France with Mary Godwin (Mary Shelley) and her 15-year-old stepsister Claire Clairmont. The sisters maintained a ménage à trois with the poet in various parts of Europe for the next eight years. In the summer of 1816, Claire urged that they should go to Lake Geneva (to be with the man of her obsession, Lord Byron, with whom she had previously had a one-night stand and to whom she later bore a child). It was at Lake Geneva that, as a result of a bet to see who could write the best Gothic novel, the brilliant young Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.In the Autumn of 1816, Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in London. Two years later, Shelley, pursued by creditors, suffering from ill-health, and understandably a social outcast in England, took his lovers to Italy, "the Paradise of Exiles" as he called it, where they could live more cheaply......

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http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/copyright.html

"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." Henry David Thoreau, 'Walden'"Be kind to one another. Have a good attitude. Don't waste time. Never give up."

Wilson family motto: I killed my TV before my TV killed me.

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P.S. - In today's Book of Days you can read about Nikola Tesla, "almost forgotten genius", born today, July 9, in 1856. He was an electrical engineer, which is of interest to me because my grandfather was one, as is my son.

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