MARY SHELLEY'S GRAVE - BOURNEMOUTH
And Percy Shelleys Memorial at Christchurch Priory
Bournemouth on England south Dorset coast, became a seaside resort in the Victorian era, broad sands, tidy promenades, and a steady trade in ice cream and nostalgia. Also here is the final resting place of Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein. In a town better known for beach huts than brooding Gothic imagination, her presence feels quietly improbable.
On opposite sides of a street the modern meets the past. The Mary Shelley, a Wetherspoons pub bearing her name, complete with modern traffic humming past and a knowing nod to Frankenstein is a commercial homage to the author, and few achieve this kind of immortality. Across the street, on the wall of St Peter’s Churchyard, a blue plaque marks the burial location of Mary Shelley and he assorted kin.
Mary Shelley is buried here alongside her formidable parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, as well as an honorable mention to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is an impressive gathering, though not one originally in Bournemouth. These family remains were moved from St Pancras Old Church graveyard in the 1840s when railway expansion made their earlier resting place inconvenient.
The relocation was arranged by their son, Percy Florence Shelley, who had settled in Bournemouth as it developed into a respectable coastal retreat. The choice was practical, genteel, and perhaps faintly ironic - Romantic radicals finding their afterlife in a well-ordered Victorian resort.
Percy Shelley his not actually interred here After his death by drowning off the Italian coast, his body was cremated on the shores of the Gulf of La Spezia. His heart, according to romantic legend, survived the flames and was kept by Mary for the rest of her life, later interred with her and moved with her remains. A story fitting the epic sad love story of this forever entwined literary couple
A short ride away in Christchurch, the magnificent medieval Christchurch Priory of soaring Romanesque arches topped by later by Gothic elements houses the Shelley Memorial, erected by Percy Florence as tribute to his mother and sad death of his father forever bound in permanent grief.
Back in Bournemouth, at the Mary Shelley Pub, the circle closes. The pub, the plaque, the grave—memory rendered in forms both solemn and every day. It is a reminder that literary immortality, like the creature in Frankenstein, has a habit of turning up in unexpected places, so sit and have a coffee, open your laptop and write a classic. © Bargain
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SEE ALSO:
PERCY SHELLEY OXFORD WALKING TOUR
