Percy Bysshe Shelley

Rebellious Youth

P.B. Shelley

Active, mischievous and highly imaginative as a child, he was conventionally educated at Syon House Academy, Eton and University College Oxford; an upbringing that made him deeply unhappy and rebellious. At Oxford he read radical authors such as Godwin, Paine, and Condorcet; he dressed and behaved with provoking eccentricity and in March 1811 was expelled for circulating a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism.