Shelley Memorial

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The Shelley Memorial.

The Shelley Memorial is a memorial to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) at University College, Oxford, England, the college that he briefly attended and from which he was expelled for writing a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism.

The memorial consists of a white marble sculpture of a reclining nude and dead Shelley washed up on the shore at Viareggio in Italy after his drowning, sculpted by Edward Onslow Ford, associated with the New Sculpture movement. It is housed on a decorative plinth in a small domed late-Victorian room designed by Basil Champneys, behind ornamental railings that protect it from students. It has been the victim of a number of pranks over the years. The college's chemistry don, E. J. Bowen, had to clean paint off the statue, for example.

The statue was commissioned by Shelley's daughter in law. It was originally intended to be located in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome where Shelley is buried, at the request of adventurer Edward John Trelawney, a friend of Shelley. Trelawney wanted to have a monument of the poet next to his own. However, Trelawney's descendants thought that Ford's statue was too large and thus did not consent to his wishes. Eventually the statue ended up at University College.

Although Shelley was expelled from the college, he remains one of its most famous alumni and is held in honour there. In 2005, the college acquired some of Shelley's letters to further enhance its connection with the poet.

[edit] The Boyle-Hooke plaque

The Boyle-Hooke plaque on the outside of the Shelley Memorial in the High Street.

The Shelley Memorial is located on the site where the scientists Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke performed experiments while they were in Oxford, previously Cross Hall until the early 1800s. A plaque on the exterior wall of the memorial in the High Street records this for passers by. It reads as follows:

In a house on this site

between 1655 and 1668 lived

ROBERT BOYLE

Here he discovered BOYLE'S LAW

and made experiments with an

AIR PUMP designed by his assistant

ROBERT HOOKE

Inventor Scientist and Architect

who made a MICROSCOPE

and thereby first identified

the LIVING CELL

[edit] Bibliography

Darwall-Smith, R.H. "The Shelley Memorial," University College Record 12.4 (2000): 74-87
Getsy, David. "'Hard realism': The thanatic corporeality of Edward Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial." In Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 87–118. [earlier version in Visual Culture in Britain 3.1 (2002): 53-76.
Haskell, Francis. "The Shelley Memorial." Oxford Art Journal, 1 (1978): 3–6.
Shelley and Univ: 1810–1811. University College, Oxford, 20 June 1992. (Papers delivered by the Master and three Fellows of University College at a seminar to commemorate the bicentenary of Shelley's birth.)